Inside a Halifax Heavy Bomber: Crew, Turrets and Guns [HP Halifax 2/2]

hello everybody and welcome back to the Yorkshire air museum we are standing next to our old friend Friday the 14th a Halifax heavy bomber of World War two and service with the Royal Air Force now in the first episode we talked a little bit of the history of the Halifax but today we're doing something very special we're gonna go inside and show you just how this magnificent aircraft works alright so getting into the Halifax a little bit tricky we have the main access hatch on the backside of the fuselage just between the main wing and the tail section and now you obviously have to imagine me being in a full kit parachute on my big boots my big uniform protecting me against the cold in the in the altitudes that Halifax would be flying at I obviously don't have this kind of kit on me at the moment but even without this kit it's a little bit tricky let's say so I'm gonna use these stairs I'm gonna try to get in and not be a fool out of myself now one of the important things here to note is there is the hatch actually opens inwards so it's right above me now so if I just stick my head through and go up immediately I'm gonna bang my head so I can't do that I have to go through and sort of squeeze myself diagonally into the aircraft so as you squeeze into the aircraft you're presented with a choice either you move to the back if you're the tail gunner or if you're not a tail gunner in any of the other six crew members you move up front you do this obviously wearing all your kit then in the mid section you are presented with the dorsal turret and the way it is positioned right now is actually ideal for moving through this it gives this nice little room well room to move through you do this you get to a certain kind of passenger space area as you might want to call it and move up over presented with a couple of bits and bobs five sting wishes on all that good stuff then you climb over this area once again you gotta be a little bit careful where you step on I've got a pitching cage to your left no I'm not kidding and then you've got your first clue station here this is the fly engineer follow-up immediately by the pilot it's a little bit of a climb to get up there but you know you got to do what you got to do the wireless operator sits right below him and over where the camera is there's a navigator and the bomb-aimer right we're going to talk about the commander section first this is obviously where the pilot is going to be sitting now a word of warning when they designed this plane they obviously didn't have in mind that somebody could come around in 2018 and film this station so it's a little bit tight and it's somewhat of a awkward shot to make however we're gonna give it a go we obviously have the pilot's seat over here this can be adjusted in height and not much lower and then to his bottom right we immediately have a couple of levers now the first level right here this is the undercarriage down and up obviously and when the pilot activates this he will go to a indicator over here where it tells him whether the gear is up or down and locked then the second lever here has the flaps indicator the flaps obviously in multiple positions down and up and to make sure that the flaps are set in the proper proper setting he can check them over here and there he sees the angle of the flaps and the last lever we have over here is the bomb bay doors which the pilot himself can open there's just a little bit of a pull and to make sure that these ceilings are opened he will have to check these dials right here we obviously have the markings open unlock and shut and we have also a bomb jettison lever right there one last thing over here actually the trim tabs elevator trim tabs and he can check the elevation of the trim tabs and this dial here right moving on to the overall seating arrangement obviously he said sphere and this is this yoke his steering stick and this handle right here is the brakes and there should be a handle right here I'm not actually quite sure if it would be this one or it would be an additional one here maybe it's a little bit different on a mark free for internal communications of the crew now moving on towards the left side here we have autopilot instruments and then we go towards the dashboard now first thing that is presented here is a comm pass he has a second Direction finding compass over here as well as somewhat of a homing beacon indicator here the dashboard that he has here is pretty much good for him to do instrument flying we have the speedometer obviously calculating everything in miles an hour we have the artificial horizon we have the climb indicator we have altitude given in feets we have a direction finder thingy and we have a side slip and turn indicator right here now moving on towards the engine control settings we obviously find ourselves presented with a massive and I'll just wait for my cameraman to squeeze through we have a massive engine control lever setting here these top ones are for the throttle these bottom ones are for the propeller speed from these constant speed propellers obviously the Halifax max free that we're filming in here is operating with Bristol Hercules radial engines and below that we have control levers for the mixture and for the superchargers now short one of the engines or multiple of the engines fail and he has to feather the prop he goes all the way on top and you find yourself with four different buttons and you obviously hit the corresponding button and then you favor your prop and you also have a disk point the ability or if you wanted to add another point and time that's fine as well to do some of the navigational lighting and internal lighting for the position and the last lighting the bits and bobs here is over here for the landing lights and next to that one we also have another direction-finding indicator over in the back here this is where the pilot can read the revolutions per minute for his engines and then for the last couple of things that would like to explain we have a clock very important we have air pressure and we have the pressure in the brakes and that pretty much rounds us up for the pilot section of this aircraft how I hope everything was clear obviously it's not made for filming as I said before one thing should be noted however the pilot even though he has all these instruments before the actual engines is not able to operate the engines himself he actually needs the flight engineer and that's where we're going to right now alright so we are in the air flight engineers position and he actually shares this position although it's predominantly his position he does share this