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The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
Henry “Sandy” McMurray
Interviewed by: Steve Little
Date: February 27, 2020
Location: Seattle, Washington
This interview was made possible with generous support from
Mary Kay and Michael Hallman
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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Abstract:
Pilot Henry Sanford “Sandy” McMurray is interviewed about his military and commercial flying
careers. He discusses his service with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, including
his flight training with the Civilian Pilot Training Program, his service with the 305th
Bombardment Group in the European Theater, and his service with the Air Transport Command
in the Pacific Theater. He then shares highlights from his time as a commercial pilot for ONAT
(Orvis Nelson Air Transport) and United Airlines and as a test pilot for Boeing, where he rose to
the position of head of Production Test Flight before his retirement in 1981.
McMurray’s son, Scott Sanford McMurray, also participates in the interview.
Biography:
Henry Sanford “Sandy” McMurray was a retired Boeing Production Test Pilot with a career
spanning 32 years, from 1949 until 1981.
McMurray was born on July 14, 1921 in San Leandro, California to Welborn and Harriett
McMurray. He lived there with his parents and younger sister, Elizabeth, until joining the U.S.
Army Air Forces in 1941.
McMurray went to McKinley Grade School and San Leandro High School, transferring to
Hayward High School from which he graduated in 1939. While in high school he filled out a
questionnaire about possible careers and indicated that he was going to be a pilot. Working
toward that goal, mechanically-minded McMurray attended San Jose State College taking
engineering classes. The Civilian Pilot Training Program had just started there and McMurray
was one of the first 50 candidates selected. Earning his Private Pilot Certificate by the summer of
1941, he took his physical and was accepted into the U.S. Army Air Corps on November 7,
1941. Attending training at “Kelly-on-the-Hill,” he selected multi-engine training, knowing that
would further a civilian career as a pilot.
On July 3, 1942 he was assigned to the 305th Bombardment Group, subsequently known as the
“Can Do” group, at Muroc Field. Completing his B-17 training there, McMurray found himself
and his crew in Chelveston, England by November. McMurray flew his first mission on
December 12 to Rouen, France in the B-17 “Unmentionable Ten” and his 25th mission on July
26, 1943 striking Hanover, Germany. Returning to the United States, he was transferred to the
Air Transport Command, where he earned his Instrument Rating while delivering bombers,
fighters, and transports. Assigned to the 7th Ferry Command, he was based in Wilmington,
Delaware on D-Day when he had the opportunity to fly in the Pacific Theater. McMurray’s
father had disappeared in 1942 with the fall of the Philippines and he was eager to see what
information he could find. He learned that his father had passed away at Cabanatuan on June 14,
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1942 of cerebral malaria. McMurray spent the last year and a half of the war bringing wounded
troops out of battle and flying in replacements.
Discharged from the U.S. Army Air Forces on January 3, 1946 at McClellan Field, California,
McMurray quickly found work as a flight engineer for Orvis Nelson Air Transport (later
Transocean Airlines). After three months with ONAT, he was hired by United Airlines, flying as
copilot primarily on West Coast routes. On one of these flights, he met his wife, Marjorie, a
United Airlines stewardess. They were married in San Francisco on December 6, 1947. About a
year later, United furloughed 88 pilots, McMurray included.
McMurray was then hired on at the Boeing Company. When United Airlines asked him back in
October 1949, he opted to stay with Boeing. For his first couple of years at Boeing, McMurray
wrote pilot handbooks. He subsequently moved to a test pilot position. As a test pilot, he started
out copiloting Stratocruisers, C-97s, B-50s, B-29s, and other variants of these airframes. He
transitioned to jet-engined aircraft with the B-47 and also flew the KC-135 and B-52 as part of
the team developing jet-engined refueling capabilities for the U.S Air Force. Moving to the
civilian side of Boeing, he flew the 707, 727, 737, and 747 extensively in Production Test Flight.
In 1966, McMurray’s manager, Clayton Scott, retired and McMurray was promoted into his
position as head of Production Test Flight. He held this position until his retirement in 1981.
McMurray died in 2021 at 99 years of age.
Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by
interviewee.
