I think it was probably the top fighter of its day and it was a superb airplane in every way when we got the aileron booth when we got the dive race it was probably the best fighter during the war that was the culmination of a dream the first time I drove a p38 off the power of that p38 to this day still brings chills to me when I think about it I feel like oh my survival to the a p38 there were probably few enemy soldiers seamen and airmen who did not fear an encounter with a lockheed p-38 lightning called the four tail devil by the Germans the p38 deadly effectiveness was unmatched during World War two in 1937 the Army Air Corps realized it needed a new fighter specifically designed to intercept high-altitude bombers lockheed assigned the project to designer Hal Hibbert and a promising young engineer named Kelly Johnson Lockheed submitted their proposal and was awarded a contract to build one prototype designated the ex p38 in June of 1937 the ex p38 flew for the first time on January 27th 1939 just a few weeks later the Army Air Corps ordered Lockheed to challenge a cross-country speed record with the new plane the ex p38 shattered the existing record but the publicity stunt proved to be very costly the aircraft was destroyed in a crash landing at the end of the flight despite losing the prototype the Air Corps ordered 13 test aircraft called Y p38 before those test models were delivered the army ordered an additional 60 fighters designating them p38 while refining the aircraft and preparing it for the assembly line Lockheed perform nearly 2,000 changes between the first production model the p38 D and its successor the p38 II as Lockheed Ford managers worked frantically to produce more Lightning's its engineers and test pilots tried to solve the aircraft's aerodynamic problems my very first test flight for Kelly Johnson was doing what we call a VG diagram velocity and gravity pulling G's and at these speeds you just pull in all the way just pull it in until it's airplane stalls it's all very sudden and they're trying to get more G's out of the airplane at these various speeds the 300 mile an hour speed as I peaked out in the airplane stalled at 300 miles an hour that's called an accelerated stall and G meters would record it recorded 6 G's and it stalled and at the same instant a loud explosion in the canopy blew off right over my head well ok anybody lose a canopy going fast like I got a guarantee it's a thrilling for the moment so I came down and reported it to Kelly Johnson he was there when I came down and I I said it jettisoned itself so they immediately redesigned the canopy and that's the one that you ended up with the hinge back here wasn't much of a hinge but it had pins that went in and then hooks on each front corner and it survived the war the most dangerous problem that the engineers and test pilots had to overcome was compressibility we came to a point where we're having trouble with a p38 and we lost one in a dive due to compressibility and the military thought we didn't know what we were doing and our test pilots weren't up to the job after an unsuccessful attempt by the army to solve the problem Kelly Johnson received permission to form his own flight department dedicated to test flying the p38 Kelly Johnson's first four planets were Milo Bertram Giotto Jim white myself we did think it was AI speed problem I know that Kelly Johnson knew is a high speed problem what do you do you're trying to make the airplane go as fast as it can and of course a fighter has to be able to dive when you die you go faster than you do on in level flight and I remember one day that I got into compressibility deliberately to see what it was like I'd heard about it and I just went into it gradually and I was about thirty thousand feet and I got into it where the nose suddenly dropped it would Buffett a Lilin drop and I went to pull it up right away and it didn't come up I wrote it for a while a couple thousand feet and finally nursed it out and now I know this is for real well my god you got to do something you got to redesign something the airplane came out at a time when it just had too much speed and and and and climb it was a really a function of the altitude it would go in this great speed and you go into a little bit of a dive and my god a 15 degree dive from say 30,000 feet with power on the Abid compressibility within thousand feet something like that well my gosh the fighters gotta do better than that Kelly Johnson knew we had to get the Lightning into a high-speed wind tunnel to solve this problem but he was meeting resistance from the wind tunnels operators NACA which is now called NASA through Kelly Johnson's dodge dart turn determination and ability to reason got general HAP Arnold convinced that it was a high-speed problem and he made it possible to get it in a high-speed wind tunnel and they could see exactly what was happening and the air was reaching the speed of sound and and shock stalling and instead of going remaining supersonic it would shock stall and go back to subsonic speed that down downstream and this would be turbulent error and this would strike the tail and make the airplane quiver and Shake as well as reducing a download on the stabilizer which is part of the aerodynamic function of the tail to balance and help control an airplane and we were losing it and they determined well now what we've got to do is produce a device that would not only help slow you up because it's too critical a speed to be flying in but we wanted to restore some lift to the wing as well as a nosing up tendency so this is what we did with this dive flap we call it a compressibility dive flap and it worked Milo Bertram and Tony Levere immediately began testing the new dive flats however the army felt that they were progressing too slowly so they sent Colonel Ben Kelsey to Lockheed to finish up the dive test program and he took it up and went into a dive like I described and next thing we know we were getting telephone calls that a p38 appeared to be coming down in pieces and one was the main part was in a spin and out of this spinning airplane came up a pilot and parachute well we've been Kelsey he actually went into a dive and for reasons we don't really know couldn't get the dive flaps out miraculously Colonel Kelsey survived the accident with only a broken ankle we immediately get another airplane from that moment on nobody bothered us Bertram and LaVere completed the test program in 1942 proving that the dive flaps worked the modification was added to later p38 models while Tony levere was test-flying for Lockheed America was drawn into World War two the Army Air Corps put its training program into high gear sending pilots with little experience into combat there were 20 of us volunteered as fighter pilots and we'd never fired a gun we'd never flown a fighter plane we just went over and learned on the job so it's just people those of us who survived for few missions though we learned as soon as we got to New Guinea we were into p39 and that's about all they had they didn't have many p38 over there and so we had really a rough time with the zeroes they had our superiority this was in this was in 42 and they chased those p39 s right down into the ocean we didn't have the altitude on him we didn't have the manoeuvrability we we never used this serial number zero in any transmissions because people would pop up out of formation about 50 feet if somebody says they zero as soon as p-38s became operational they were quickly pushed into service in a variety of roles as an interceptor escort fighter fighter bomber and ground and shipping strafe er appropriately the p38 shot down its first enemy aircraft while being used as an interceptor on August 4th 1942 lieutenant Ken Ambrose and Lieutenant Stanley long shot down two Japanese bombers that were attacking at conditions but the p38 pilots and all pilots of the 11th air force had an enemy even greater than the Japanese whether it was the big problem up there for us and for the enemy also its way the factory of the world on the north side of them you have the cold dry winds coming down from Siberia and the northern very northern latitudes it's on the south side the thing called the Japanese current comes up along the south side and head-start in Japan it wasn't warm water it was a lot warmer than the rest of water and the prevailing winds are from the west and when these two air masses mix you have god-awful flocks and storms it was it was very difficult to live there and to fly through there you had to be careful when you got into your airplane in the morning if it was really cold you had to be very careful not to touch it with your fingers because your skin would freeze to it it was the end of your physical endurance to live up there you had to take care