North American P-51D Mustang - Part 1 - Walkaround - Kermie Cam

a criminal weeks here fantasy a flight thinking about going to go do a Kermit Kim in the p-51d what do you think huh anyway this airplane what kind of holds a special place in my heart here it was my second collectible airplane the first one I bought was an 86 to basically learn how to fly a p-51 I didn't have a specific interest and getting an 86 other than learning how to fly my goal was a p-51 one of the coolest days of my life was taxiing into a ramp full of my friends in this airplane when I was 25 years old let me tell you that was a pretty cool day I still remember that through my bags out of the back I started giving rides I've been sharing my passion and good fortune ever since so anyway this particular airplane is painted up in the colors of major George Pratt II George back there on the canopy he was the highest-scoring p-51 ace in World War 2 this was his third airplane unfortunately how to crop some eye to the fourth and on Christmas Day I think in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge he was chasing an enemy airplane at low level over American troops the American troops got word that there was two enemy airplanes headed their way they missed the first one and they got the second so unfortunately that was the end of George that's all those kills up there and in this paint job not this airplane the original airplane doesn't exist but in this paint job airplane I think on one mission he had been up you know doing a little bit of gamblin a lot of drinkin was not feeling very well the next day went on a really long mission he was like you know really not feeling well it was a long mission deep into enemy territory and I think in about six minutes or 10 minutes shot down like five or six airplanes and anyway it was an amazing sword he came out walked out the end of the wing and I think he threw up when he got back so anyway hopefully that won't happen to me today so it's kind of interesting too this was some of his original crew and there was a one time when this red McVeigh guy he was one of his uh mechanics he came down I gave him a ride in the back of the airplane that how cool is that so that was pretty cool so basically what we're going to do is we're going to do a little bit of a walk around and so I usually start about here where the gun camera was you know it's got a little thing to close up there's a 16 millimeter camera back there that you can actually access through this little port right here and change the fill mountain stuff and it helped for you know determining if somebody had shot somebody down or something like that but it was also used as a for intelligence because if you weren't a dog but you're fighting around man you're just looking to shoot at somebody or save your butt or whatever and what would happen is the intelligence people would down you know basically take these out when they got back from their mission they would look at them and they could see things that the pilot couldn't in his frantic pace see like maybe some new German airplane like a metro smith t-62 or something like I go what's that you know so anyway so basically up here in the left wheel well we're looking at you know just make sure there's no leaks stuff like that these are coolant tubes hydraulic rams stuff like that this is one of the landing lights just make sure everything's up to snuff as the gear lock mechanism their landing gears hydraulic we're looking down here to make sure you know there's no brake fluid leaking these are disc hydraulic brakes that all looks good you know just checking out the condition of the tires of course there's the three machine guns there's one that's recessed and I'll show you a little bit later how one why those are that way these are drop tank shackles that you could put up to 110 gallon drop tanks which is basically two 55-gallon drums of fuel on each side or you could put up to a 550 pound bomb it's where you actually Jackie airplane this little thing it goes in there and put the jack there and jack up the airplane when you do gear swings so we're just making sure you know the leading edges look all good there's no scratches dings somebody bumped into something wingtip here is made of much softer metals so check that out ailerons trim tabs a little bit of a servo tab there if you notice that when the a neuron goes up the trim tab goes down well that acts as a bit of a leverage to lighten the controls slightly but it also is into the it's coordinated end of the system for trimming the ailerons as well flaps five-position flap here that I'll show the guys basically filled the fuel tanks we want to check that out make sure you've got plenty of fuel it's a hundred 100 load LED and the world wasn't low led it was Connard octane yeah and on the p-51 B's and the C's they had oh they had a fuselage fuel tank back here one of the reasons why the p-51d is such a great airplane is because you can actually take that fuel tank out and put a jump seat back there you can't do it in the C model because you've got a big roll bar that's part of the structure and anyway so when we had this airplane taken up to Oshkosh twice we won grand champion once I think about 1987 it got dinged in the hurricane we sent it back to Cal Pacific our motor that is my p-51 see they're doing my a model Mustang as well they redid it we took the restoration to a higher level went back you got to be at least 10 years after and we won grand champion warbird again so this airplane might have been the only one at Oshkosh its won it twice so that's pretty cool needs a little bit of we need to touch up the paint it's basically from you know polishing the airplane from time to time so anyway so right now we've got the fuel tank out because we do a little bit of jump seat you can actually see the this is a radiator shutter door here and under here you can see that one right there that's actually for the oil cooler I'll show you that and that's what this big doghouse on the bottom is for and when they work American designed this they design it in a wind tunnel where the air going in course it's a radiator so it's cool in the oil it's cooling the coolant temp in the radiator it cools the engine and so you've got this hot exhaust coming out like jet thrust okay and they basically designed this in the wind tunnel at North American to where the scoop on the bottom the thrust was overcoming the frontal drag of the of the of the scoop so it's almost like it's not there so that's that's pretty cool this little thing in the back here this is where a bar can go through and you can actually lift the tail up if you're jacking up the you know so you get the tail wheel off the ground when you're doing gear retracts the control surfaces on the elevators on the D model elevators are actually metal on the p51 see they're fabric but on the rudder on all of them they're fabric and you can see now this one is an anti servo tab so you can see that if I put in left rudder it's actually pushing against it and it's holding it back I'm not sure why there might be some sort of flutter issue but all these control surfaces are counterweighted and that is definitely for flutter this is for flutter here as well this is actually the this