Interviewer:
Steve Little worked in the finance and statistical analysis field for 38 years and retired from
General Electric Capital. He holds a degree in economics from the University of Colorado at
Boulder and is a licensed pilot. As of 2019, he is a member of The Museum of Flight Docent
Corps and is the Vice Chair of the Docent Leadership Committee. He also volunteers for the
Museum Archives.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from The Museum of Flight Oral History Program must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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Videography:
Videography by Peder Nelson, TMOF Exhibits Developer.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services. Reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
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Index:
Introduction and personal background .........................................................................................6
Flight training, part one ...............................................................................................................7
Service in the European Theater, part one....................................................................................9
Flight training, part two ............................................................................................................. 12
Service in the European Theater, part two ................................................................................. 14
Service with the Air Transport Command, part one ................................................................... 16
Story about an ill-fated takeoff in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress .............................................. 17
Service with the Air Transport Command, part two ................................................................... 19
Service in the Pacific Theater .................................................................................................... 20
Father’s military service and death ............................................................................................ 22
Marriage and career with United Airlines .................................................................................. 24
Career with Boeing ................................................................................................................... 25
Connections to The Museum of Flight ....................................................................................... 30
Thoughts on different aircraft and a close call on the runway .................................................... 31
Ferrying a B-17 from Hawaii to California ................................................................................ 33
Memories of the Red Barn ........................................................................................................ 35
Additional stories from wartime service, part one ...................................................................... 36
More on the Red Barn and stories from flying career ................................................................. 37
Additional stories from wartime service, part two...................................................................... 41
More on his father’s career and service ..................................................................................... 44
Bailing out of a Curtiss C-46 ..................................................................................................... 46
Closing thoughts ....................................................................................................................... 48
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Sandy McMurray
[START OF INTERVIEW]
00:00:00
[Introduction and personal background]
STEVE LITTLE:
Hello. My name is Steve Little. I’m an oral history interviewer with The
Museum of Flight. Today is Thursday, February 27th, 2020. We’re interviewing Sandy
McMurray at his residence in Seattle. Sandy has a long history in aviation, with his first
solo flight in 1940, followed by his enlistment in the U.S. Army Air Force. After
completing 25 harrowing missions in B-17s over Europe, he joined the fight in the
Pacific Theater. When the war drew to a close, Sandy stayed flying with United Airlines,
where he met his future wife, Marjorie. In 1949, Sandy joined the Boeing Company as a
test pilot. That long and storied career ended with his retirement some 32 years later.
Thank you, Sandy, for taking time to participate in The Museum of Flight’s Oral History
Program. It’s an honor for me to be here with you. I’d like to start out by getting some
background information. If you would state your full name as you prefer pronounced and
then spell it for me, please.
SANDY MCMURRAY:
Okay. I’m Henry Sanford McMurray. McMurray, M-C-M-U-R-RA-Y. People that call me “Hank” don’t know me. My middle name was Sanford, and
with the family that I had, “Sandy” seemed to stick. So from here on, I am now called
Sandy. So when people call “Sandy,” I know they know me. If they call “Hank,” they
don’t.
SL:
That’s a good screening for crank calls. Can you tell us when and where you were born
and did you grow up in that same area?
SM:
Yes. I was born on the 14th of July 1921 in Hayward Hospital, and I grew up in San
Leandro, California my whole life until I went into the service.
SL:
Okay. What were your parents’ names and what were their professions?
SM:
My father was Welborn G. McMurray, and he was a lawyer and kind of an accountant.
And my mother was a housewife, and her name was Harriet McMurray.
SL:
Okay. I know your dad was a World War I veteran as well. [unintelligible].
SM:
That is correct. My dad was in finance in World War I, and he stayed in the service—in
the Reserve all through the main years between World War I and World War II.
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SL:
Oh, that’s good. Through the Depression. That had to have been a big help.
SM:
That’s correct. And he went back—was called back into service in 19—what was it—
1941.
SL:
Okay. And how about brothers and sisters?
SM:
I have one sister. She’s 95 years old, and she’s living. And I talk to her every evening.
Her son puts me in communication with my sister, and she seems to be doing really well.
And she’s living in Manteca, California.
SL:
Manteca? Okay.
SM:
In a rest home there.
SL:
That’s pretty cool. You guys have got a long, long longevity in your family history,
apparently.
SM:
Correct.
SL:
That’s good. A little bit on the education. So where—you went to high school, grade
school down in the same area?
