Douglas A-26B Invader - Part 1 - Project Visit - January 2023

yeah Kermit weeks here fantasy of flight and I am out in the LA Basin uh came out earlier for The Living Legends of Aviation and it was pretty cool uh Steve Hinton who actually tests flew the a26 was my date for the night so that was pretty cool got a chance to hook up with him and I am about to hit the Chino Airport to check on the a26 um I did not I was not there when they did the test flight but they had a bit of a problem everything was running great but they took off and uh the soon after takeoff the gear came up and both canopies opened up apparently the early airplanes had some issues and after the fact we learned that the previous owner who had worked on the airplane had the same problem so anyway would have been nice to know but uh anyway so I'm going to come out and check on the progress they've been doing a lot of little detail painting since then and and uh we shall see what the progress is there's no airport sign there's the Yanks air museum over there and I'm currently enjoying the fresh Aroma of Chino cow pastures so anyway um so I'm gonna go check uh Carl and Tony see how it's going still working a little bit on the nose art uh you know which uh just last a little bit a lot of what's put on there apparently there was a lot of detail Carl was telling me where they had to do uh you know a little stenciling and things like that there's some little minor things and they ended up you know changing the seals and coming up with a like there was an A.D on the canopy deal there so hopefully that's all fixed so anyway so I saw Steve at uh Living Legends of Aviation I don't know if we're going to get a chance to watch something fly while we're here we shall see until Carl I was going to be here let's let's see what their number is parotrader112 aerotrader hey Carl Carmack yes sir good deal I'm at the gate three foreign I understand the airplanes outside it was raining a little bit last week but uh it's a very a very very nice day today as you can see it like that go see what there is to see I think that's a con bear I don't know I can't tell if there's not a conveyor in a 404 Martin it might be a Mark I don't know it's twin Beach oh there's my baby we still have to do the rest of the nose art on the side so let me see what we got here take an extra camera lock the door my man what's happening [Music] oh we do edit them yeah yeah we're gonna put you in a tuxedo actually yeah good what's going on [Music] I don't like that pretty cool oh awesome great yeah so I saw Steve a couple of nights ago oh yeah good good uh hurt his back okay a little bit yesterday but he said probably by Wednesday he might be feeling okay Santa Maria tomorrow afternoon he'll be here all day today yeah and uh no big deal yeah something I want to go see what's going on where's the Rod's Connie said they've been working on her in the Lockheed hangers across the airport oh okay cool you have to go out oh no big deal I mean you know we might go go see it and you know for some reason the the uh Yanks guys want to talk to me or something so I'll go down there and just go see what they want to do okay so cool hey man Kermit yeah okay about a couple years yeah I know a second time here yeah good good good well it's looking good so so does uh so does Jerry Jerry knows I'm here yeah okay cool good good good so we're still working on the nose art which we're not going to show anybody it's going to be a surprise to a special friend of mine so we got the uh something we can sit in there and talk about the canopy thing did you mainly just like put bigger seals in them and then there was some kind of a lock um there's a so there's a latch that will come down and it will physically lock the handle oh it locks so did the handle pop and then the handle vibrated down at Power and so it eventually gradually came down and then it just sprung open okay okay so later model mod that I had another lever up there in the further up in the center of the canopy rail right and this airplane didn't have it because it's pretty early I'll be darned but apparently when uh challenge Publications had it and had the same problem they didn't realize there was the fix so what did they end up doing and why did we never have a problem I don't know I couldn't tell you I'll be darned well the trouble is the canopies were on and off this thing several times you know right right right now there's something going on there but I'll be darned plexiglass looks all great is it stuff that you all did yeah yeah it's all new yeah awesome so so you said there was a lot of little detail yeah unbelievable so they marked all the uh well there's 250 numbers within themselves just in the individual panels right and you still have um the you know the Y drain valves and you know the the toe stencils and there's probably at least [Music] oh my God for example you know just stuff like that right it's it's everywhere but that that goes inside the bomb doors open correct [Music] cool so there'll be another stencil here that says fire extinguisher on the inside right yeah that's something that uh you and I would talk about depending on what kind of fire extinguisher you want to put in this airplane that's a big bottle [Music] uh yeah awesome [Music] there's no de-icer on this is it no I mean so so so did they have a thing on the front is that what it was okay huh cool did you guys shoot this inside I mean outside or just outside here kind of outside right here okay cool that's the lower uh turret here which but we'll get inside look at all this cool stuff here the upper one Periscope goes out the top too so the guy looks through the Little D there looks to me like we need to get a new little uh eye cushion uh yes the rubber boots disintegrating in the sun it's I don't know how old that is foreign [Music] that makes sense okay that's cool yeah electric motor also fire extinguisher goes here throwing mounts that's great okay that is your relief canisters for the Gunner so oh there we go cool well good I'm glad it's got two five five but it depends on the mission is there Just One battery or they got one on each side I'm surprised the uh why is all this chipping I mean there's paint's chipping and stuff you know wouldn't have didn't all this stuff get done the hurricane y'all picked it up about a year after Andrew so say 93 oh my God 1003 13 20. 