position with the navigator but more on that later now the flight engineer acts as sort of a co-pilot or I oh my god the pilot was hit who's gonna fly the aircraft sort of person and the flight engineer was given some rudimentary training rudimentary pilot training in order to at least bring the aircraft home was he able to land probably but whoever the landing was a good one you never know any landing you can walk away from is a good landing I guess right his primary job was checking on the engines and keeping them running we have everything here that is required to do that first of all we've caught the fuel tank content dials here there's a lot of them and he has to keep an eye on them obviously fuel tanks get hit they leak and that's a big problem but he can transfer the fuel with some fuel transfer pumps right here now above the fuel tank contents we have the fuel pressure and he also has morning lights telling him which engine is a bit problematic beyond that we have the oil pressure again that pressure has to be in a certain interval in order to the for the engine to operate correctly and beyond that to the left and to the right we have the temperature the oil temperature and of course the cylinder head temperature of the the engines now the good thing about radial engines is they're not really requiring a lick cooling they only require oil and cylinder temperature cooling so this is a good thing for radials but still you have to keep the keep an eye on everything and if your engine does get hit there might be well you might fly home with four one engine less that really rounds up up on this station here there's a few bits and bobs I want to show off later but I think it's time to go to the navigate rest position before we do that however people always talk about armor in World War 2 aircraft now I've made a video over that specifically kind of dispelling the myth of these armored panels that people say can find themselves in all some manner and sorts of aircraft during World War two there were aircraft that were very well armored but the majority weren't now in the Halifax there is some armor left right and center in the aircraft there are some armor for the engine there's a little bit of armor in the back for a detail controls and also for the crew one of these crew armor it can be found right behind the flight engineer there is a six millimeter armor panel right here which will protect him against most calibers at most ranges also considering the fact that the rounds actually have to travel through the interior of the aircraft they lose a lot of their potency right there another armored part of this aircraft it's not really armored but the bar is a bulkhead between the flight engineer and the pilot and the pilots it's more or less where the camera is right now and that put that gives the pilot a little bit more extra protection and above that bulkhead we have armored glass between these two positions that allows the pilot to look over the flight engineer shoulder if he can do that and the flight engineer to look over the pilots shoulder and check on him as well but it does actually protect the pilot as well now for the navigator what does he have to do in this position well there's an observation dome to the top with a sextant and this is very helpful for him to well find the position of the aircraft at any given point in time especially at night when he finds himself stranded in enemy territory and he doesn't exactly know where he is so as the observation dome with a sextant it's powered by a power supply down there and essentially looks through here and does this job hopefully finds this position I can get the aircraft home now there should be an armored glass hello for this observation dome as well but we can't find it on this on this refurbished machine but there should be one just so you know right we find ourselves in the wireless operator spot he obviously operates the radios and you know what for the first time in the Halifax I'm actually sitting comfortably the cameraman is not having such a good time anyway receiver transmitter the receiver is a type T 1155 and the transmitter is a type T 1154 and these are obviously used to keep contact with the formation and with ground crews beyond that well there's a little bit of modern stuff in the position as well but he has a Morse quote instrument that he can use for 4d communication and beyond that there really isn't all that much to say about this position it's really just a radio operator who was a very important fellow of a Halifax crew but that's really his job he's just there for communications he does have a window with a blind that he can close and open for the purposes of making this shot here we obviously closed that and for the rest well he's having a comfortable ride in a really magnificent aircraft that's it let's move on to the next position alright so we finally find ourselves in the Navigator position obviously the navigator navigates and he makes sure to that bomber reaches its destination that gets back and that the crew knows where it is at any given point in time now here we have a fairly well restored actually really nicely restored navigators position and even off the table and a map and apparently there is a course posit here and apparently today's mission is rola in the Netherlands so yeah we're bombing the Netherlands anyway all these bits and bobs here all these machines are for a navigation we've got the re system which is a parabolic navigational system it has a range of roughly 400 miles which allowed crews to navigate towards well the fur drives that Germany however because Germany actually did scramble and try to jam he's kind of a navigational systems it didn't really work anymore beyond the Netherlands really but for today's mission apparently everything is fine the this system this re system actually allowed the bomber to navigate towards the target even in completely poor and horrible weather conditions within a two mile radius of the target so you didn't have pinpoint accuracy but for the time that was actually pretty good now for a navigator that really is all his job he has a nice little lamp here that he news obviously to plot his courses he has all his little instruments rulers pens and all that good stuff and below him there is in fact an escape hatch so he's one of the few people in this in this bomber that has a straight way out of the aircraft and next to that I escape hatch there's also a camera which we're going to be showing you do where you can take pictures from your bombs falling to the ground and that really is all there is to say about this position there's a little bit of a bench shoe that he and used to