of yourself you always carried food in your pocket in case you were stranded someplace you tried to stay dry and and you you did what you were supposed to do in the Aleutians misjudging headwinds or running low on fuel could be fatal mistakes if you were weak in navigation you didn't make it home many pilots were lost without a trace the first guys were up there navigated by dead reckoning and you many times you just couldn't find the islands basically we were flying patrolling is looking for the Japanese subs that were trying to interdict American ships that were luring than these two rhetoric three-quarters of the people I went over with didn't come back and we never saw a jet plane we were fighting the weather we lost a pilot a very good friend of mine he was going to be a minister after the war and he ran out of gas maybe half a mile off the end of the runway I think it was the Exide point and he had to set the airplane down in the water which he did but nobody could get to him and he was sitting on the bottom of the ocean there and kind of like he was coming in to land and for months after that every time we flew over we saw him sitting in that cockpit under 100 feet of water whatever it was and it was you know Pearson way in a low tone General George Kenny commander of the 5th Air Force needed a sword to strike the Japanese he knew there was only one aircraft that could accomplish this mission the p-38 lightning the p38 had the range to escort bombers on attacks against bases and airfields vital to the Japanese general Kenny fought desperately to equip an entire fighter group with lightnings he received approval in the spring of 1943 and the group began forming in Australia in June and July of 43 they began taking people with experience out of all the other squatters up there and putting them in this new outfit that was forming down in Amberleigh field Brisbane near Brisbane and then they filled a table with young pilots from the States who didn't have any combat experience and a lot of the ground personnel from from the unit's over there also were very important because they knew combat and they knew what they were doing so our outfit had a lot of experience before it ever went into his first combat mission and I must say the young pilots who came from the states were much better trained than we were we had gone over without very much training and learned to fire machine guns on the job and they had very good gunnery training the 475th was going to need that experience this unit became General MacArthur's Vanguard during his drive to take New Guinea and the Philippines when we got the 38 we got definite air superiority and in a very short time we could get up above them and we'd usually try to get up above them and come down on them and just keep up our speed hit him hit the formation and fly on and come back turn around come back hit him again the air war in the Pacific quickly changed from a frantic defense to an aggressive campaign to seek and destroy the enemy they were getting pretty gun shy when we got the p38 and they would often turn and run and we intercepted them before they'd stay there and run us into the water in p39 but in 38 they they knew that they had to get the heck out of there they would sometimes stay with their own bombers to try to protect them but if they didn't have anything that they had to stay for they'd take off and as time went on we got more and more of their good pilots and and that they were easier to hit easier to get they just weren't as good I remember our first mission on Rabaul which was in October early October and we went across on the water real low with the Bombers to stay under the radar we caught him flat-footed and beat up the harbor and got a lot of shipping and knocked out a lot of our planes on the ground and that was very memorable there was very little interception because they didn't know we were coming but from then on those were ball missions we got plenty of interception the 475th flew a total of 20 missions to Rabaul between October and December of 1943 they lost only seven aircraft and five pilots and shot down more than 60 enemy fighters know where was the versatility of the p-38 more evident than during the North African campaign flying fighter bomber escort dive bomber interceptor ground attack and photo reconnaissance missions the camera airplane is basically the same p38 except instead of guns it's got all the camera equipment up in the nose and it took some great pictures I think the photo Jose did an admirable job they flew unarmed and well I wouldn't have cared for the job but I have a lot of friends that flew recce airplanes and outstanding I've one friend that went over and took the pictures of all the bridges along the river the River Seine into Paris and he had a good picture and that way the the commanders knew exactly what laid over the horizon you know they had a good idea of where they needed to direct their power so many airplanes were specialized to do one mission and like the p51 the p-47 and many other fighters that we had and the Germans and and everything none of them ever had the capability during World War two to do what we call a multi-role capability and this was the first truly awe multi-role airplane I was ever devised he could do any almost any mission with it when the Allies needed an answer to the Luftwaffe night attacks they turned to the p38 I was asked if I would like to do something a little special and I said well that's what I'm here for whatever it is and they to my liking said how would you like to do some testing of the p38 to be a long-range night intruder fast intruder and I had been specially trained in that particular field and long-range night fast and shooter the early night fighter pilots patrolled alone because there were no visual references over water and blacked out cities of pilots only means of navigation were time and distance day fighter pilots take a course in aircraft recognition so you know the enemy by just a flash of a card showing the aircraft 99th fighter pilots learn the exhaust pattern of an aircraft and usually most of our tax were done where we would approach the aircraft from below to the side and low so you could see that I can identify the aircraft prior before you shot it down dick will see had two unconfirmed victories during his night missions the information he gathered was forwarded to Lockheed and applied during the development of the p38 M night fighter which was introduced in 1945 during my tour there I 331 night missions and 82 day missions and I ended up being a squadron commander the squadron that I heard his name was assigned to my clue and the p38 for a solid year of combat after the Allied victory in Sicily and the subsequent invasion of Italy the 15th Air Force was formed in 1943 to strike vital targets throughout Europe we would be above the Bombers but the Germans were always above us on recon man and their tactics were to dive down on the escorts try to break up the escorts and then hit the bombers and even before that we would get to the target area the Germans would try all kinds of ways of trying to get us to draw them draw us away from the Bombers and then there there ME two tens and four cans would be able to come in they'd be equipped with rockets to go in after the Bombers our tactics now with the p38 Teddy family against them was to fly and for ship lights and each two flights would work together and weave across each other like this all was in a turn over the Bombers we could keep up our speed that way and we could stay right over a certain area well the p38 having the slow rate of roll that we had until we got the aileron booth this was where we figured that our best capability was to keep him away from the Bombers this is there's two forms of escort and one is to keep him away from the Bombers and the other is to shoot him down so they won't come up the next day but if you wanted to ask a fighter pilot what the best what he would prefer to do and that would be to go chase him can shoot him down so it took a lot of discipline to get the pilots to stay with the Bombers and consequently we didn't shoot down as many airplanes as we would have if we went chasing him around but we've probably saved a lot of bombers from being shot down by doing it that way and that was our main job that's why the songs were written and by the bomber pilots say give us a p38 for an escort in March of 1944 the enemy was able to break up an allied fighter escort mission over the Po Valley in northern Italy with the 15th Air Force faced one of the biggest air battles of the war and in my case we got broke up and I ended up way back up over near the Alps way deep there and now I could hear guys that it's long enough now I could hear people that were heading home on their