30 freaking years oh my gosh yeah huh oh so you don't have any of the gun packs on yet yeah I agree I totally agree that's great yeah yeah well it'd be interesting too to see how the airplane speed goes without them and then put them on and just see if it makes any difference yeah exactly well I'm they're gonna go on there but yeah yeah in case I race at Reno I mean is that what it is yeah yeah one of our B-25 customers at one time was complaining about putting the turret on because it's going to slow me down five miles an hour and it's going to burn 10 down with more gas and I said well if you can't afford 10 gallons of gas you probably shouldn't be flying this airplane no there you go unbelievable unbelievable so we've never been completely concerned cool have you have you done anything with the eight gun nose at all we started on piano yeah okay and yeah at some point you know I'd like to do the the class nose too with the Norton and stuff just to put them on display side by side cool yeah it's kind of weird walking outside seeing the airplane and once it's outside it's outside yeah it's a major pain getting it oh yeah totally yeah but it was good when it was raining and all that stuff and y'all were doing the last little bits of stuff on it [Music] yeah cool well awesome all right so uh uh yeah so what do you suggest do we look in it I've got a ladder we can pull up yeah yeah yeah let's let's take a peek while we're here and I got the car and you know if I run out of camera I got another one so [Music] after you oh my God okay here we go did you guys make this for an a26 really it's awesome yeah I know and I know and I'm gonna have to wear my sneakers for that I brought the manual so my plan is to sit in it and read soak up the uh so you just write down on the seat so yeah put it on the back of the seat there oh my God here we go this has been a long time so I worked with it wow pretty cool that's a lot looking back at you we'll figure it out some of the stuff you obviously don't need like all the where the bombs drop out and selecting the bombs and stuff but we'll get a little bit more into it we can do the so what y'all do to hide the radios the radios are actually in front of you I'm just behind the control oh I see okay right there okay all right so we got we ended up with two uh two yes two radios and you can switch in between or you can do com both right your both radios at once then off your left side to transponder right at your shoulder yeah and it's got to hit that and it's got the ATS what is adsb yeah cool okay well that'll give me two airplanes with adsb so anyway I'm awesome pardon the dust we had a 40 mile an hour yeah storm that kicked up last night and it just no I I woke up this morning with the wind chimes outside uh playing a melody all right so that's pretty cool so we got the airspeed here so the is there a white so the blue line is for the single engine correct me yellow is uh okay so as long as you're below that you can start to knock on down can you go full flap of that speed or start quarter start you start stepping it down right okay but that's that's the gear speed too because you've got uh I believe there's 40 degrees of flaps on this airplane why does it say oh 38.38 red line which they used to attack at I thought it was 425 but it looks like 460 or something that's yeah that's hard that's higher than 425. wow and of course it's got the when they first did the drop the bombs they'd open them up they dropped the bombs because it was going so fast the bombs would float in the Bombay so they had to put little three little fingers down you know to get the drizzle would get away from the airplane and then go well we don't need an extra nut there can dust took that out yesterday sticking getting jammed the part of it is these old fiber nuts they they dry out and they stop blocking so I've been replacing those as we go so is is there any kind of a uh a pre-oiler in this at all there is okay roller switches are awesome okay great all right great I'm glad to see that because when it sits for a while you want to pump some oil through it and get them all okay flip the Masters on top these back up to 200 it has per uh Steve Evans request okay cool so was that so it's got two main tanks that are 300 each correct so that right there would give you a you know three hours of range plus a little bit left in the tank because they burn like 80 an hour so and then what do we got here what are these are these aux tanks those are your left and right ox and is that in the Box oh the Bombay bag and it's loaded 125. it's yeah maximum's 125 and where are these two tanks located uh those two tanks are located inboard in the cell okay okay so the main 300 tanks are out a little bit they are in the nacelle the 300 gallons are in them so huh oh that's cool so above and forward of where the landing gear is correct yeah okay cool all right let's go down there you can see the liquidometer right there props locks mixtures elevator trim Rudder trim is here aileron trim is here Bombay tank got the main and the auxes okay so how does obviously probably take off