As Ron said, this is something that Gallery wrote about in the early 50's,
and it was supposed to have happened in the late 30's or VERY early 40's. A
later version of this by another writer (mid 60's) puts the event in the
late 50's early 60's. Gallery was diffinately in print with it in the early
50's though. The program manager on one of my contracts heard the story in
flight training (minus the audio recording) in 1943, and it was supposed to
have happened a "few" years before he heard it. He started as an F6F
driver, did the F4U thing, and finally the A-1, before leaving flight
status.

Because Pete heard it in 1943 I have to believe it was probably a late 30's
thing, wasn't that about the time that advanced trainers got radios? Prior
to that and there would have been no radio for the ground folks to listen in
/ record.

I have, at one time or another heard two different versions, or portions of
them, on tape. The only problem I have with all of this is.....in the late
30's what kind of audio recordings did they do? And would a training field
actually have the ability to record audio from the radio as a matter of
course? Even in the early/mid 40's (timing it with the end of the period in
Gallery's writing) it would have been a wire recording, yes? The ones I
heard did not originate from a wire, the quality was definately tape.

My personal opinion is it never happened, but a couple different people got
ahold of the story and made the tape.

There was a thread in rec.avaition.military about 6 or 7 years ago about
this, but I can not find it with a Google search now, can't seem to narrow
the search enough.

T!