own it sound like most of them are over the Adriatic already I'm going home and I'm clear back up here in the Alps they thought I decided I better get the hell home too you know so I turned and started back and but I looked over here to my left and Here Come another p38 doing the same thing as I was doing but he had three 109s on his tail so the only thing to do in my what I figured as I turned into him you know to get him off his tail so I turn and I call to him I'm breaking into these aircraft on your tail and I didn't know who it was you know and so I just called me p38 I'm you're you got three 109s on your tail I'm breaking into them you know so I swung around and when I got about this way he was going straight and I said come on fella break with me but he knew what I didn't know he knew that is not more of them back there you know I saw was the three so I turned into these guys two of them went that way and one went the other way so I went after the two because I figured to be better than cool heft and there were two of them worse than than one and I won but when I did that I looked up and all I could see was enemy aircraft above them and I estimated there was at least thirty and so I ended up the next twenty minutes in the damnedest maneuverings around and if an airplane ever got jerked around it that one did and I didn't I did I shot up all my ammunition trying to give each one a squirt as I would turn into it or something and then I'd have to break the other way and I just constantly broken shot and broke and shot until I finally got clear and it was so wild that I thought that some of them were gonna run into each other trying to but anyhow I got I got that airplane boilin and got at home dick will see he received his first Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic efforts while the 15th Air Force struck at axes targets from bases in Italy the 8th Air Force attacked the axis from across the channel in England in the fall of 1943 the 8th Air Force's p-47s did not yet have the range to escort the Bombers to targets in Germany and bomber losses were heavy p-38s were pressed into service and in November of 43 early combat encounters were successful but the winter months brought colder weather and the sub-zero temperatures at high altitudes caused a rash of mechanical problems the engine was a problem in developing and the p38 there's no question there was a good-looking engine it ran great when it ran great but I got to tell you they lost a lot of them from all sorts of causes Lockheed was determined to correct the engine problems from the day I joined Kelly Johnson and in 1942 and that very first flight that I mentioned all through the remaining three or four years that we were testing them I was probably doing more testing on p38 and the other pilots and every flight was an engine test no matter what test they had it always included a engine test I had to determine already get maximum power in the process through these years I lost 14 Allison engines due to this detonation and that is of course an explosion in a combustion chamber of an engine and when a fuel mixture detonates you gotta remember it's like setting off a stick of dynamite and something's gotta give in December of 1943 Lockheed Rush clavier to Europe in an attempt to find a solution to the engine problem Lockheed also manufactured 500 modification kits to update all the p-38s in the European theater the kids included dive flats and boo stellar ons that would greatly enhance the plane's effectiveness there were 21 modifications and they called it the blackjack program for the card game 21 we were setting up to modify p38 every p38 over in England was to come to North Ireland and we'd go in one day and out the 5th or 6th day with all these modifications they had all the tooling the jigs and the whole bit to do this monstrous job and hopefully that we'd have this engine failure problem Alecto lockheed set up a base in northern ireland to implement the program but the parts never arrived so the man in charge of the program sawaki Joe Johnson went out searching and going tracing back on the dispatch of the airplane and the progress and everything and finally it turned out that the British could identity shot the airplane down coming in thinking was a German airplane and they did admit it that was the end of that modification program we never caught up with it it was a low blow while in England LaVere was asked to give a lecture about the p38 to a new fighter group he explained single engine operations and the dangers of compressibility he also gave a dramatic flight demonstration soon after levira found out how effective his lesson was a young pilot off maybe 100 feet or so called my name it came toward me and he's got up close said to want to shake your hand you saved my life and I've chuckled and I said how did I save your life and he told me this story there was four of them up on a training flight and the lead pilot said let's go home and he peeled off and they all peeled off I suppose they were in a right hand that's lawn or whatever and they all peeled off and down they went all of those three guys went in well they couldn't figure out why why he got out in the other three didn't he said well I did what Tony laverre said to do if he got into it that's exactly what he told me and they had him down there and to tell the higher command people well now they never told me anything the next thing I know they're shipping me off to all these bases to demonstrate in lecture and I gave all these other bases the same treatment and I even to make a good entry like you would want to if you're going on the stage or performing you want to make a good entry I got to come in over the field at 20,000 feet straight down in a p38 and would bring it right down to the deck over the base and I got to tell you that would get the attention of everybody within 50 miles the noise as you know the terrible noise of a p38 going fast there was nothing quite like it levira was called back to the states to begin test flying America's first production jet fighter the p80 the training he provided was not only invaluable to the strategic 8th Air Force it also contributed to the deadly effectiveness of the tactical 9th Air Force so our work was primarily reconnaissance and then fighter bomber type of work where we carried bombs napalm or our full load of ammo so we go out and oftentimes targets of opportunity anything that moved in those days was the target because the for the civilian populace they didn't have gas so it had a military meaning if it moved on the road the 9th Air Force than its p38 fighter groups attacked the Germans were ever they could find them one of our main targets of course was marshalling yards and trains and oftentimes we try to get the train right in the marshalling yard and and that way destroy three or four tracks you know and every mission was either trains or tanks or trucks that move or perhaps airfields I hit one train coming out of Berlin that had this where mark I was the fellows that were kind of too old for the army but they were coming out to defend the fatherland and we caught that train about 20 minutes out of Berlin and it shot up pretty badly and stopped at its tracks I flew 60 missions in the p38 and then 19 the p-51 and every mission was fighter bomber type of tactics and gosh shut up trains but train busting was not the only mission for the 9th Air Force's versatile p38 they also escorted bombers and engaged the Luftwaffe in aerial combat we had been escorting the b-26 flying cigars it was called at the time and we're coming out of Alesana in France there were about 18,000 feet when all of a sudden someone called bandits and coming in from 6 o'clock I saw six fw 1 90s and a command they hit the number four guy and knocked him down he went down both engines smoking the number three guy pulled out and then a German came by my left wing close enough that I could recognize the guy and he saddled in behind my my flight leader and by that time I'm getting the gun switches on and the changing the power settings and everything else so I just slid in behind him and with about two radii lead I was able to hit him hit him pretty well with that great firepower of the p38 and in doing so why the guy bailed out so it was an automatic one victory which was the extent of my aerial victory since we didn't see the Luftwaffe too too much in last year of the war the p38 pilots of the ninth might not have had to face the Luftwaffe very often but they continually faced deadly anti-aircraft fire from the ground any time strafing when you have the small arms fire that can come after you that's far more dangerous than staying at altitude but they could the Germans got so professional in their attack that they could cut an 88 which was