Not at all. But I think you’ve got to understand, Craycroft wasn’t the kind of man who’d get excited about buying or selling airplanes. He wasn’t a possessive or retentive sort of personality; at least he didn’t strike me as one. His interests lay in the mechanical, not the financial. If you really want to know, I think a lot of us tend to think of airplanes as-well, not to put too fine a point on it, we think of them as playthings. Toys for grown-ups. We’re hobbyists, essentially, and those of us who are lucky enough to be employed in some capacty in the aeronautical field are simply getting paid for what we’d prefer to do anyway. I know I’m like that, and I inferred from Craycroft’s attitude that he was the same way. It’s not an acquisitive sort of interest. I love working with airplanes, sorting out the truth about their development, digging up stories about them-anecdotes, unique events associated with some particular airplane. The museum has an extensive collection of planes dating right back to the earliest days of powered flight. To me it’s like having an enormous playroom. I love to tinker with them, study them, even create fantasies about them. Visualize them as they were, I mean-in flight, in action. But I don’t own them, and I don’t have any particular desire to own them. They’re simply there, that’s all. Part of my job consists of acquiring aircraft for the museum’s collection, but I do that merely as a custodial purchasing agent. I’ve never tried to kid myself into thinking it was my collection. It wouldn’t matter, you see?
I think so. Now, these two planes that Craycroft delivered to you were Second World War bombers that he and his crews had restored to airworthy condition, is that right?
To some extent they were restored. To some extent they had actually been redesigned. Some of the components were devices that hadn’t been invented until long after those planes went out of production. Radio-beam navigational systems, for example. But these two particular planes had been put together for use in a motion picture about the war, and they’d been painted with the markings of an actual squadron that had been in service over the Channel on D-day. Some of the equipment-the blister guns, for instance-was mocked up, but it looked real enough, and we were glad to have the planes because in appearance they were as close as you could get to what the original planes looked like. Naturally we’ve admitted on the identifying placards that these are restorations and that some of the visible components are mock-ups, but at least the visitor knows that this is exactly what they looked like in June, nineteen forty-four.
I see. Are these two planes, which you have in your collection, essentially similar to the bomber Craycroft flew in this case?
No. The two planes we have are B-24 Liberators. One was built by Consolidated, the original manufacturer, at Fort Worth in nineteen forty-three. The other was built by Ford, under license from Consolidated, at its Willow Run plant near the end of nineteen forty-two. Both those planes actually saw service in the war, incidentally, although not with the markings Craycroft painted on them. But in any case they were B-24 Liberators. The bomber in this case in New York was a B-17 Flying Fortress. A Boeing design. It’s a completely different airplane.
I hope you’ll indulge my ignorance, Mr. Channing. I’m no expert on airplanes.
It’s quite all right.
Is it possible, in spite of the fact that the plane wasn’t the same design, that we might learn something about Cray-croft’s own bomber from the nature of his design-work on your two planes?
It’s possible, yes.
In what ways?
With reference to the television-movie films I’ve seen of his B-17, you mean?
Yes, of course. I take it there are some similarities between the two types of airplane to begin with?
They were both designated as heavy bombers, yes. The B-17 design preceded the B-24 design, as you might assume from the numerical designations. Their specifications were in the same ball park when it came to dimensions, performance, speed, range, bomb-load capacity, and that sort of thing. They were both four-engine designs; they both carried nine-or ten man crews and had armament that was roughly the same. Their silhouettes are completely different, of course. The wings are located at a different level, the tail structures are different-the B-17 had the standard single rudder, while the B-24 had a tricycle landing gear and sat with its tail up, supported on a nose wheel. Do you want more detail?
Not of that kind, no. But I’d like to know what you might be able to explain about the particular plane we were dealing with.
Well, for one thing I think we have to remember that he had to rebuild the plane twice. At least I’m told that his original restoration and redesign on that B-17 was intended to turn it into a passenger-and-car-go plane.
Could you clarify that for me?
In essence it’s quite simple. Originally at ACA he rebuilt the plane to carry passengers and cargo. Then, at some recent point, after he’d made up his mind to make this attack on the city, he had to reconvert the plane. Make it a bomber again.
Very well. But what does that tell us?
There were a few things that the reporter, Mr. Harris, noticed when he was taking his film footage of the plane from his helicopter. The bomb-bay doors were opened, for example. A cargo or passenger plane has no bomb-bay doors. So he’d had to rebuild the entire bomb bay, you see. Then there was something else Mr. Harris noticed and pointed out to me-the fact that the windows were sealed.
Go on, please.
When he’d converted it for passenger use, he’d had to pressurize it. You understand the term?
Yes.
All right. But in order to pressurize a cabin you’ve got to seal it. The interior of the airplane must be absolutely airtight. Otherwise, obviously, you can’t pressurize it. So he’d had to strengthen the windows and seal all around them with rubber grommets and epoxy. The same around the doors, of course. And he’d had to double-pane the windows to provide insulation. There was a second skin built inside the outer shell of the fuselage, also for heat insulation, and there must have been a heating system built into the plane. None of that was part of the original design. On an original B-17 the pilot could open his windows-there was a sliding glass pane beside him. As things turned out, it proved quite significant that the windows were sealed, didn’t it?
Yes. But let’s get back to the design changes he’d made. It wasn’t possible to maintain pressure inside the cabin if he had the bomb-bay doors wide open, was it?
No, of course not. The whole interior of the plane was exposed to the outside air as soon as he opened the bomb bay. It must have been quite windy inside, as a matter of fact.
Then having a pressurization system didn’t do him any good?
Well, he didn’t need it anyway. Pressurization is only required when you’re at high altitude-ten or fifteen thousand feet or more. Circling over New York, he wasn’t much higher than your tallest buildings. I doubt he ever took the plane up above two thousand feet. Probably less than that. He had no need to pressurize the cabin, or use oxygen, or turn on the heat. It’s only at higher altitudes, where the air becomes very thin and cold, that you need those devices.
I see. But Mr. Harris mentioned to you that he noticed these elements when he first photographed the plane in flight?
Harris is quite observant, I’ve found. He’s also something of an airplane buff, so you might expect him to notice things that another person might miss.
Can you continue?
Certainly. The point is, I think, you’ve got to realize that the plane had already been converted to passenger use when he decided to turn it back into a bomber. He’d already got the pressure system and the heat and all that stuff built in. Now he didn’t need any of those items for his bombing scheme, but it would have made for a lot of extra effort to remove those items from the plane, and he had no reason to remove them. They weren’t in the way. It’s the same as the air conditioner in your car. You don’t use it in the winter, but that doesn’t mean you remove it.