the land on the mains yes yeah okay and so then you get going then what you burn the ox off you burn the uh you can burn the you burn the oxes off um I mean it's necessarily doesn't matter as far as weight um right but they're both in the wing yeah they look like they're all kind of on the same CG exact okay so at that point you burn them how you want yeah you land and take off with means yeah but once you once you get off try and burn out the aux tanks first and then whatever so so Steve's gonna be flying with basically a little bit of fuel nothing in the aux in the Bombay a little bit here just to keep it something in it and then he's got and he wants 200 in a deal okay so I'd give him uh he wants to make sure that the oxes are still feeding even though we have verified that on the ground which is why he's requested 50 for uh and at some point maybe in a later test flight test the Bombay too if you want to yeah I mean just somewhere down the road I mean does it works it works yeah okay cool they work [Music] that makes sense okay so they're located on the wing Bombay the wing goes out the auxes are inboard and then the main tanks are on board okay and that is your emergency brake which is uh air and those stencils and yeah they're they're water slides of this whole panel here and this panel here I'm going to redo so over the years and the guys have dropped tools right so I think I've got seven so when you say emergency this is like uh if you lose the Hydraulics this is not a parking brake no okay that uh the parking brake is actually down on your left hand side it's kind of hidden it's right by your cap um this is air so there's an air bottle which back here you're gonna see a pressure gauge yeah and that air into the brake system and therefore you've got three shots and yeah okay so you don't want it you want to use it to stop and then have somebody tell you to lock them up yeah you're not going to taxi with it yeah you're going to burn those tires you're going to put a nice flat side so what's the difference between this hydraulic pressure gauge and this one back here so that one is your accumulator pressure so this is just uh nitrogen that's above it okay that's why so you do it so this gets set when you walk in correct test it okay if you notice in which we're on system you start building up hydraulic pressure bam it starts from that nitrogen yeah from that charge it starts shoving fluid into the system so there's oil cooler flaps and then they're separate from the cow flaps correct so wear the oil cooler flaps down below the oil cooler flaps or just outboard them in the South walking away and oh on the bottom of the one oh I saw them yeah okay it's got that little thing there and it looks like a flat crack okay because the oil coolers are in the wings correct if they are in the wing um earlier style 826s they did have at this gauge right this gauge is extremely hard to find wow later style they had an automatic switch so both Cal flaps and oil coolers are manual controlled so you have to look at the at your at your temperatures right and manually adjust that okay later 826 has had an automatic setting I'll be done and you just left it alone it operates and controls itself okay huh and where are the cow flaps the cow flaps and Cal flaps are here okay oil coolers are here okay let's open the port ones over here okay go fairly slow awesome but I mean basically flying I mean you're taking off with them open and you're laying them with them well you Landing with them closed with them closed okay but if you go around then you got to get on them right away you gotta yeah and and I mean nowadays you're not going to be necessarily flying by yourself you'll have help somebody will be sitting here with you so if you can delegate some of that to the other guy yeah makes it easier yeah yeah as long as they know what they're doing exactly exactly cool cool awesome air control so this just basically goes down until you get what you want and then you go back to neutral correct as far as reading the gauge right the electric they're electric okay most of this aircraft is electric besides the brakes and the Bombay all right let's get all the you know brought in the manual with me I don't plan on reading that while I'm sitting in here maybe this afternoon or something just to kind of get going and I you're gonna run it this afternoon oh yeah yeah oh that'd be great and you know one of my plans is because I haven't flown multi-engine warbird in a long time is to uh you know do a bunch of flying in the princess over there and maybe you know get a couple three hours or three flights in Atlanta just get to feel ride with Steve at some point you know you know just to be as safe as I can I mean I got a type rate in here but it's a single pilot airplane so I just need to make sure that I'm safe absolutely you know um princess is ready to go if you decide to do that yeah cool uh yeah cool so carb air where's the carb heat right here the carburetor temperatures there yeah okay I got a cylinder head temp I can't remember when you like if you feather if you feather something in the air uh uh and then you know if you fly around for a little bit what was it like 195 or something you want to get the the head temp back up to before you before you you know you start getting more RPM yeah so you're you I mean you let it idle idle yeah at low power in the air until you have temperature and then you slowly bring that power back up so you're not uh I just couldn't remember what the temp was but it was been such a long time ago Bruce uh Bruce somebody checked me out of this thing when I bought it uh for Houston you know he knew uh the guys that challenge and when I got here I let Carl and Tony go get a rating in it too oh