our big gun that could go to altitude they could cut that right on the horizon that she came across so they were quite accurate I took several hits on one time had a little piece of shrapnel in the cockpit but that's as closest to my hide that ever say ever came in addition to low-level strafing and dive bombing the p38 showed its tremendous versatility with two very unusual modified versions in the droop snoot model guns were removed and replaced with a plexiglass nose a Bombardier sat in this area with his bomb sight the p38 Pathfinder was also equipped with radar nicknamed Mickey and a Mickey operator who could identify targets obscured by clouds if the targets in Germany were soft in they were overcast and we couldn't go out and do our thing I guess I flew 2 or 3 missions with the troops Newt and the way it worked with a radio contact that you took off and you flew formation and then just like the heavies or the mediums in their bombing you drop on the signal from the lead ship which had a bombardier or Mickey operator that would handle it the 8th and 9th Air Force were unrelenting with their attacks on the Axis powers from England and later from France the 8th Air Force with their bombing saturating bombing where they hit it to hit the ball bearing factories they hit the armament they hit the air airfields and things like that and then that combined with the 9th Air Force going in for the low level going in for the bombing and strafing and targets for opportunity I feel that we just overpowered them and that's exactly what happened combined with the 15th and 12th Air Force out of Italy and the Russian Air Force on the Eastern Front the Luftwaffe was totally destroyed and with it Germany's military might while the war raged the Army Air Force continued to train thousands of new pilots in the u.s. to fill the ranks overseas there was a great shortage of pilots at that time and general Kenney which was the chief of staff of the Air Force in the southwest Pacific for General MacArthur sent the word back to HAP Arnold general HAP Arnold he says we need some pilots and we need them now and I happen to be an RT you up at Hamilton field in Northern California by San Francisco and they said ok the first half of the alphabet of the groups a to M you're gonna go here and I can tell you this I had about forty hours in the p38 in training and I was in combat but my pal he got sent over to Italy and I kid named Millay see I really kind of get a little choked up when I think about it because he went over to Italy and on probably his second week of missions he was killed but he and I going through training Malaysia and Madison we were close friends so but I went to the South Pacific and I was first assigned to the for 75th Fighter Group 5th Air Force southwest Pacific in right around the turn of 43:44 my CEO was major McGuire me just Tommy B McGuire which as we know will end up being in a second leading ace of World War two with 38 victories if he was just two behind long and then McGuire was killed but you flew with him I did and many of the new pilots did and he liked me for some reason because the one thing that we were told to do is when you're there to protect his tail he's the one that's supposed to be doing the shooting you're supposed to protect him if you happen to get some shots fine but that's not your primary purpose your purpose is to be back there and cover his tail and I felt I hadn't done a pretty good job for him and he liked it so that's why he kept me there for four eight of his victories before I finally got promoted into flying in a different flight and a different element and all that it gave me a chance to start to get in some shots but at the beginning I didn't get many because he didn't miss for the one thing he was a fantastic shot in bottom lion great leader I would take him again MacArthur used the 475th to strike the enemy throughout the southwest Pacific the p-38s versatility gave MacArthur the strategic weapon he needed to strike the Japanese primarily we were a gun platform that was our purpose we carried all of these guns the four 50 calibers and a 20 millimeter cannon in the nose and our purpose was to get those guns to the enemy and use them and that was our primary purpose to combat aerial combat we also evolved into some dive bombing we carried heavy pound bombs under each of the shackles and sometimes we'd carry a wing tank under one shackle and a thousand-pound bomb on the other and so we did bombing and then we did a lot of strafing and we're strafing any enemy installations along throughout New Guinea in the Philippines and so those were our primary functions we'd go out and try to find the enemy in the air and if we didn't find him in the air we'd hit him wherever we could in the ground or wherever we'd hit them at home I had a hundred and six combat missions totaling about just about four hundred and some-odd hours for fifty somewhere in that range I flew did my job and came back and whatever it was a very simple life Madison and the fifth Air Force helped to chase the Japanese from New Guinea and the Philippines then they flew strikes on China French Indochina and Formosa the 475th tally at the end of the war was impressive five hundred and fifty two enemy aircraft shot down with the loss of only 56 p38 a testament to the effectiveness of his all p38 fighter group there were many acts of heroism among p38 pilots in the sky but there may have been even more heroics on the ground thanks to the tireless efforts of the crews who maintain the aircraft ground personnel often lived under miserable conditions working around the clock to keep the lightnings in the air and while pilots would complete a tour of duty and return to the States there was no rotation home for ground crews some who enlisted at the beginning of the war were not sent home until its end I'll doff my cap to a guy that maintained my airplane every day honey day in a week I had a tremendous regard for him because my life was on the line and he maintained that airplane and the job that he did was the direct result is that I flew 60 missions and 79 missions totally you know so I have a profound regard for the troops of maintain the airplane we worship the ground that they walked on the ground personnel the support personnel the crew chiefs in particular they worked long and hard and very very primitive conditions and they kept those planes flying and they absolutely did a miraculous job and they became very very immersed in our well-being and I know for a fact that coming back from a mission if they're on the ground they always were there on the ground when we started the land they'd watch us peel off and do our thing they're looking for their plane and I've seen this happen huh you know the guy says my plane didn't come back and I saw tears tears come to the eyes eyes because he didn't know and he felt that maybe he's responsible for the guy not coming back respect he looked at him and you got a strange look in your eyes called respect those poor guys terrible living conditions like everybody did but they had to work out in this stuff in the cold miserable freezing weather they had repair planes they had two armored and they date work all night long getting ready things ready for a mission in the morning and all some something would happen and they'd have to change all the plugs in the airplane and the they had a tough time we owed our lives to him in fact every time we took off we put our lives in their hands and they knew it I'd like to describe some of the features the outstanding features of this airplane and we'll start with a nose which was the devastating part of this airplane to its enemy the fantastic concentrated firepower and up here we have the four 50 caliber machine guns that are farsighted straight ahead no converging point the 20 millimeter cannon is missing here but it was right below the center - and you can just imagine when all guns and cannons were blazing away it was just like shooting a shaft of steel out in front of the airplane the nose of this airplane is distinctive and it was so well-liked particularly by Kelly Johnson he put the same nose on the the p80 jet fighter that we built toward the end of the war now the guns are furnished by ammo cans that were here in this area has had a large armament door one on each side this particular airplane does not have one but this whole side would open up and the armament containers the ammunition containers slid in from each side and was designed so that you could have these containers serviced and ready to go and an airplane could come down and open this up out goes the empty cans in goes the full cans feed the ammo chain into the guns and the airplane could make a quick departure for further combat it was one of the very first airplanes