Aircam WWII Wreck Exploration final

[Music] hi i'm tom and this it's a lockwood air can pretty interesting huh very unusual airplane twin engine with this great big wing large camber that's the curved surface on the top of the wing gives it uh an awful lot of lift it's a fabric wing modern fabrics they last for 30 50 years low tax engines each one develops uh about 100 horsepower it's uh it looks like a wasp that wasp it's not an ultra light it's too powerful uh 200 horsepower is too powerful and it's also too heavy to be an ultra light so it is an experimental aircraft been about 250 of them built it's not really an experimental i mean faa calls them that basically means it's it's a kit filled airplane instead of being built in a factory so you can see from here pilot sits way out front there there's some interesting things about this design because it's pusher prop and twin so the the pusher props i mean the engines face backwards center of gravity tends to roll back when you put the engines back and that allows them to do this extend that uh pilot cockpit way out front here so unobstructed views and so the air cam is called an air can because this uh the strut you see sticking out here is horizontal thing that's for mounting a camera and it's sturdy enough for professional grade cameras the design was done for uh initially for national geographic so if you've ever seen these national geographic things where they're flying over forests jungles mountains there's a good chance one of these air cans was used to fly over that and the reason why is because the twin engines make it very safe an engine goes out you're not going to go down in a jungle or down in the mountains and still fly matter of fact this thing can actually take off on one engine don't recommend it either as a manufacturer or the designer but uh also that giant wing allows the thing to get off the ground in about 200 feet actually a little less than that and uh those big tires you see allow it to land in a very rough terrain and since it stalls at such a low speed meaning that you don't have to worry so much about it falling out of the sky as you reduce your air speed you can you can slow it down and land it in about 500 feet on rough terrain so you can you can land it in fields we're gonna land it in the desert today we're gonna go in the desert and uh it's an adventure airplane it's actually designed to be able to land off field exactly what we're gonna do today we're gonna fire those twin engines up take off here from the latoya airport i'm gonna fly over to this uh abandoned airfield right here square on the map there that's uh that's left over from world war ii the desert has long since taken taken back the airfield it was a giant asphalt square it was used during world war ii to train first-time pilots so that's where we're gonna we're gonna fly over to it you'll see it from the air and then we're gonna land in the desert next to it you can see this clear desert next to it uh and find uh find a wreck that's out there world war ii wreck that should be pretty interesting so that's kind of the background on the plane let's uh let's do our ground checks and uh all right so here we are we're strapped into the cockpit here on my checklist done a couple of pre-flight checks on the airplane i'm gonna turn the fuel pumps on pumps on throttle set if i hit the starters and get this thing started layer prop [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so here we are out in the middle of the sonoran desert doing what that airplane does best bright yellow air can landing off field we're going to do is uh take a little hike out here into the desert see if we can't find that airplane wreck interesting little bit of history from uh world war ii so let's start our hike there she is off in the distance still hiking we found it a little bit of a hike here to get uh get out here not that the distance was so uh long just uh finding it zigzagging back and forth following the the wrong wash i finally got here there it is remnants buried i don't know where the rest of the plane is this is obviously one wing and there's an engine cowling no more engine of course but uh you can see it's been uh i think it's been abused by souvenir takers it uh let's say it it's the engines on the wing and the wing's not big enough for more than one engine it's a twin probably a beach 18. the uh telltale on that would be this this air intake right there so yeah it's probably a beach 18 they were used for uh training training bomber pilots out here during the war there were many many airports out in the desert this was just an auxiliary airport that's not too far from miranda regional which was also a training center and there was a third one out here somewhere too and you can see this is a yeah a little bit of history right here world war two i wonder what the story is behind this crash i'm sure there are others so yeah that's it i'm gonna hike back to the airplane [Music] so 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Channel: Tom Fournier

Views: 31,588

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Id: AVwG0nYl-_E

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021