particular airplane came out at the end of World War two it was literally on a boat headed to New Zealand when the war ended in crates with about I don't know 39 other ones I think there was like 40 airplanes they were going to New Zealand and they actually had this on there I believe unless it was added later but this was actually a tale radar warning system so if somebody got in this cone of where somebody was behind you to shoot you there would be a light that would flash up on the panel up on the top there our next next to the gunsight that would let you know that somebody is back there so that's that so looking pretty good and you know this would be where you would look for some reason wanted that the battery was lower you want to start with an external starter that's where you would do that but the venturi for something probably draining something I'm not sure not draining something would just keep something from keep it going overboard or something okay check the fuel here it's a pretty shiny day today it's been actually it's pretty rainy lately okay so we got plenty of fuel and because they just feel it I'm going to want something that's why I've got this little thing with me now one thing I want to show you we actually back in the mid to late 80s when we restored this airplane we really took the restoration of originality up to a completely new level and this was one of the things that we did that we added and let me just set that there for now so you can see we've got all the guns and obviously they're just aluminum breeches I think the barrels are real 50s but ATF takes a dim view these days of having 50 caliber active machine guns and your airplanes these are the ammo chutes and as you can see the these two guns are fed out of and I'll show you this here let's say I can pull it away a little around kind of loaded the guns on a while we have a Chocolat ammunition lately yeah so you can see that there's you know basically all the ammo there so this app thing here feeds this one gun here and that's why this gun is recessed you can see that there these two guns are fed out of this thing up here was a little bit thicker part of the wing if you look at the deal right here you can kind of see how it's loaded how many rounds there aren't stuff you know so I can't remember just to come around a minute senator guns got 270 rounds so instead of 300 yelling less than 30 seconds you're out of freaking ammo if you held the trigger down so this back here so that was you know one of the things that we did people want risk doing back now and also here's the firing solenoids they actually are what in the cockpit when you pull the trigger you can actually turn the switch on in the cockpit on this airplane and when you pull the gun trigger all these click of course they don't click to anything but you know anyway so pretty cool we're very very proud of this airplane like I said it's got a really soft spot in my heart because it's been a big part of my early history of the Warburg's and stuff these fasteners okay that's that flap neurons all the good wingtip okay first thing we want to do well make sure we take the pitot cover off here and this is for the airspeed you know the RAM pressure goes in there and basically expands a bellows in the airspeed indicator and it's geared to the dial so the more pressure the faster you're going and we put these on here in Florida and a lot of places to you get these little mud dobbers they love to make nests there and that is not a good thing if you want to have any airspeed leading edge looks all good it really chalks and then down here again we're looking for you know we're looking for any kind of leaks checks on the tire things like that this gear well is a little bit different the landing gear time looking for leaks and stuff and on these these Rams here this is actually the the RAM that runs the gear up and down and very early in some of the Mustang days some of these tubes would break and if for some reason they actually broke it could jam against one of these ribs you couldn't get the gear up or down regardless so this is just a little bit of a Rube Goldberg out of spring there so if it does break it will pop up and you can actually get the gear gear down emergency and the only other thing of course there's the up lock right there I'm going to clip in there once it goes up the only other thing in here it's like a little hydraulic it's an accumulator actually and this is the pressure gauge supposed to be like 400 psi it's a little bit of an accumulator that acts as a dampening system in the hydraulic system which runs at about I think it's a thousand psi of course there's the clamshell doors and this is all connected through sequencing valves that you know make sure that the gear goes up before the clamshell goes up and all so that's that now back here is the radiators and this inside here a couple of things first thing the one down low there that's the oil cooler down here and the back there is the radiator for the coolant and then I've got two two little fuel ok gets in here anyway I got a drain there we go I'm sure that there's no water in the fuel that looks all like fuel to me smells like fuel do this one over here looks pretty good looks clear and it's blue which is good that's the color that they put the dye in there 400 octane and then just one of the little fuel thing here that we check and that is not that side but let me go up here first because this is another key thing we want to take out and that is the carburetor air duct and we put that up there so the mud dobbers won't fill that up but you can get a bird's nest up there so that's uh something that we want to make sure it's clear I'll have to come back this way anyway so that's all good and you know spinner probably all the good one thing really isn't a problem with the deals but if you tap it with a screwdriver if there's a cracked exhaust stack it goes clunk yeah so those all look good and over here is the fuel strainer and this is where the fuel kind of filter is before goes to the carburetor so there's actually one more little thing that we drain here okay that all looks pretty good okay that's that I can get rid of this chalk put my fuel speed driver dueña here there okay close this up because this is the rainy season we try and keep all this dry as we can that's our little fuel tank there hang holds on 2,000 gallons yeah so anyway so everything looks good on the outside let me go history with karma cam helmet off and we'll go okay so you [Music]

Channel: Kermit Weeks

Views: 253,906

Rating: 4.9307766 out of 5

Keywords: Kermit Weeks, Fantasy of Flight, Kermie Cam, GoPro, Cockpit Footage, North American P-51D Mustand, Mustang, P-51D

Id: jzKFkYLHq3Q

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SovietSteve]

I love Kermit. So jealous of his collection.

[u/hazzer111]

Thought this might be of interest to you all.

[u/Hellreign82]

Not jealous of this guy at all. Not one bit No sir Nyet Nien Nope Bastard Never

Good find

[u/Reaper_reddit]

his C model (I think) 3 part videos are also great

[u/AndreDJ]

He's got some fantastic videos, I especially liked his Wildcat ones.

[u/Vitormouraw]

Very excited to watch part 2 and 3! Kermit is great guy, love watching his videos.