to have a tricycle-gear and I recall seeing the the engineering work that they did to develop this shimming on an airplane is one of the worst things that can happen and can almost tear the structure part in the nose of the airplane usually and not to mention tearing the gear loose I've had shimmy and it's fierce you don't want it and this is all the shimmy damping mecha this is the little hydraulic container and each of these will keep it from shimmy one of the great features of the p38 with the power plants the Allison engine v12 cylinder seventeen hundred and ten cubic inch with a capability of producing seventeen hundred or more horsepower when we first started flying the p38 we were just barely getting eleven hundred horsepower part of my job at Lockheed as a test pilot was to test the engines at greater power and pretty near every flight that I made we got as what we were testing beside the engine was to climb takeoff and climb full power and then full speed full power at whatever altitude thirty thirty five thousand one of the things we were trying to do from the very beginning is to work the horsepower up with a start of only eleven hundred horsepower when I first started to fly it we wanted to course get it up to at least seventeen hundred horsepower because reciprocating engines should be if they're designed right be able to get one horsepower per cubic inch and that's about the way it's run today now of course why do we want more horsepower we need horsepower to increase the capability of the airplane to take off with greater weight and climb a greater speeds as well as going faster in level flight and it goes without saying you need it for a fighter airplane we worked the power up and this particular model which is the L the latest last model of the fighter version and we did get it up to 1,700 horsepower but we did it with a new intercooler to cool the air that came from the turbine supercharger which made it possible to go up to these great heights we did that by taking air in here to cool the air going into the engine and of course we know an engine or internal combustion engine likes cold air you don't like hot air same for jet airplanes the colder the air the more of the power one of the most important things about a fighter airplane er for that matter in the airplane is having a good rate of climb this airplane was outstanding and probably would out climb any airplane of that period even that friend or foe now of course one of the most important parts of the engine was the turbine supercharger and the p38 was I believe one of the very first mass-produced airplanes in this country to use the turbine supercharger we had done early work prior to the p38 with the turbine supercharger and it does wonders for an engine it takes an engine for instance like this where it has a a rated horsepower usually up to without super charging up to maybe ten ten thousand feet depending on the gear ratio of the engine blower with this we can make an engine believe that it's at sea level this high is 35,000 feet now we're at the point of the aileron of this airplane and I think it's important to tell you that when we first started to fly this airplane it had jet straight controlled mechanism to the pilot with a control wheel and they were extremely heavy like driving a truck if in comparison and I remember being sent out on test flights to measure the rate of roll of the airplane where you'd see an airplane roll violent to the right or left that a fighter must have good control and rapid roll that's one of the most important things in order to maneuver in combat and I used to go up and do these damn Raider roll test to the point where when I would at a certain high speed like 350 miles an hour I would crank the wheel over as hard as I could to measure the rate of the roll and I used to throw my right shoulder out of place I did it at least twice and it's ruined the shoulder where I can't even throw a baseball one day I complained to Kelly Johnson and I told him that this raid our old business jr. making me do is ruining me and he thought of why and he said by George will do something about it we had already designed the first practical pirate booster controls for our constellation so he said hello we'll design one for this airplane and he did and the actuators were right up in here in this area that you see blocked off you can't believe what power-boost did to this airplane as I remember it had about a eleven to one boost ratio you could just fly the airplane at any old speed with almost fingertips just like the modern automobile in fact the automobile got their idea from the p38 and it would out roll any airplane to our knowledge anywhere and in combat it certainly improved its ability to deal with the smaller more maneuverable airplanes one of the finest features of the airplane was the flap system the devices usually are on the bottom side trailing edge of wings to increase the lift for takeoff in many cases and certainly for landing approach and landing we chose at Lockheed to use the Fowler plow which is a flap that comes out and increases the area and then droops progressively more as you desire the flap position and it was a tremendous thing this airplane at the tremendous weight that we could lift you could come in and land at as slow as about 75 80 miles an hour which is slower than a lot of these modern general aviation airplanes believe it or not it was really quite a gentle airplane now to cool the engines the liquid cool Allison's they didn't use water they use what they call glycol it's anti freeze type of liquid that all liquid cool engines and those days use at least in our country and each engine had one of these bulges on the inboard and outboard and this is the outboard on the left engine and the inlet here and then automatic temperature control with a scoop back here when you'd first start up this would be closed and as soon as the engine started to warm up this would automatically start out and if it was an extremely hot day it would be all the way out and of course the wind from the propeller would do a good job of cooling we didn't really have any problems on ground cooling to my knowledge except maybe in the very hot desert regions of the world now we're at the tail end of this airplane and one of the most important parts to an airplane that is providing it has enough fin and rudder and stabilizer an elevator and one of the great features of the p38 was the twin tail twin fin and rudder which gave it enormous controllability down to very low speeds and made it possible to fly this airplane at and handle engine failures on takeoff in dealing with our problem of compressibility Britain near every aeronautical engineer in the country thought the problem was a in our tail - stabilizer in the elevator that's the full travel of the elevator nose down like I haven't now and nose up here now when we go into this dive and reach compressibility what was happening was the shock waves on the wing and particularly on the center section was darling there and it was coming back and binging on the tail and making the tail puppet and you would feel it in the control colony so they decided that the problem then was in the elevator balance they thought actually the elevator was nibbling they didn't know why but they associated with the fact that the tail is after the main wing and on about the same plane now this is a what they call a mass balance counterweight and there's one on top and one on the bottom and this balances the weight of the elevator against the possibility of flutter and as you know what letter is is a condition where you get an unstable situation where a control or a wing would start to flap like that and the loads would be so high that but usually structures won't take it and in the end they break and fall off can't have that and I talked about the elevator and the elevator counterweight we also had it on the writers and as you see up here that is the rudder and when below mass balance to prevent rudder flutter kind of rhymes now in the compressibility dye where the airplane is going down the pilot is pulling furiously to get it out of the dive and nothing is happening when you get down to lower altitudes where the Mach number is still high but the indicated speed or the total speed of the airplane has risen maybe a hundred and fifty miles above the limit speed of the airplane in the region of 500 more indicated the tail loads due to this pulling back and the severe buffeting the tail will always fail at this joint now before we knew much about this compressibility we knew that the pilot needed help to get out of this dive and the most effective control is the stabilizer which is the forward part of the elevators at high speeds high Mach numbers you have to realize that the trailing