yeah that's right yeah yeah that was kind of cool so that's right they uh oh cool all right Feathering buttons here eggs bag master all this stuff is all this stuff here oh there's the bomb bed demolition okay so that's not and where's the bomb so the Bombay switch is here oh it's just electric okay okay and then if you uh for any reason need to jettison your bombs reach down here to yourselves yeah Salvo switch okay and you hit that yeah with hydraulic pressure on the cyst or with pressure on the system what it'll do is it'll open the bombays first until it hits the switch yep the red light will come on and then from there it'll salvage or Salvo whatever Armament you have in the airplane and it'll just let it all go at once yeah these days pretty much all we carry is watermelons yeah that's it that's it so awesome well cool cool cool original radios like hey I think that's ADF um or whatever man that's nobody uses this stuff anymore is that the uh the recognition correct oh my God so what's the what's the switch on the left so we've got red green Amber okay what's the switch on the left here it should be a white a white light a white light okay and then there should be a push button for teeing oh yeah visual lights I'm gonna have to brush up on my Morse code I know I do know how to say SOS I might be able to remember how to say you got information like the blue lights on top of the wing that's cool about the top of the fuselage those work as well as well so you can ideally fly a night with somebody I do not plan on doing that anytime soon well this is so cool I did not realize that the guns you see normally the when we had the originally had the glass nose up here with a bomb shot a guy crawled up there but this particular airplane flew in France in like 1945 as the six gun knows you know so when uh I bought the airplane it had a glass nose on it but they had put it on there to do a movie they wanted to do and it never actually happened but I think somewhere I might have got a script from somebody but anyway so they ended up uh you know they had the glass nose on it so I got there when we started looking at we're like oh my God this is not a c this was technically a b flew in World War II flew in Korea and it was interesting there was no um there wasn't a lot of history on the squatters but this airplane was in it and they uh there was really no artwork pictures we couldn't find the exact artwork so I thought you know it was an opportunity for me to come up with my own and since it had all these guns not only in the nose Six Guns you got the two fifties on the top turret and the bottom turret but you've also now got four twin packs he got another eight under the wing and so I've already honored my wife twice she's the Piccadilly princess on the B-17 she's the Apache princess on the B-25 and now she's going to be the pistol packing princess on the a26b so that'll be pretty cool anyway awesome oh man cool well let me go spend some time with Carl and uh you know maybe some lunch or something will come back up it'd be fun to run it you know maybe I get a camera outside oh yeah and then you know Coral could run that or something and I can either sit here or sit there or you know whatever you want to do you're going to be the guys awesome great yeah so just for communication purposes this is also yeah okay this is also a push to talk transmit now so what's the deal with the so you can either use this one or this one yeah because your left hand is going to be there your right hand is going to be on the throttles and depending on which one you want to communicate with so how uh how's the intercom work so the intercom is a squelch system so it's a citronics which we hit up here okay cool so let's hop out of the way it's already on should be able to plug in your headsets is anybody TR so it's voice actuator yours is voice activated for pilot and the guy I'm sitting here yeah okay that's that way it doesn't pick up the background noise and you've got right and then you can switch it yeah okay cool we've got two things there and there's no Nab in this thing at all it's just strictly yeah we're gonna I'm gonna put a GPS on my you know actually everybody's telling me they're using a four flight these days but uh I do have a strap thing to my leg uh yeah I do have a tablet I want to play with the four flight stuff I haven't done a lot of cross-country flying a lot I flew a Wako biplane back from Sedona and it was pretty much a sectional and IFR down the roads you know yeah that's fun that was good and that was interesting at the end of the it's like a three-part deal on my YouTube channel and I got at the end Wawa and it says blah blah blah and it says you know how many miles and how many stops and how many hours and then at the end it goes by road because because we're going anyway pretty cool awesome man super so so when did you get involved in in this from the beginning not from the beginning no there's been a lot of guys working on this airplane throughout the years and they've come and gone yeah um and now for the past uh for the I've been here six years maybe seven um and I've been one of the main guys on it since last time they're like I said there's a couple guys who've come and gone Mark Moody was another guy that was working on this with me and uh and since he retired it's just been me awesome well I I mean you know I think it's awesome if Steve goes flying man you sound like the guy to go over there and help him and sit here and feel like you've uh can partake in the success of the accomplishment that you guys have all done here so I appreciate that yes sir you know I can get some I can get some video from the outside and when everything seems to be running good and stuff and all that you