Warbird Information Exchange

I could use some help identifying this B-29 station. The only information I have is that it is a CONUS station in 1947. I've ruled out Sioux City, Roswell, and all the Kansas and Nebraska Army Air Fields. The hangar and flight line building layout is unfamiliar to me, as is the placement of the two Celestial Navigation Trainers between the hangars.


Thanks for any help you can give me on this one,
Scott

Looks like MacDill, Tampa, FL.

Dang it Jack! You beat me to it. I thought they looked familiar...last airshow, I parked where those '29s are parked!

Thank you fellas! I am very familiar with the 2nd Air Force stations but haven't even started on the 3rd AF B-29 fields (except Maxwell). I will label my photo accordingly. I knew it had to be somewhere east because there are actual trees in the 1947 photo.

Here is a bonus shot of a less picturesque B-29 field.

Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509th Bombardment Group (VH). This was taken in February of 1947, before the invasion of the little green men.

WIX and WIXers are the best.
Scott

A lot of engine oil on the ramp. Looks great! Big drippy radials. This era was short lived, not short enough for some, not long enough for others. The last of the big props. Great pictures.
Thanks all, Tom

Here's another nice apron shot, this time Smoky Hill in 1947, looking south. Notice the engine maintenance docks in the east row of airplanes? I imagine the powerplant guys really appreciated those during the cold of winter and heat of summer.


Scott

Any close-up shots of a 29 in one of the eng maint docks? That would make a very cool diorama!

Look at the plane in the upper left corner of the original picture posted. There's a 29 in the dock. I was wondering what type of plane it was, as the wing looked thin, then I realized part was covered by the dock!

_________________
Mike

Holedigger, I have several photos of those outdoor engine docks, and the plans to build them if you wish. There were a couple of different designs and some were pretty elaborate. I'll have to find the 2AF publication in my storage room and scan them. I'll try to have them up for you this morning sometime. They're really neat shelters compared to the alternative--working outside in the Nebraska and Kansas winters! As an aside, some of the Midwest B-29 fields modified their smaller hangars to accept two B-29s at a time instead of one--so eight engines could be changed in the hangar at a time. I'll pull up that information from some blueprints I have if anyone is interested. The remaining small hangar at Herington still has the door in the back end of the building.

Scott

I have seen you mention that you have been collecting plans for old bomber bases, very cool. I definitely have a thing for old buildings, being my day job is doing architectural illustration! If there is some structure project you would like to see raised up in 3-d it might be fun to take a whack at. See some of my architectural renderings at my website, shepartstudio.com. Have you been digitizing your plans or just collecting paper? There is some software that will take the scanned planes and turn them into vector/dwg (at lest to some extent, depends on how dirty the plans are!

Yes, I've been collecting blueprints and airfield layouts for the Second Air Force training stations for a number of years. I have both full-size hardcopies and digitized material. I've found for my research I prefer to have the full paper print in front of me, such as when we're at an airfield cataloging foundations and their respective building numbers. I also am trying to preserve the individual building blueprints as we are able to find them. My plan is to digitize all the hardcopies and be able to archive copies at AFHRA, the individual airfield museums (if any) and I'm keeping copies for my own use.

As promised, here are some of the different engine dock designs. I'm including the station that designed the stands for the ones I have drawings of. From my knowledge of the subject, the engine change crews designed the stands around their needs and sent the idea on to the Post Engineers. The P.E. then finalized the design and built the stands locally. There is a lot of variation in the docks since many ideas were put into use. The photos I'm putting up now are from a book that compiled these ideas and was sent to all 2AF stations as an aid in building what they needed.

This open-air dock came from Davis Monthan:



This is one design of the enclosed "winter" engine dock. I don't know for certain where these were taken. This design was quite popular at the Nebraska and Kansas stations. Very temporary construction with felt siding, and these could be moved fairly easily to other parts of the apron if necessary. The B-29 in the second photo was a B-29-15-BW and was reclaimed at Alamogordo on 1 March 1945.



A second design winter dock, with barn siding and of a more permanent design:



Here is a nice portable engine stand with canvas enclosures, designed and photographed at Pratt AAF. Notice that they are building a large engine dock in the background of one photo:


And finally, a couple more variations of the small stand with a variety of construction methods. The metal stands were photographed at Grand Island:


I'll post some info on the hangar modifications later.
Scott

Very Cool! Better than a couple 2x4s on top of a couple oil drums! Wait till you get in the field and try to maintain em!

That brings up an interesting bit of trivia. We met a veteran named Easter Davis whose specialty was welding, and he explained that the various metal stands were adapted to be broken down to a size that could be loaded in the bomb bay of a Superfort when he was at Pratt. The 40th Bomb Group Maintenance officers, crew chiefs, and mechanics helped Easter's shop to build a number of stands that they took with them when they headed for the CBI. You can see the engine stands and smaller crew chief stands in photos at the Indian bases of the 58th Wing, having been constructed at the four training stations before deploying. The early B-29 operations depended on a lot of GI ingenuity to make things work as well as they did.

The following blueprints and photo will detail one of the mysteries I've come across during my bomber training airfield research. I have spent many hours documenting the remaining foundations and buildings at Herington, one of the Processing Centers for B-24, and later, B-29 crews. Herington is unusual in that nearly all the foundations were undisturbed since the buildings were moved off in the postwar years. The south Squadron (OA type) hangar is still in fine condition, but I always wondered why the back of the hangar had these doors in it.

The foundation for the twin hangar further north also had a cutout and rails in the concrete where the doors had been, and they looked as though the modifications had been done during the War.

Later on I spent a day documenting the remains at Grand Island, and found evidence that a similar modification had been done to their three OA type hangars. I was finally able to figure out the mystery when I hit the mother lode at GI--over a hundred blueprints of the airfield and WWII buildings. I spent two days cataloging, copying, and storing the blueprints for the nice folks in Grand Island, and one of the hangar prints caught my eye.

I apologize for the poor quality of this print, but it is a copy of a copy of the original Corps of Engineers blueprint for the OA hangar with a cutout in the rear wall. These doors, both horizontal and vertical, are the perfect size to allow a B-29 tail to pass. The center pair of doors has a circular cutout to allow them to close on the fuselage.

This next shot is of the normal hangar doors, and the center pair have also been modified to fit around a B-29 fuselage.


After I measured everything and put the puzzle together, I realized that this setup was designed to allow two Superforts to be nose-to-nose in a hangar designed to hold only one B-29. This allowed engine change crews to work two aircraft at a time, inside, during nasty Midwest winters. I know of three stations that modified their hangars in this way--Herington, Grand Island, and Kearney. In fact, Kearney had modified their smaller hangars to admit two B-17s before B-29 processing began.

This last image is the full blueprint from Grand Island, and has the actual building numbers of the three hangars that were modified there.


Other 2AF stations may have constructed these doors as well, as I continue my research I'll be on the lookout for them. A final note--when the hangar at Herington was "modernized" years ago the vertical fin door in the back wall was sheeted over but the other doors were kept.

Scott