edge controls become less effective and this was holding true back here so what they did is they changed the angle of the stabilizer to a more negative angle and if you come here I'll show you the difference in this cut here you'll see is sort of a wedge and that was opened up and this was done in 1942 and then remained that way it did help but it wasn't a total solution now when they started to lose the tail and they break off here they added a strap outside with this same row of screws now this airplane does not have Stremme but in all probability they'll never be good diving this airplane like we used to do it so it's probably pretty safe the concentrated firepower of having four 50 caliber machine guns and a 20 millimeter right in the nose and just being able to concentrate that fire you know on a target was just well it was devastating it's just remarkable what it could do you had almost a stream of lead sticking out in front of your airplane on those fighters the guns were in the wings and you had to zero in three or four hundred yards out beyond that the the your your ammunition would spread but anything you shot at with a p38 providing you were flying a properly you just about destroyed we like that firepower a cone of fire coming right out of there with a 120 millimeter cannon that when it hit the object you are firing out it spoke among it exploded on contact and you can see it here the four 50 calibers were armor-piercing incendiary they hit and they would go right through armor plate like a welding torch or welding torch would cut a hole in it just right - and it looks like a rockin around hole right through armor cleaning we could fire that those four 50 calibers in that 20 millimeter and there could be a freight train out there or the engine or something I could hit that and that engine would just demolish it would almost turn to dust man when you fired those guns if you could aim it at all it was like shooting fish in a rain barrel they found out that it's not fun to make a head-on pass at a p38 the most important thing was the extra engine out there particularly if you're flying up in my case a patrol line looking for subs all over the Bering Sea you could fly that airplane very well you could take off you could land and you could fly actually in combat with one engine he didn't want to but you could do that and a lot of people did I came back on single-engine about three times as I recall and never really counted but of course that's one of the reasons I love the p38 single-engine job you know you lose that engine while you're out of business though p38 while you had twin engine reliability you know and it brought you home now of course if you lose an engine then you had a somewhat of a dog on your hands in any airplane any multi-engine airplane twin-engine if you lose an engine it ain't a great airplane once the airplane loses an engine you got a dog but you got something as you know it had counter-rotating props in the planes that we flew and it was very very easy to fly we liked the fact that you didn't have to fight torque when you were taking off and that when you changed speeds torque is the force that offered that the propellers try to turn the airplane to the right when they're turning left or turn to the left when they're turning right we had counter-rotating props and they canceled out the torque from each other so that was a problem we never had to worry about the single-engine pilots always did flying high powered airplanes those two engines were you could trim them up and they had no torque and you just go along there with very little effort we did a lot of thousand mile round trips and in most airplanes you'd really be tired by the time you're dead a thousand miles over 500 miles over five around I had a capability of packing a hell of a load you could you could we never found a load that wouldn't get off the ground that ability allowed the p38 to carry two external fuel tanks significantly increasing its range at the end of the war in my squadron went out and had to we were getting ready to accompany our bombers to Japan northern Japan we never were able to do that before because we didn't have the range but the p30 Ellsworth haveli tanks had that range it had a terrific range if you know how to operate it and when I went to England I took a booklet over there to show how to get the most range out of the airplane by proper manipulation of the engine low rpm and higher boost it's like over driving an automobile same idea and Lindbergh went to the Pacific and he got involved in that with the boys flying the p30s over there and he showed them the same thing when Charles Lindbergh came over there we all know that historically he showed the world how to get maximum range out of an airplane engine so he came over to the southwest Pacific and he saw what we were doing and he tested in all he flew with Colonel MacDonald and some of the other guys I said here's here's what we should do and he showed us we'd go out on missions and we came back and we'd have maybe 40 or 50 gallons left he'd have 200 far enough excess of what we had what did he do he showed us how to get really good range we increased our range till later in the war I mean later on in this whole program flights of 10 and the fraction hours were not too uncommon and up to that time before he got there if we were on a five-hour mission we were sweating out gas coming back so he taught us how to do that but it has its side effects too we're flying this strike into the manokwari area major McGuire is leading and there's altogether about eight of us which I was somewhere back in the middle of the pack and we circled over the field and there's a little bit of a CAC hem so we stay away from that we go out over the harbor and major Maguire sees some shipping down in the manokwari Harbor so he said let's go get it don't drop your belly tanks save what fuel you have because after this we'll continue on to another target and see if we can't find what we're looking for which is aerial combat so we start strafing these Japanese freighters down in the harbor and we're still conscious of fuel economy we didn't change our rpm back to what we should have which is like 2,300 or more that'll give you a better lift for pull ah don't forget it I rather a new pilot you know in a whole scheme of things and so I'm diving on this ship following the leaders up ahead of me and I'm getting hits right on the bridge of the ship and it's just the very thrilling things you could see the shells impacting on that and I've been hittin there hitting there and I start to pull up at the last minute and I didn't have enough recovery with the RPM there at 1,600 I must in and hit the mast of the ship and that mass was you know not this big I hit this with the right lower part of the right engine propellers and the first thing I did is it turned me upside down flying away from the ship and the propeller starts to break off and it breaks alright the plane still have the belly tanks don't remember I write the plane and the propeller continues to break off and part of it goes through the canopy you know the plexiglass canopy and smashes that and I duck because I see it coming through because it's going like this you know and I duck and it goes threw in a piece of the plexiglass hit my head here and put a big gash in my head and by this time a reflex action which all pilots are taught I leveled out and I'm flying along away from the harbor away from the ship and as far away from all those Japanese people as I can what I'm sinking I've got one engine I've got this big hole in the right engine where the propeller was and it's a great big hole but that big and I turned off all the power and electrical and all that so there was no fear of that but it didn't matter much because most the instruments were not working and they were all beat up in this impact but I'm sinking I'm sinking down and my radio is not even working well so I can see myself going into the ocean maybe a few miles away from manic weary and that was not very inviting and so I'm flying along and I got a message through that the guy is a ha I'm sinking but remember this I'm in a state of trauma shock right now this blood is coming down in air is blowing in through the canopy and all of that and the right rear vertical stabilizer was knocked off by the propeller as it went back so I'm in big trouble one of my very very dear friends who is now a major-general named Harold of gray Hal gray he flew up alongside of me and caught my attention because I'm fighting to keep that plane flying I'm only doing about 160 miles an hour where normal would have been 220 to 230 and he gets my attention he drops his tanks Oh my tanks are still on there they're dragging me into the water so I dropped the tanks and