SM:
Yes. I went to McKinley Grade School, and then I went to San Leandro. And I
transferred to Hayward High School, where I graduated from Hayward High School in
1939. And from there, I went to San José State College until 1941.
00:03:53
[Flight training, part one]
SL:
Were you involved in the Civilian Pilot Training Program?
SM:
Yes. If I can go back a little there on the thing?
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
I got a—I learned to drive when I was 12. I got a traffic ticket for driving without a
driver’s license when I was 13, and I got my first driver’s license when I was 14. And my
parents let me buy my first car when I was 15.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
So I enjoyed driving and was rather mechanical, working on my car and whatnot. And
then about 1935, they sent kind of a questionnaire. They asked us what we wanted to do
as a career. And I’d never really given it much thought. And a friend of mine said he’d
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like to be an airline pilot or airmail pilot. I thought, “You know, that sounds quite good.”
So I put down that I was going to be a pilot. Well, Hayward there—or rather, the Oakland
Airport was only three miles from home, so henceforth I spent a lot of time down at the
Oakland Airport. And I got a chance to sweep around the hangars and whatnot and meet
some of the pilots.
And so to be an airline pilot, you either needed an awful lot of money. The Boeing
School of Aeronautics was down there at the Oakland Airport, and it was a terminal at
that time for United Airlines. The San Francisco Airport had not really been developed.
The Boeing School of Aeronautics was in Hangar 5 down there, and of all things,
Wellwood Beall, who came here to Seattle, was running the school in those days. And to
be an airline pilot, you had to have 200 hours in a commercial license and instrument
rating. Well, the price of flying was so expensive, the only way that you could really
become an airline pilot was from the military side. And to be a military pilot in those
days, you had to be—you had to have two years of college, and you had to be 20 years
old and physically fit. So the only way that I saw that I could be an airline pilot was to—
through the military route.
So consequently, I went from Hayward to San José State, and I took engineering there at
San José State. And lo and behold, the Civil—CPT, Civil Pilot Training Program, was
just started there, and they needed 50 candidates to be pilots. And fortunately, there had
been a little difficulty, so they were glad to take the first one. So consequently, I learned
to fly there. And the CPT Program, you ended up with 40 hours of flying time and a
private pilot’s license. The other thing that was real good at San José is they had flying
clubs down there where I could fly at a very reasonable rate. They were getting fuel
through the college at 10 cents a gallon in those days.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
And we did our own maintenance on the airplanes. And the head of the department there
had an A&E license, so he could buy off all the work that he had supervised our doing.
So consequently, I had kind of a heads up. So in 1941, I had my two years of college, and
I was—turned 20 in July, and so I went and got a physical in July, right away. I had to
wait in flying—to get into flying school until November 7th, 1941. That happened to be
one month—
SL:
One month.
SM:
—prior to World War II. I might mention at this time that my dad got called back to
service. By then he was a major, and he went—I took him to Fort Mason, and he took a
troop ship and took them almost a month to go from San Francisco to Manila. And he
was—had a job as fiscal officer for the Far Eastern Air Force at that time. And General
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Claggett was the commanding officer of the Far Eastern Air Force, and he reported
directly to MacArthur. So my dad was—fortunately was on military row there, and he
met with MacArthur and Skinny Wainwright in those days. And I have a letter—a whole
pamphlet that Scott’s put together for me, on the letters that my father wrote to my
mother at that time. So she kept kind of a history of when World War II started there with
the bombing, and he’s looking up at—in a trench there, looking up at the bombers and
whatnot.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
So that was kind of interesting there. I went to flying school—I’ll just put it this way. The
first class of 42F, which I was in, was the first ones to go through a placement setter.
Prior to that, the Cadets went directly to the flying school that was going to teach them to
fly. In doing so, the class ahead of me was all dressed in blue, and we got our uniforms
and whatnot that we were going to wear as officers once we graduated from flying
school.
So we were there for about five weeks, and I was a—it was called “Kelly on the Hill.” It
was in Texas. It’s now called Lackland Air Force Base on the thing. We spent five weeks
there. We got our uniforms and all our shots and everything, and there, where I went to
primary flying school—primary flying school was in Bonham, Texas for me, and it
happened to be that that was the home of the Speaker of the House, Senator Sam
Rayburn. [laughs] So there was some political connection there. I spent five weeks there,
and fortunately, I was able to go to Randolph Field. We flew B-14s there at Randolph.
