Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction House taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming fall of 2018 firearms auction. Today we're actually not looking at, legally speaking, firearms. We're looking at a pair of British flare pistols,
and these are probably the most odd and overbuilt looking flare pistols you've ever seen. They
certainly are some of the oddest ones I've ever seen. And that's because these are pressure
cabin flare pistols, a Mark I and a Mark II. And these are for use in high altitude aircraft, or at least aircraft flying
high enough that the cabins have to be pressurised, say bombers. Flare pistols in World War Two
were used fairly extensively in aircraft, they were an important communications tool because,
for one thing, not all planes had radios. Most did for sure, but perhaps more importantly, the radio wasn't
used as regularly as we might expect it to be now. And of course, there are security concerns.
You know, if you're flying off on a bombing mission you don't want to have every plane radio as it takes off,
and thus potentially inform the Germans that you're coming. Or the British that you're coming if you are Germans. So flares were an important and very
easy way to signal various important things. So, for example, if you have an aircraft and it's
landing and there's wounded crewmen aboard. Fire off a designated colour of flare, the landing
field knows that that means there's wounded aboard, and they can have an ambulance
ready to greet the aircraft. Or if you have to make an emergency
landing because the landing gear is broken, or whatever, something's gone wrong.
You can fire off a different colour flare. And these things would also apply, say, to
bomber formations. When you're coordinating a bombing attack on some target,
you don't necessarily want to radio, you know, you have one plane that determines when you're
going to drop the bombs at the head of the formation. You don't necessarily want to radio
everybody to tell them to make the drop, instead fire a flare of a particular colour. Any number of
things that ... flares make a very good signal for. So, if you're in a pressurised aircraft however, there is this issue
of you don't just roll down the window and stick out a flare pistol. And so that is what these were
designed for, so let's take a look up close. So these are a Mark I and a Mark II but the differences
are really, really minute, they're functionally identical. So let's start with this one, which will
show us a little bit more of the gun, and then this one which shows us a
little bit more of how it actually works. So the one thing I want to point out on this one because
we can see it here, are these locking lugs on the barrel. There's 4 of them around the circumference and
those are there to lock into the wall of the aircraft, or in this case basically the pressure port in the
aircraft that we're gonna mount the flare gun in. You will find other flare guns with these
sorts of lugs around the barrel like this, and those are guns that are meant for use in
aircraft that aren't pressurised. Where you can just lock it in, and then open the breech, and
load a flare. And it makes sure that, you know, the flare pistol doesn't get whipped out
of your hand by the wind rushing past ... whatever hole in the airplane you might want
to stick the thing out of, it secures it in place. So, we've got those and on this gun,
because it has to be pressurised, those lock into a special attachment
that's bolted into the plane. And this example has that attachment. So
there are four screw holes here at the corner, down there, and then the front of this thing would normally
be sealed here, to be airtight, and you'd bolt this squarish assembly into the aircraft.
And then the flare pistol locks into this. Now in this position when the flare gun's lined up,
you can see the muzzle of the flare gun right there. It's wide open, which means the breech has
to maintain the pressure seal for the aircraft. Which is a problem when you
want to load it. So in order to load it, what you actually do is rotate it 90 degrees
upward, out of alignment with the barrel. So we're gonna pull back on this lever, and
then this whole part of the assembly pivots up. Note that the hammer assembly in
here is disconnected now from the trigger. So there's no way that it can be fired when it's pointing,
like, into its own mechanism. That would be bad. And now this has actually had this ball valve on it
that seals. So if I start to rotate this back down you can see right, right about here, there we go. We're going to open and close that seal, I guess it's actually not a ball valve, but it is
rounded to make sure that it gets a proper seal. Anyway, when this is in the upward
position then we can actually open the breech by taking this lever, pulling it out, and then
lifting the back end of the flare pistol up like this. Crack it all the way open. You can see
this white ring, that's a rubberised seal. So between that and this latch
right here that keeps the breech shut, that is what maintains a pressure seal
when the gun's in the ready to fire position. So open it up, we can drop in our flare.
You've got a firing pin for it right there. These used standard normal flares. It's the
gun that's weird, not the ammunition for it. So then you lock that in place, and then
you pull this lever in order to drop the gun. I should be showing it to you in this orientation,
because this is how it would be in an aircraft. You pull this lever and that allows you to
pivot the gun back down. So it's now loaded. Once it's in this horizontal position this lever
is locked, so you can't break the seal and ... well, intentionally open the gun
and unintentionally break the seal. Then you can set the safety to fire, and
this is a double action, hammer fired flare pistol. And that'll shoot a flare
out the now exposed barrel. So, really a lot of mechanical complexity that goes into
a thing to allow you to signal by means of a coloured light. But that's what it took to have a
pressurised flare pistol in an airplane. This particular auction here at Morphy's actually has a
substantial collection of flare pistols that has been consigned. So I was looking through them and there were a number
of them that are, well, I don't really recognise them, flare pistols really aren't my specialty. But when I
came across these two I figured, you know what? These are mechanically so cool and visually so distinctive
that we really have to take a look at these on camera. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If
you are interested in owning either one of these, or if you're interested in flare pistols in
general, take a look at the description text below. That will take you to ForgottenWeapons.com where
you can follow a link to the Morphy Auction lots for these two pistols in their catalogue. You can find their
high-res pictures, their descriptions, their price estimates. All the other information that you might want to have on
hand if you decide that you'd like to make these yours. And you can poke around their catalogue for
all the other cool stuff that they have as well. Thanks for watching.
It's interesting that they went to all this trouble instead of grabbing a block of aluminum and drilling a bunch of holes in it (as is the case on modern aircraft). What was the advantage?