I started to be able to hold my altitude not dropping down out holding I can't climb much but I'm holding ok now here we are just outside of manokwari we've got about 350 miles back to base I'm in trouble I'm hurt the plane is badly hurt and I'm scared to death so they led me back because they wouldn't let me go back as a wounded bird because if the enemy saw me I'd be sitting duck for them so they led me back and we headed back towards our base at Hollandia and I'm drawing a lot of power on the good engine and my fuel gauge on that engine is going down and down and down ancestor I'm not gonna make it in between me and the base is many many miles of water and even worse than that is the jungle because if you go down in the jungle there's no chance of rescue because there's just no way to get you out but we didn't have helicopters and things of that nature the big problem was between our location which was along the coast of New Guinea and Hollandia was a large series of mountains and they were about five six seven thousand feet and I couldn't get up over a few hundred feet because if I tried to climb I poured too much power she didn't want to roll over or if I didn't have enough she install out so I continued to head back and we knew that a small island off the coast of Holanda that had been captured by our infantry just two days before called wok T W a KDE was now in American hands and that was a low island it was off the coast for I was headed for and I decided that's where I'm gonna go and I'll put it down on this island next problem is when I get there what am I gonna do the radio and a lot of power systems are not working so I I can't get my wheels down I can't get my flaps down and I'm gonna have to belly this thing because if I tried to put the wheels down and then they're hanging up I'm gonna crash because there wasn't enough power to carry the wheels the drag and a big hole in the engine so I decided to do a belly in and so we finally got there after about three hours or so of the single-engine trauma and I circled the island once and it's a small island about the size of Catalina and I see the runway and I get lined up on it and in the meantime how gray and Jim morning had already landed because if I bust up the runway they don't be stuck up in the air so they land and get off this side and I come in and I start to lowered the speed down and flare out and everything and I wanted to do it far down at the end of the runway so that anybody coming behind you would have room to land well finally I touched down on the belly and she skidded four yards and yards and hundreds of yards I can't tell you how far about that coral dust is in the back is flying up and the sparks are flying I've got all the things turned off now that would cause a big problem and I have finally come to rest at the end of the runway and everything stopped the dust is starting to settle the dust that was in the cockpit is all settling down and I'm sitting there and frankly extreme data confusion but we are taught one thing when you land the first thing you do when you land you pull out the form five down here and you fill out that and you say admissions so-and-so and etc what's wrong with the airplane and I'm sitting there and that all of this is in a matter of a few seconds you know what I'm sitting there maybe a half a minute or a minute and how gray and jim morning would already landed they came running out and I'm sitting there said get out of the plane it's gonna blow up catch fire and blow up so I dropped the form five I crawl out of the cockpit under the wing and drop down and that's the end of the story one mission that stands out in my memory very vividly is the mission where we were sent out to hit targets of opportunity and we caught this train halfway in halfway out of the tunnel and our job at that time was to skip bomb to take 500-pound bombs and take it down and hit the train and then the idea was conceived that if we could hit the tunnel and knock the tunnel down we'd do double damage well as we were making the pass and coming in for the run I suddenly had a tremendous jolt and my first reaction was that the flak had hit me and then as I looked in rearview mirror I noticed that the left rudder was just pushed in and caved in and and broken over and I could tell because I had my rudders locked and it took full power to climb out of there and then right away the the other man I saw his airplane his right wing tip looked like it was peril up about two or three feet and the squadron took the the two and I carried put a bit of power just to fly the airplane under that condition and when I landed I ran out of fuel so it was that close the 82nd Fighter Group was on its second shuttle mission to Russia when the p38 clearly demonstrated one of its unique features we're flying line abreast so when we strafe the airfields we had three airfields we were going to strafe and all of us who exactly line abreast and take everything in front of you know turning around and going after things like that we shot everything in front of us as we crossed over those three airfields so being line abreast my position just took me right over the top of some of these trains and I was really hit badly by machine-gun fire I think mainly because I could feel the armor plating bouncing my feet underneath me and so they were hitting me pretty good I could tell laughs and the first thing I looked at was my left engine and it was covered with oil and I knew that I couldn't keep it running very long it would freeze up immediately practically so I feathered that engine and there was an airfield on the moor airfield to go over and so I strafed on one engine and after I did that I looked back at my right engine and coolant was streaming out of the radiator on the boom so I knew that that was means I'm going down so this one fellow who was dick Andrews called him said pick a good field now come in and get you well yeah that's almost unheard of you know I mean and at this time it did seem a little bit ridiculous and I was so busy I really didn't have time to to answer him and and of course I was going to kick his best to feel like it so I had to pull up though to take a look around and when I did I got hit again in the cockpit and they're gonna came in and I got a nice big gouge in the head from flack and so I started bleeding pretty bad but I did spot a feel that I wanted to and I was a tiny bit high and I had to get it down so I I kicked that airplane sideways and and slid it down and straighten it out just before I touched down and and got on the ground pretty nicely consequently the problem was now that I was in probably the most highly defended area in Europe with Germans trucks all around shooting at us six 109 tried to come in the shoot us while we were on the ground the other guys are staking the trucks and a lieutenant Pape shot one of the air one own eyes down which crashed in the field we were in and it was all hell breaking list now I'm on the ground and I can hear all this going on I mean you can hear them air engines roaring like guns shooting you know and it just seems like amazing and so I jumped out of the airplane and started off wanting to run off the wingtip when I looked up and saw this airplane coming in for a landing I said by God in heaven you know and so I settled down that came low as I couldn't watch him for a second you know it's the eye god he is coming in you know so I turned around and started running towards he was gonna where he was gonna end up and he attempted to turn around and start the tactical one fellow told him hey he's coming to you why don't you stay right there you know and how he got the thing on the ground without noticing and using it losing in the nose gear that is remarkable and so anyhow when I got there I was bleeding quite a bit but I was the most senior pilot in the group at that time so as far as a number of missions flown and so on so and he was just new and so he said you fly he helped me up he threw out his chute you know and everything for I got there and so I didn't argue I jumped in and he got my back and what we had to do was get the canopy down and get the sized windows rolled up and we did it like clockwork and just worked smoothest could be and he did have to put his right leg over my shoulder and the left leg down by the landing gear handle on the right and so I started to make this take off and I put the flaps in a best position I knew for getting the aircraft off the ground unfortunately like I said he was out of a meter so the nose was light but then there was still dogfights going on and all the activity is going on and we're flying at low altitude apparently we got separated somehow from everybody and but by this time almost everybody was on their own you know and doing it because of