And from Randolph, I went to Ellington Air Force Base. We had a chance from basic
flying of whether we wanted to be fighter pilots or bomber pilots.
SL:
I was going to ask you that.
SM:
And I wanted [unintelligible] multi-engine training, so consequently, that’s why I flew
the bombers on the thing. So I flew the AT-6 on the—in flying school and graduated in
July 13—excuse me, July 3, 1942.
00:11:49
[Service in the European Theater, part one]
SM:
And from there, I was assigned to the 305th Bomb Group that was training in Muroc. I
might mention there that the commanding officer, the CO, happened to be Curtis E.
LeMay. We spent there about a month and a half or two months training. And I was the
copilot on the thing. And from there, we proceeded to go overseas. We went—we took
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our airplanes to Geiger Field and took a troop train to Syracuse, New York, where our
brand-new F—B-17Fs were delivered to us.
From there, we flew over to England. We went by way of Presque Isle, and from there
to—oh, excuse me—Gander, Newfoundland. And Gander, Newfoundland, we went to
Presque Isle. And then the RAF navigators, they didn’t dare trust us to fly down around
England with our inexperience in flying. So they took us down—an RAF navigator—
down to—their first base was Grafton Underwood, which we—immediately we changed
to Chelveston. So all my bombing missions were flown out of Chelveston.
I might mention here that we arrived over in Prestwick, Scotland in—just a little before
Thanksgiving, November of 1942, and we flew our first bombing mission—I believe it
was in December of 1942. And you have a list there of the missions that I flew. I flew as
copilot in about half my missions as copilot, and then I got a crew of my own. When they
brought the crews over [unintelligible], why, to gain experience, they took the pilot and
he flew as copilot for us because we had more experience in what to anticipate in the way
of combat on the thing. So I got my own crew there.
And it might be interesting to note here then, we were—there were four groups over in
England at that time that went over there, and there was the 91st, there was a 303rd,
305th, and the 306th. And we each had 36 airplanes. We had 36 pilots on the thing. And
the missions there, the formation type we flew, were probably 18 airplanes we put in.
There was a lead group—lead squadron of six, there was a high squadron of six, and
there was a low squadron of six. So when we made turns on the thing, it was impossible
to turn around and keep that formation. And so what happened is the low squadron could
still stay in formation by sliding over in the wedge. Instead of being this way, it was just
reversed. [demonstrates] And we could do a 360-degree turn without having to change
power, which was—I believe that formation was probably developed by Curtis—or
General LeMay in those days.
I might mention that we were pretty inexperienced. We didn’t know what to experience
from the Germans. By the same token, the Germans didn’t know what to expect from us
on the thing. They were pretty smart, though. They found out that approaching from the
side was a bad thing because we could put the top and the ball turret and the waist gun all
on them on the thing. And furthermore, once they went by the formation, we could shoot
at them, where they had nothing to do to shoot back with. The tail position didn’t work
too well because we had tail gunners. They could shoot at them likewise. So they got
pretty brilliant on the thing, and they had the—what they called a head-on attack. And
they would get out ahead of the formation, and then they would turn around and shoot at
the formation on a closing head-on attack. And the beauty of that one was that, once they
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went by the formation, they just did what they call a split-S. They just drove straight
down. So they—and consequently, that was pretty devastating for a while.
So initially we took the bombsight out of the nose of some of the airplanes, and we put
tail guns on the—up front there. And so consequently we had two .50-calibers on certain
airplanes that could shoot at the thing, and this—I might mention on the thing there, the
Fs had—didn’t—were short-ranged airplanes, compared to—they got—to the Gs and the
H. And they—on those airplanes, they put what they called the chin guns on them—on
the thing. And they put fuel in the outboard wing panels so they could fly further. And
they did have a defense on the thing.
As far as statistics on the thing, when we were there, it was rather devastating on the
thing there. There was a—I figured, in our group that initially went over, that 37 percent
came home or survived, and 63 percent were shot down. And of the 63 percent, about
half of them were killed. The other half were prisoners of war.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
I finished my last mission, and fortunately, I was able to fly with my squadron CO. And
we led our whole group. And it was kind of interesting and kind of funny, because
before, you were always looking with a lot of people around you, and all of a sudden, you
were out front and everybody was behind you. [laughter] Who was going to protect me
on that last mission?
