Airdrop

Flight Journal, Jun 2000

John Clayton Jr. Lake Forest Park, WA

To start with, I was temporarily hired to hang two 1,200hp engines on the plane as it sat in the hangar at Glendale Airport. I claim to be the oldest temporary employee at Hughes, as I didn't retire until 40 years after that. The mounts had to be redone to accommodate the larger engine and, as I remember it now, all the control brackets, cables and pulleys had to be redone as well. Anyway, it was quite a job, and my month was up long before the job was completed. I got to fly in it through the tests and several times after them.

Now to the pictures. number one shows it as we put it on the beach still on the trailer (I don't recall having any problem with its being upside-down under the water). We pulled it up under the raft and towed it to the beach at about 1mph, as it wanted to fly again at any faster speed. In picture number two, I'm standing up in the rear of the plane. The wing was held to the fuselage only by the control cables; when the crane picked the wing up, I cut it loose with dikes.

As you can see, the high wing support gave way and dropped the engine and propellers through the cabin. Howard was in the pilot seat; a CAA man was in the copilot's seat and Dick Felt was standing in the doorway (it took the back of Dick's head off). The other CAA man was sitting with his back to the side, and when the prop came down it split him (we never did find his body). The other crew member was sitting at a table facing forward and wasn't hurt.

We hauled it back to Culver City and started rebuilding. Sikorsky had destroyed all the jigs and fixtures and most of the blueprints, so we had to do it the hard way. Lucky for us, we had a good engineer, as we would make a repair and then he would make a blueprint. There was much more to it than that, but that was how much of the work was done.

In the cabin at the CG, there were six 250-gallon fuel tanks (when the S-43 was pulled to the surface, they collapsed in the middle as all tanks did owing to the water pressure). The plane was down 180 feet. At that time, 1943, they were cleaning up Pearl Harbor, but Howard was able to get the Navy to lend us deep-sea diver Jack Suggs.

We did rebuild the inside, but it was not as fancy as the article describes. When we went to fly it, we discovered that the CG had changed enough to make it hard to fly (probably because of our rebuilding method). I never saw Clark Gable or any of the other notables mentioned in the article, but Howard did fly the plane to somewhere in Nevada and tore the tailwheel off. Because of his secrecy, we had a hell of a time making the repair.

I guess that if the guy who has it now is happy, that is enough.

Van Storm Congress, AZ

HH-3E

You folks have a great magazine, and I've been subscribing since the first issue. As an ex-USAF helicopter mechanic (HH-3E and HH-53C), I'm writing about the cap- II lion on the middle photo on page 50 of the Mayaguez article in your April 2000 issue. The aircraft is actually an HH-3E, not an HH-53.