Fantasy of Flight

I mentioned in my previous post that one of the places we went with my dad was Fantasy of Flight in Auburndale (about 70 miles from us). Dad thoroughly enjoys planes and we'll be heading to Wright Patterson AFB (the Air Force Museum) in June. One of the reasons we'll be going is to see the B-36 on display there. While he was here we were talking and he mentioned that when he worked at Curtis Wright (from the mid 1940's to the early 1950's), he was the final inspector for propeller blades. He never knew what plane he was making the props for - all he knew was they were huge - each propeller blade was 108 inches in length (so the total diameter of the prop was 216 inches). He said that they (the company) were pushing the guys to turn out as many as they safely could as fast as they could. The company never "volunteered" any information and the guys never asked. He asked me if I could research it on the internet to see if we could find what plane it was that he was making the props for. The only plane that used that large a prop was the B-36 which would make perfect sense since at that time in history, WWII had just ended and the Cold War was starting with Korea also on the horizon. The diameter of the prop was 228 inches - each propeller blade was 108 inches and the hub was 12 inches across - translated to feet the entire unit was 19 feet in diameter - WOW!! The B-36 had 6 engines and was a "pusher" (the props were mounted on the backside of the engine) which meant that each plane needed 18 propeller blades (each engine had 3 propeller blades X 6 engines). Dad loved finally finding out what plane he had worked on!!

Once an inspector, always an inspector!!














At Fantasy of Flight, one of the displays included a 1932 Chevy. Dad just loved looking at it as it reminded him of his very first car, which was a 1931 Chevy. He just grinned ear to ear looking at it.



I will also be adding more pics and commentary of our trips while he was here.