I might mention, too, that our bombing altitudes in those days is the lead would generally
fly at 25,000 feet and the lower group would fly at 24,000 and the top would fly at
26,000. Well, fortunately, the last mission, the lead got mixed up and he flew at 26,000,
and we got jacked up to 27,000. By the same token, I think the German flak was all set
for the lower altitudes, so consequently, we got a free pass on the last mission as far as
flak was concerned.
Okay. That kind of concludes my combat. I did finish my 25 missions, and I did get the
Distinguished Flying Cross and I got the Air Medal with three clusters on the thing.
SL:
Were any of your crew injured during some of those flights?
SM:
Fortunately, I was very, very lucky. Nobody on the crew that I flew on ever got injured. I
might mention on one of the missions, too, as we were coming off the target on the
thing—we were over by Heligoland. I think we were bombing Wilhelmshaven at the
time. And we were coming back, and we got hit with a flak. And it was a great big bang
and a lot of blue flame to my left there. I was copilot at the time. And what had happened
is we got hit with flak on the thing, and it hit the oxygen bottles. That destroyed them,
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and it looked like we were going to be on our way down. I might mention, the co—the
pilot’s wheel he was flying had severed the aileron control, and he lost aileron control of
the airplane on the thing with all the confusion going on. And fortunately, my oxygen
system was not struck, but his was.
So in the confusion of lack of oxygen and everything, he felt that we were going to have
to leave the airplane with his [no lateral?] control. So I looked at it. And flying along, we
were just starting to leave the formation. And lo and behold, my aileron controls were
still functioning. So we got back into formation. I was able to get the airplane back in
formation on the thing, and the pilot was able to get oxygen. And we called around to see
if any of the other crew was injured. And in the back, nobody was injured. They really
didn’t understand what had gone on. And we called down into the nose, and nobody
answered. We sent the engineer down. Lo and behold, the navigator and the bombardier
had jumped out. They thought we were on our way down. And fortunately, they were
lucky. We were just getting over the water, and I guess they landed back on land because
they spent the rest of the war in a prisoners-of-war camp starting in about April of 1943.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
So as far as statistics on the thing, on the roommates there—there were three to a room—
this friend of mine, the other pilot, he survived and so did I. But we packed up five pilots,
four of which had—did not survive.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
So that pretty well ends my combat.
00:23:05
[Flight training, part two]
SL:
That’s difficult. I do have a couple questions on early training for that. Because you went
through the Civilian Pilot Training, flying Piper Cubs, probably?
SM:
Yeah. I trained on J-3 Cubs on the thing.
SL:
Then you go to the next level.
SM:
That was a tandem yellow airplane. Tandem.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
And my instructor there was—he was a crop duster. So he flew crop dusting in the early
morning hours, and he taught CPT—
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SL:
Instructed you guys later.
SM:
—as an instructor.
SL:
So you go from primary—or CPT to primary training? Or basic?
SM:
Yes. No, I went—which was very fortunate for me because my instructor in primary
flight training had done the same thing. He was a CPT instructor, so when he came to
[unintelligible], he said, “Well, this is what we did in CPT. I know this. You know this.
And this is the way we’re going to do it in [unintelligible].” So we got along real well,
and I had no trouble soloing or anything like that.
SL:
What kind of planes were you flying then?
SM:
That’s a PT-19. That was a Fairchild with a Ranger engine, inline engine.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Okay. Okay. And then after that is where you went to the
advance—the twin-engine training after that or [unintelligible]?
SM:
Well, from the PT-19, going to Randolph, they had the BT-13 and the 14. The 14 was the
better of the two airplanes. It was very similar to the AT-6, except it had a fixed gear,
smaller engine than the AT-6.
SL:
Okay. And then it’s after that is when you got the choice to go fighter planes or multiengine?
SM:
Yes, that’s correct. They asked us then where we wanted to go.
SL:
And you were allowed to make the decision at that—early in the war?
SM:
Well, at least I made a desire. I think everything was statistics in those days. And I say
probably most of them wanted to go to fighter pilots, and so I had no difficulty.
SL:
Because I did hear late in the war—later on in the war, anyway—they didn’t really allow
you to make that choice. They were sending pretty much everybody to bombers.
SM:
Oh, yeah. It got to the thing later on that when the people went to the replacement center,
they either went to pilot training or they went to being a navigator or bombardier. So
some of them later on on the thing, as I understand, didn’t necessarily have that choice.
