On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 14:42:39 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

Recently we flew with a friend who weighs over 320 pounds. With he and I
in the front seat, and just Mary in the back, we were at the very forward
limits of the allowable CG.

Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay, with your indulgence, a little military history that is on your
post's topic.

During the dark days following Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the
Phillipine Islands, a highly practical and inveterate ex Navy pilot
scrounger by the name of Paul (later called Pappy) Gunn ran a rough
house airline out of the Phillipines called PAL (Philipine Air Lines).
He his airplanes were requisitioned by the army and Pappy had various
hair raising flights and encounters with Japanese aircraft and anti
aircraft fire from both sides before he wound up in Australia and then
Port Moresby.

Cutting out a lot of his story, he ended up in charge of a provisional
transport squadron and offloaded some A-20's that had been assigned
him. He discovered that they had arrived without any machine guns.
His combat experience to date had convinced him of the need for a LOT
of forward fire power to keep the enemy's heads down on the run in to
the target so he began modifying them.

He plated over the bombardier's position and installed a row of four
50 caliber machine guns in the nose, plus two more in blisters
alongside the cockpit for a total of six forward firing machine guns.

With the machine guns, internal bracing and ammo cans and ammo, the
fully loaded A-20 was seriously nose heavy (you wondered when I'd get
to the subject?) His first takeoff, apparently wasn't. He could not
lift the nose to get airborn.

So he relocated the two machine guns in side blisters, moving them
back behind the cockpit.

At this time Gunn met up with George Kenney, who arrived in the
theater with a notion about low level attacks utilizing some parachute
equipped fragmentation bombs he'd developed, which would slow their
descent to allow the bomber to move out of danger from an explosion
once the bomb was dropped.

He saw what Gunn was doing and immediately liked the concept. He
yanked Pappy from his command in the transport squadron and placed him
in charge of modifying more attack bombers.

The A-20's were immediately extremely effective, but Pappy was unhappy
with their performance, feeling that he needed a bigger bomber with
more capacity. Enter the B-25 strafer.

I've got to stop, I could go on about this for a while longer. ;-)

Corky Scott