know then I'll jump up with Steve or something maybe go do a couple of flights I know at some point Michael Leary wants to do a photo flight for her Classics I he was my date for The Living Legends pretty party yeah yeah yeah so I think Mike may be out in the next day or two so anyway you know we'll still be nice to see this thing in Oshkosh yeah yeah yeah that'd be awesome cool all right super man appreciate it [Music] pretty cool pretty cool that goes down oh man that's the Bombay right there isn't it yes it is oh my gosh so can you actually walk on go back to the back I've tried it and it it uh once once the valve is neutral it locks that hydraulic pressure ideally you can go to and from oh my God I wouldn't want to do that if the pilot was pissed at me oh my God and one of these days I gotta figure out how to get in up the ladder the side you see the step down there in the land gear uh nose Gear door when you come up this way what's the stainless for here as for the when the guns are rotated forward I see for Flash protection correct yeah okay that makes sense and he was saying oh I see the blue formation lights okay seeing that now one two [Music] three fabric ailerons formation light here at the stainless the stainless strip yeah on just aft of the turret yeah another one on the fuselage why does it appear the flaps are Dr is that that the way they made those no no so since I activated the flaps earlier and put them I see they dropped a little bit I see but normally they would they're nice they're flush with these I see okay cool yeah of course the Gunner sits back there and uh is that just a vent the the hole there or oh no that's um so that's the emergency access handle so you can push that in and you can rotate the handle to open that hatch from the outside on the outside emergency purposes I see but normally the guy would just go out the left out the uh the door hatch there yeah yeah there's also another cut out on this side I've yet to paint the red outline but you can see there is a removable panel inside yeah they would use that for a camera but also that section in case of an emergency you cut that section out the Gunner I'll be darn unbelievable ah cleaning up the sagebrush snow up on top of the mountains there pretty cool and that's the uh that's the Pacific princess yup see it yeah I got it anyway pretty cool so right now the engines have got five minutes of air time and you know yes five minutes of air time and probably about an hour on the ground each time good okay well we'll at least do some running while we're here I hope this does not oh yeah it should be okay [Music] you should have gone around back the other way okay so left foot there right there right hand here right foot another little step there and they can have you uh I can demonstrate that or you can try it yourself oh yeah yeah yeah a little later we'll do that that'd be cool oh my God I used to be a gymnast and of course this is all this is not this is aluminum to take a deflection this way with a bullet it wasn't designed straight on for a straight on which would be like armor plate steel or whatever but this is all you know kind of wood here that actually yeah so this actually got painted over so I'm going to be supposed to be just wood so that accidentally got painted over correct yeah I think this airplane was Bare Metal when it left the factory and there was no paint on it so when they put the wood strips on the wood strips are bare really I'll be darn you know I have a question because I asked Jerry about this and I asked Carl too who I guess it doesn't really matter I mean who who actually did this because if this would have been doped this all should have tightened up that should have been it should have been tightened up um yeah because ideally what I would have wanted to have done was had the artwork go back slightly more and make it a little bigger but because of that we we could I didn't want our face in the deal there yeah well the fabric strip they've they put them on in World War II yes exactly there was one there yeah and there's one at the production break at the tail to prevent air from getting inside right yeah and they were cut it just looks like it got put on but it just didn't like if it was dope properly it would have tightened that up more I would have some but whatever that's one of the ejection shoots another one there another one there oh yeah because I got more on one side than the other cool and the nose was also interchangeable with the arm arm and package so you can have 450 caliber machine guns on this side and a 37 millimeter cannon here oh really or you can have a 37 millimeter and a 37 millimeter cannon oh my God but with this nose with this nose oh with this nose the eight gun nose is just strictly 50 caliber machine gun right yeah but this this nose here you can change it anywhere between 50 caliber machine guns to 37 millimeter cannon or a 75 millimeter cannon oh my God huh we got any of those laying around yeah so here's the uh in the nose here and you can see what happens when they drop the bombs originally they would float in there because the airplane was going so fast that they put these when you dropped the bomb doors these three things hang down and uh basically disrupt the airflow so where it's turbulent the bombs fall far enough that when they get out here they keep going so pretty cool uh pretty cool deal yes so he popped the flaps slightly and you can see how they dropped here so pretty cool who was this guy and this cute girl foreign

Channel: Kermit Weeks Channel - Over 360 Videos to See!

Views: 40,442

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Id: flIJiGDYj1g

Length: 39min 25sec (2365 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023