the fighting that was going on and so we set out for course and I told dick I said you watch our ground if you see their ground rise and let me know and I'll pull it out but I'm just going to sit here because I was too far forward and so low down in the darn seat but I could just lean my head like this against the rubber top of the cowling of the instrument panel and I just fly instruments because I was comfortable flying instruments and so that's the way we flew all the way back we hit the river and we were the first ones to land at fault Avvo that was probably one of the most spectacular things that ever happened to me and this fellow is about the most courageous fellow I ever saw because you know it takes a lot of guts to do something like that you can do all kinds of heroic things when you're trying to save your own salad about one-year trial when you go after and save somebody else and put your life at risk like that that's something else again but I might add one thing though and people ask me what's the one of the best things he's like about the p38 and I said and everybody has all these other points but nobody ever realizes that the landing gear was the best thing it had the capability of landing in a plowed field and not on a fixed runway and taking off without collapsing your gear 50 years perhaps my memories aren't completely correct but it was a miserable war eventually was called a thousand-mile war and today very few people ever heard of the Aleutian island of Cold Harbor of Cold Bay of at to Kiska Hashemi ax of Agra - of uh neck and the many other places up there were a lot of people fought under terrible conditions for something that at that time nobody who was in it was fighting for for the place had any idea of why we were there why they were there except that there were these chaps she use expression on American soil I hope that someday somebody will remember this God forsaken place and the people just like them that were sent there and suffered died for a thing called Aleutian campaign well trained as a fighter pilot if you don't believe that anything can top you you feel like you're really a tiger and it's the training that you were given and when when they give you a good airplane which is the Cadillac the world war two was the p38 and to be able to go fly that airplane by I was 20 years old 21 years old and I was I enjoyed what I was doing I liked the job and the old cliche of kill or be killed you know was certainly in your mind so if you got the guy first and he didn't get a draw a bead on you here I was the 23 year old kid and and when I became again and when you're a squadron commander you lead the group and I've three squadrons on in these big missions and sometimes here's this 23 year old kid up there leading 72 p38 and one thing that was interesting about it is that in the 82nd Fighter Group the spinner on the p38 which is quite large and the very nose right where the guns come out were painted red and when you're leading a group of 72 airplanes that are all flying behind you and you look back to the right and all you see is a lot of red dots coming along after you a multitude of them and on this side over here another big large bunch of them you feel like you're pretty strong you feel like you're really not scared of anything you say okay where's the enemy let's go Jenna ma'am my main concern was that I valued my pilots better than I did a big storm and I had smoked a lot of them up and never followed them down in order to get credit you know you had to get a good gun camera picture of I'm going in on fire or you know crashing and I never would do that something guys would follow him right to the ground blasting away I just never did that I lost one wingman and never got a bullet hole in my airplane and flew over 150 combat missions but I just didn't take chances I was maybe overly cautious I know I was seeing my shots hit this airplane and the cockpit so I was convinced right away that I've killed him and it started down in a tight spiral II type dive and so I just went by and my thoughts were I hope he bails out you know I'm not a killer but and I guess if you fly in combat long enough y-you get the killer instinct but at that time I didn't have it and I wanted that guy to bail out I think frankly it I agree with Colonel McDonnell that if the plans were interchanged between the zeros and p-38 the Americans still would have won because of something about an American that is unbeatable and I think the basic difference in the entire war was one word freedom we were and are a free people but losing friends you know was just a hard part it's brought the world into a reality for you it's not just a game this is killer be killed and it's the war so it's a very sobering experience you didn't dwell on what happened and even though you lost your friends you you didn't dwell on that he just didn't permit yourself to do things like that it just you know it's the way people lose their effectiveness they lose their drive as a young person there was a big adventure there were a lot of hardships and a lot of bad things about it but as I remember it all those hardships kind of dim into the past what I remember most is the companionship great guys I met the adventure of combat flying Tonie LaVere and Kelly Johnson continued as a successful team for Lockheed corporation working together on a multitude of new aircraft including the p80 the f94 and the f-104 starfighter kelly johnson is probably best known for designing the sr-71 spy plane he passed away in December of 1990 Tony LaVere retired from Lockheed and is still actively promoting aviation safety through his safe program he and his wife neva have two daughters and five grandchildren after the war John Babel became a test pilot on jet aircraft and set a transcontinental speed record in the p80 he left the Air Force in 1951 and then earned a PhD in marine biology he and his wife Alice have three daughters dr. Babel retired after 23 years of teaching Lloyd Levine left the Army Air Force at the end of World War two he started up an electronic retail store and built a successful real estate business he and his wife Rita have two sons and a daughter after the war dick will see owned and operated an airport until he was recalled to service for the Korean War he decided to make the Air Force his career and commanded a Skyraiders squadron during the Vietnam War performing the same type of ground attack missions he flew in World War two Colonel will see left the Air Force after more than 30 years of service he is enjoying retirement with his wife Marilyn Pete Madison left the Army Air Force after the war and became a successful businessman he recently retired from the multi-million dollar company he founded he and his wife Ann have two children and are enjoying spending time with their grandchildren joke Hyun stayed in the military after the war flying many different types of aircraft in Vietnam he found himself in combat again operating a troop transport helicopter Joe retired as a colonel after more than thirty years with the Air Force and began a 15-year career with Lockheed he and his wife Nancy have seven children and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren after the war the p38 was quickly withdrawn from service crowd lightnings were sold as surplus a few were used by stunt pilots and air racers including Tony levere others performed aerial survey work most were destroyed today of the more than 10,000 p38 produced only a handful remain well I've talked about the p-38 to its history of fifty years and with his fine airplane behind me and I want to say in closing that one of the most important elements to the safety of flight is pilot training and I think all through my flying career I think that is one of the areas where it got the least attention I'm still working on the theory that flying is inherently dangerous and only a well-designed airplane properly maintained and flown by a competent pilot is acceptable safe and in this closing I would like to tell you what I'm doing today in civilian aviation I'm trying to encourage the FAA and and organizations to recognize the need for upgrading and improving the quality of training civilian pilots and testing to higher standard for private and commercial licenses and I do this to an organization I form seven years ago called safe accident flight emergency and what I'm doing is raising funds from individuals and corporations and these funds are turned in to flight scholarship 100 percenter the money funded is devoted to teaching pilots how to handle in-flight emergency and that's the name of the game how to handle an emergency no matter what it is from a stall to a spin to being ripped upside down by wait service you name it we teach you hard to handle it thank you very much