sit on every wrong we can fold that open slightly I'm not gonna go complete with it and below that there would also be his parachute and by the way just so you know the parachute over here that's the one for the flight for the wireless operator and yes these parachutes were not worn while they were on duty during these bombing missions they put them on once they had to put them on otherwise it would simply be to obstruct me but yeah that is the navigators position taken care of let's have a look at the bomb aimer alright so welcome to the bomb radius position once again very awkward to film but yeah he would be lying here looking down his bomb site trying to hit something that well he wanted to have blown up for self defense purposes there is a Vickers Kagan up front there we go and we have also some ammo drums on the on the side panels here now for him actually being able to successfully complete his mission he obviously has to use the bomb aiming station and the main panel finds itself to the his right with all little indicators that he requires to set the bomb he also to his left in fact has some idea of where his aircraft is going once again a very awkward shot to make and he has a couple of maps over there and some box pair lamps overall his job really is only one of self-defense and getting the bombs on target it's a very very difficult job obviously these guys were trained expertly trained for the time trying to get the bombs as close to the target that as as possible however when you look at how there's positioned here it's a key I've got to say a fairly comfortable position but you don't want to be lying here or doing your job for for many many hours as this mission is took so mostly the bomb aimer when he wasn't required to be over here would just move around the aircraft and then see what he can do alright so we have two more positions coming up the dorsal gunner position and the tail gunner and that one I'm really looking forward to what we're going to do now is I'm going to put a camera on my my my forehead try to get up there and show you guys how much of a tight squeeze it is actually to get into these turrets keep in mind I'm roughly 6 foot so that's a meter 90 and I was not designed to be operating a turret like this okay so to get into this position right here you actually have to lift off this part of the turret but as you do that you essentially have to go inside the turret already so we're going to go I hands first push ourselves up and now we find ourselves stuck what we have to do now is lift one leg onto the wrist lift the other leg and then somehow find a way to squeeze like overly sized body it this position who and once you're on in here it really is quite nice we've got the gunner position with his quad free or free Browning's these office replicas at this moment and he really has a nice little overview over there we can see the navigators observation Dom that's pretty nice they can wave at each other and beyond that well we're not in the sky but it's a beautiful and actually quite comfortable position and the way that it is the joystick here is actually pretty pretty cool getting out of it though is somewhat of a nightmare so let's try it out to get out I have to stand up I then have to lift the part that I'm sitting home and then sort of drop into the never hoping I don't bang myself and then just fall through position all right so the last position I'm dreading this one the tail gunner got my silly hat on my celly camera I'm trying to put in there my camera one tried it before me he's about a head smaller than me shorter however he fits me we'll see right so the way this is done obviously without the parachute the parachute would be right here too to the left when he comes out to the right of the aircraft and a way to get in to this position oh let's see how this is done okay my body's in that's good however I still have to get my leg somehow squeeze there we go there we go and I'm in very nice little position there was the gun side right there here's the joystick for the guns once again I've got quad browning for your fries this is a bold port bottom hole turret they actually got this one from the French and the 30s and improved it now one of the things that happens while you're actually in operation in this station you have to close these doors right here I'm not going to do that right now but these folds inwards like so for both sides and they are closed during flight so you actually cut off from anything that goes on in the Indian made part of the aircraft now you might now ask the question if the plane gets hit if it's on fire what does the tale gonna do well it pushes open these panels and then he has to get out somehow because he has to get to this parachute there's a little bit of a fire extinguisher here you can try to fight the fire I guess but usually by the time he's out that's not going to be an option anymore anyway he has his his parachute here he has to get to that there's a little bit of an axe here which he can maybe use to pry open the the panel's if they were stuck and then somehow obviously he's not gonna care about getting out here without destroying anything I do so this is gonna be a very difficult maneuver oh I don't know one second I have an idea you know I'm regretting my words that I said earlier when I was having a laugh at my cameraman during that wireless operator shoot but look oh my god the plane is on fire and I'm finally out of the position we can take the parachute I can put it on and if I can go that way to the escape hatch which by the time I'm finally ready as possible I will have to move back into the skirt rotate at 90 degrees to I recite and then bail out the open hatches so yeah have fun being hidden charlie now if you're lucky you will leave this aircraft the old-fashioned way by just getting out of t entry hatch together with all your mates and there we are back from a successful mission of the Halifax now I hope you guys enjoyed this with your more than I enjoy getting out of that hell Gunners position and if you did check out the power patreon page down below in the description box it's the support of patrons that actually allows us to travel to these museums set up shots like this and bring it to your living room as always I hope you guys have a great day good hunting and seeing the sky [Music] you

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 842,250

Keywords: WW2, Aviation, Education, Bomber, Halifax, Handley Page, RAF, Heavy, Strategic, Royal, Air Force, Allies, Inside, Cockpit, Turret, Gunner, Memory, Rememberance, Visit, Yorkshire, Air, Museum, Exclusive

Id: 2zypfAVMRJc

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018