75 years ago today - first flight of the P-47 Thunderbolt! [Archive]

Zack Baughman

05-06-2016, 02:26 PM

75 years ago on May 6, 1941, test pilot Lowry P. Brabham took the Republic XP-47B, the first of the Thunderbolts, on its maiden flight. Best all-round AAF fighter of WWII in my opinion.

"If it can be said that the P-38 struck the Luftwaffe in its vitals and the P-51s are giving it the coup de grace, it was the Thunderbolt that broke its back." - Brig. General William Kepner, Commander - 8th Fighter Command.

5498

crusty old aviator

05-11-2016, 07:10 AM

The prototype was lost the following year on August 8th, on a night flight, when the engine quit. She went down in a wooded area of Long Island and the trees tore the wings, tail, and engine off. The cockpit remained intact, so the pilot didn't get a scratch. He walked through the woods to a road and started walking back to the airport. When the ambulance and police cars screamed past him, he turned around and headed back to the crash site, thinking they may have been looking for him. Upon arrival to the scene and identifying himself, they promptly picked him up, slammed him onto a gurney and strapped him to it, and hauled him off to a hospital, where they forced him to spend 24 hours "for observation." Upon discharge the next evening, he went to the guarded hangar where they'd moved the wreckage to retrieve his kneeboard, that he'd left in the cockpit. The guards were about to arrest him for being a spy, as they assumed nobody could have survived such a crash, due to the mangled condition of the airframe, until he was given the chance to describe his kneeboard and where they'd find it. He also asked them to look for blood in the cockpit. When they couldn't find any blood, but his kneeboard was exactly what and where he'd described, they reluctantly believed him and gave him his property so he could go write up his flight report. I don't recall if the pilot was Lowry Brabham, though.