00:25:48
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[Service in the European Theater, part two]
SL:
Yeah. I think that’s right. Were any of your missions in the B-17 leafletting missions? I’d
heard there were some early missions where they were dropping leaflets.
SM:
Excuse me. What was that again?
SL:
Where they were dropping leaflets early on?
SM:
I guess we might have dropped—I don’t remember dropping leaflets. One of the bombs
we used to drop were these firebombs, and they were with the magnesium in a crate. And
they would—we would drop them and they’d have a time where they would scatter, with
the idea that, if you’re going after a city or some large area, why, you wanted to firebomb
it.
I might mention, when we first started bombing over there, we were bombing France. So
we were very careful. We didn’t want to injure any French.
SL:
Sure.
SM:
And so predominantly our targets were sub pens. [unintelligible] in Lorient were targets.
And then we’d go for railroad yards to disrupt them. I might mention, too, in—I believe it
was about May, we bombed France there at Paris, and it was a Renault factory. And it
was kind of in a loop of the Seine River. And we did an excellent job. We pretty well
contained all the bombs right within the Renault fort. And they were building trucks at
that time for the Germans. And I think we pretty well wiped that target out, and we got
the Unit Citation, a little blue bar that you can put on your uniform, for that particular
mission.
SL:
Excellent. How is it—how do you deal with the emotions of flying into combat? It has to
be terrifying, I would think.
SM:
You lived with it. It had its toll, no question about it. And it’s—you know, I don’t know
how to say it.
SL:
No, I—
SM:
It’s just one of those things. You fly the mission. I might mention, once you open the
throttles on a B-17 running down the runway, you’re concentrating on flying the airplane
and flying your position in the airplane. And I know there were targets there where you
can see a group ahead, and they’d be just a big, black cloud of flak. And you were going
to have to fly through that. And so what I always did was just to lower my seat and
concentrate on the airplane and don’t look out the airplane.
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SL:
Fly the airplane. Yeah. Yeah. I know in Chevleston, I think, is where you were for most
of the time?
SM:
Yes.
SL:
That seems like a very small town. So off—when you weren’t flying, what did you do?
SM:
Well, we generally stayed at—we stayed right in our barracks in our area there. And I
might mention that we played a lot of poker there on that thing because we had nothing
between missions. And so depending on how successful you were, you either had a poor
week or a couple of weeks, three or four weeks, where you stayed with the Red Cross.
And if you had a flush one, well, you went to the Cumberland [unintelligible] Royal
Hotel and lived it up.
SL:
[laughs] So one of the photographs I saw doing some research was it’s a small farming
town, and they showed pictures of some of the soldiers helping the farmers.
SM:
I can’t say that. Strangely enough, the British had a lot of these Irish farmers that were
helping out on the thing.
SL:
Okay.
SM:
And, see, there’s Ireland—you’ve got Northern Ireland, and you’ve got Southern Ireland.
And strangely enough, the Southern Irish didn’t join the war in World War II. It was only
the Northern Ireland. And that was a religious between Catholic and Protestants on the
thing. So we had farmers working alongside the fields by the airdrome itself. And I’m not
so sure. The Germans had a pretty good spy system going.
SL:
It could well be.
SM:
I might mention right here, too. I give lots and lots of credit to the ground crews that
worked on the airplanes. You could hear them out there working and running the engines
at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and all they were doing is putting the airplane together
with a flashlight on the thing. And it was cold, rainy, and everything else, and they did a
wonderful job of fueling the airplanes, arming the airplanes, and maintaining it. And my
hat’s off to them. I’ve always admired that. And I can say that, even today, the mechanics
out there, even at Boeing there, working at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, they at least have
lights, but it’s still cold.
SL:
It’s cold, yes. They didn’t have hangars that they were working in.
SM:
Right.
00:31:30
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[Service with the Air Transport Command, part one]
SL:
Yeah, yeah. So what happened after you left the European Theater?
SM:
Oh, that was good. I left the—I finished my mission, and the next day they gave me the
DFC and gave me orders to go back to the interior of the United States. So I took the train
that night, and they took it up to Presque Isle. And from Presque Isle, I got on a—got a
chance to ride on a C-54, and we went to—from Presque Isle, we went up to Iceland and
then down to—oh, I’m trying to think of the name—no, excuse me. We went to
Prestwick. Prestwick.
