Airplane of the Day - Vought Kingfisher

World War II Color Photos of OS2U Kingfisher
airailimages

The Vought Kingfisher was a WW2 era seaplane that was launched via catapult from the fantail of capital ships. It was used for reconnaissance, rescue and occasionally for combat.

I originally started this post with a bunch of pictures, a sequence capturing the operation of this airplane from launch through recovery, but then I came across this video. Google watches over me. Usually I dismiss videos composed of nothing but a sequence of still images, but I would need half a dozen photos to cover this sequence, and if I posted that you would be scrolling down for a while. This way you can relax for minute. A slide show would be my preferred method, but I don't know of one anymore since Picasa went away. Oh, well, the video is okay. The most important part is the pacing. Does it linger too long on each photo? Or does it move on before you are finished looking at it? I suppose it's different for each person and what kind of mood you are in. At least if it's going too fast, you can pause it with the space bar.

I found three sites with good collections of photos of this airplane:

• avgeekery
• Clasp Garage
• HISTORYNET

Back in elementary school, me and my buds went through several phases of model building: shingle racers (models of unlimited hyrdroplanes built on cedar roofing shingles) that we towed on strings, custom car models and battleships. The battleships all had a pair catapults with seaplanes mounted on the tail. I was kind of curious about them, but there wasn't much information available and the scale was so small that you couldn't make out much detail. But now, here we are 60 years later and everything I wanted to know back then has been revealed.

The Kingfisher was not a glamorous airplane. While similar sized fighter aircraft sported 1,000 HP engines, the Kingfisher has less than 500. One thing that bothered me was how they got airplane back on the ship. The ships all had cranes, but no one ever explained how exactly the operation was conducted. Or maybe my ten year old brain didn't care. I mean it is a bit of a trick, once you have a zillion tons of steel up to cruising speed, you don't really want to slow down, much less stop, just so the pilot can grab the hook and connect it to the plane. No, what they do is the ship tows a raft that just breaks the surface. The seaplane taxis up and onto the raft and a hook on the bottom of the float snags the raft, so the plane can sit there on the raft and it's relatively motionless relative to the ship, which makes it relatively easy (possible) for the pilot to grab the hook.

During wartime things happen, and some of those incidents make good stories. This photo isn't in the video.

Downed American airmen near Truk await rescue on the wings of an OS2U Kingfisher

In 1942, a Navy pilot flying a Kingfisher rescued America's World War I ace, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, and the crew of a B-17D Flying Fortress (see NASM collection) forced to ditch in the Pacific. With Rickenbacker and two other passengers, the bomber and its five-man crew had left Hickam Field, Hawaii, bound for Canton Island in the Phoenix Islands group, 2,898 km (1,800 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The Flying Fortress wandered off course and the crew got lost. When the aircraft eventually ran out of fuel and ditched, the eight survivors put to sea aboard three life rafts. Several weeks passed without food or water. By chance, a Kingfisher crewed by Lt. Willam F. Eadie, pilot, and L.H. Boutte, radioman, spotted the raft carrying Rickenbacker and two other crewmen. Eadie strapped the sickest man into the gunner's seat, and then he lashed Rickenbacker and another man to each wing. A Kingfisher could never take off with such a load, so Eadie began to taxi toward his base on Funafuti Island, about 64.4 km (40 miles) distant. Soon a Navy Patrol Torpedo boat met the airplane and the other five men were soon rescued. Only one of the eight failed to recover from the long ordeal. - Clasp Garage

The story of Eddie Rickenbacker's crash and rescue has appeared here before.