From: Paul H. Anderson (pha@pdq.com)
Date: Tue Dec 31 2002 - 05:54:11 PST
The B-29 Kee Bird was abandoned by the air force as far as I know.
License was granted by the government of Greenland to salvage it.
The recovery site was at the extreme limits of range for recovery within
the budget they had. Avgas for the Caribou was shipped in to the "nearby"
air force base. I don't recall the ranges, but everything was extreme -
limited storage for fuel, limited shipping access due to freezing water,
extreme range from the airbase to the recovery site and so on.
IMHO, it looks and sounds to me like they were drastically underfunded,
and frankly motivated by profit - they wanted to recover an approximately
$1.2 million airframe for under $500K and resell it (parts of this were
revealed in the PBS show).
Clearly, they had insufficient equipment for safe recovery. Trucking out
was not an option - no roads. Airlift was not an option - range too far
and too expensive by far. They didn't even have fire extinguishers near
the engines on initial startup (again see the PBS show). The engines were
replaced with surplus engines that hadn't been rebuilt. The jury rigged
gas tank for the APU was wired in and had a long rubber fuel line. No
surprise that it came undone when bouncing around.
They were terribly pressed for time - the cost of reaching and setting up
camp made it difficult to leave the plane for another season, even though
that would have been the right thing to do.
There is a very long thread about the Kee Bird on rec.aviation.military (I
think that's the name of the group) - people who were onsite helping
recover the Kee Bird talked about it there. The main one I remember was a
cameraman who was fairly defensive about what was going on (he pointed out
the extreme conditions involved and certainly was right about that).
No one asked me, but my first impression of watching the recovery on the
PBS show was that it was underfunded and certain to fail. I could not
believe the end result - just heartbreaking to watch. But in light of the
level of funding in relation to the actual complexity of the task, it
really isn't that surprising that it failed.
As others have pointed out, there are other aircraft out there waiting for
recovery. There is a European group trying to put together proper funding
for safe recovery of these aircraft, and is partly an offshoot of the Kee
Bird experience. I don't recall the web site.
Paul
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Walter Houghton wrote:
> I had not heard about Having to fly it out cause the govt said so in either
> case of the B-29's. I know that they were in desolate areas. So probably
> it was the best to attempt it. But in the case of the Kee Bird, being in
> such a hard climate. It probably would have been in the best interest to
> air lift the sections out by sky crane. I believe the largest part of it
> would be the center section of the wing.
>
> Jeff
>
>
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