SL:
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
SM:
To Gander and then to Presque Isle—excuse me, Maine—and then the next day, they
took us down to Mitch Field, Mitchel in New York, on the thing. And that’s where I was
getting my orders, and they asked me what I wanted to do. And I told them I wanted to
fly transport airplanes. So they sent me up. They said, “Well, we’ll send you some orders
once we know what we’re going to do.”
So I got a 30-day delay en route on the thing, which was a leave of absence, and I went
home. So I got a chance to stay home for not quite 30 days on the thing. And the orders
came probably two weeks after I had arrived home, and I was going to be transferred to
the Air Transport Command, ATC. And I might mention, I was one of the early, what
they call, “war wearies.” I completed my 25 missions, and I was a called a “war weary.”
So they sent me to the headquarters of the Air Transport Command. Once I got there,
they didn’t exactly know what to do with me, so they gave me my choice of where I
could—where I wanted to go. So I could have gone to Long Beach or Dallas or different
places, and I chose Great Falls because they were ferrying B-17s out of the factory. And I
thought, well, why not fly an airplane I’m familiar with?
SL:
You already know it.
SM:
So I was transferred to Great Falls. And that would have been in about August—about
September of 1943. And I flew B-17s out of the factory, new ones, and we took them to
Cheyenne and Denver, where they were modifying the airplanes. There were a lot of
things that they wanted to get the airplanes ready for combat that Boeing couldn’t do in
their organization here. And so they ran the modifications. And from there, we took the
airplanes to Kearney, Nebraska and Casper, and that’s where the combat crews came to
pick up their airplanes on the thing.
I might mention, too, it was kind of an interesting thing. I checked out in most of the
bombers on the thing. I got checked out in a B-24, and I wanted to fly an airplane back to
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England to see what it was like [unintelligible]. So in about January of 1944, why, I flew
a B-17, and we ended up in England. And now I was going to have to go back and ride on
a C-54 all the way back to Great Falls. And I didn’t think too much of that. So I asked if
there was any airplane to be ferried, and they said yes, they had a B-24 to ferry to Ogden,
Utah. So I thought, “Boy, this is great.”
At that time—it was still in the winter—that the preferred route was on the southern
route. So I had a chance to fly, and we went from Land’s End to Marrakesh. Marrakesh,
we down to Dakar and down there in Africa. And from there, we flew across to Fortaleza,
and Fortaleza, we went up to Georgetown, British Guiana, and from there to Borinquen
Field, which was in, oh, Puerto Rico. And then from there to Miami and back up to
Ogden. So that was—it took almost—probably about three weeks to make that trip. And
it was a wonderful trip because I—when I got—landed there, they weren’t in a hurry to
get me out. So if I wanted to stay a day or so and visit, why, enjoy yourself.
00:36:55
[Story about an ill-fated takeoff in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress]
SL:
That was all right, yeah. You did mention earlier, before we started talking on tape, you
talked and showed me a picture of a B-17 losing a landing gear in Land—in Gander.
SM:
Oh.
SL:
How about that story?
SM:
That’s a little story in itself. When we ferried airplanes, we went from Presque Isle to
Gander, and then we were going to go in from Gander to Prestwick, Scotland. And I
might mention, there’s a big beacon out there called Derrynacross, and it was a big,
powerful beacon that, once you get close to Ireland like that, why, you could home in on
Derrynacross. But when we got there, our—they had a nine-man crew at that time, and a
tenth man happened to be my squadron CO. My squadron CO decided, “Hey, Sandy,” he
says, “Why don’t you let me sit in your seat on takeoff and then we’ll switch and I can
sleep all night and you can work.” Well, unfortunately, he was having difficulty. He
didn’t know how to start the—we had primed the engines on the thing. When it’s real
cold up there, you have to inject fuel into the top cylinders to get the engine to run on the
thing. And he didn’t know how to work the plunger—the primer valve on the thing.
So we got delayed on getting the engine started, which put us behind bomber schedule.
And consequently, they were hurrying and wanted to know where we were and the whole
hundred yards. So we tore down to the takeoff and cleared for takeoff. And when we
swung into position there, as a crew, we had always worked together. Why, I just reached
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down—as copilot, it’s my job to lock the tail wheel because we were lining up for the
runway. Well, he neglected to do that, and unfortunately, on takeoff we veered to the left
and ran off the side of the runway. I thought that was the end. I figured the plexiglass
would probably take it a little on the front and that would be it. But we came to a stop on
this stub runway, which was extremely careful. We wanted to get out of the nose of the
airplane, but the door to the compartment to get out of the nose wheel was sitting on the
ground. So we had to wait until everybody else got out of the airplane, and we were the
last ones to get out. And needless to say, I don’t think I could have—anybody could have
gone any faster than I did going out that rear door.
SL:
Oh, I bet.
SM:
Because I was on my way, and nobody was going to stop me. [laughter]
SL:
I can imagine. The plane would have been full of fuel, I assume, too, because you were
just taking off.
SM:
Right.
SL:
So it would have been a dangerous spot. Oh, yeah.
SM:
Well, what we did is we struck a pillbox of all things. Fortunately, nobody—they were
down in the box itself on the thing. And we struck it. It was a concrete structure, and the
airplane went in the air and knocked off part of the gear. And when we came back on the
other, we hit the ground real hard and collapsed our gear. So we slid down the runway.
And no fuel tanks were ruptured, fortunately. And so, consequently, we survived that
one.
SL:
Did the plane survive? Was it repaired?
SM:
Yeah.
SL:
Put back in? Yeah. So that was part of the delivery. So that’s part of the ATC that we—
that you were getting into?
SM:
That—
SL:
That was part of the Air Transport Command for delivery or was that—
SM:
No. No, no. No. This is when we were taking our airplanes from Syracuse over to
combat.
SL:
Okay.
SM:
Or, yeah.
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SL:
Okay. So, yeah. I kind of got you off track there.
SM:
Right.
00:41:00
[Service with the Air Transport Command, part two]
SL:
So, yeah. Let’s go ahead and back into the ATC to what you were doing there.
SM:
Okay. They had ATC and—let’s see. I got in a [unintelligible] airplane out of Long
Beach. And I was not instrument-rated at that time as far as air traffic—Air Transport
was [command?]. And so the weather was bad, and I went to Hollywood and had a time
with my crew. And when I went the next day to get the airplane, why, the operation
officer called my squadron CO and he said, “We’ve got a couple of your bad boys here,
Harry.” [laughter] So they sent me back to Great Falls on the thing, and I thought, lo and
behold, I’m going to be in a world of hurt. So I got all the weather sequences of—that
occurred down there, and there was only about a 30-minute window that the thing was
instrument-rated the whole time.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
So I went back, and they wanted to know why I was—hadn’t ferried the airplane. And I
told them it wasn’t instrument-rated and I didn’t want to disobey any air orders of flying
instruments without an instrument rating. And they said, “Well, you aren’t going
anywhere until you go through instrument school there.” So I went through instrument
school, and I did—I got my instrument rating.
And then the regulation at that time up there at Great Falls, well, they wanted us to be an
instructor for the next class on instrument rating. So I started out flying in the back end of
a B-13, teaching instrument flying. And they called up and said, “We need a class to go
down to Palm Springs to check out on fighters.” And I told them I wasn’t necessarily
interested and I was already in instrument school and I was stuck there. And he says,
“You won’t be stuck,” he says, “If you get on that airplane at 2:00 in the afternoon to
Palm Springs to go through fighter school.” So I spent 30 days down in Palm Springs.
And it was December of—
SL:
Nice time.
SM:
—19—I guess it was 1933 [sic]. Yeah.
SL:
‘43.
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SM:
And I got checked out in the P-40, the P-39, the 47, and the 38. And the 38 was kind of
my favorite. And they allowed us to ferry the 38 to Dallas, which was great. So I went
through the fighter school and whatnot and ferried the P-38 to Dallas. And when I got to
Dallas, rather than sending me home, they said, “We’ve got to ferry some C-47s to Great
Falls.” They were going to the Russians on the thing. I told them I wasn’t checked out in
a C-47, and they says, “You go up there to Tulsa—” I believe that’s where they were
built. “And we’ll check you out.” So I went up to Tulsa and made a couple of landings,
and the next day I ferried a C-47. And I remember we went from there to Dallas and
Dallas to Great Falls. So that was my checkout in a C-47 or the DC-3. I always called it a
kiddie car because it was so easy to fly compared to the B-17.
SL:
[laughs] I would imagine that would be so different.
00:45:06
[Service in the Pacific Theater]
SM:
So that pretty well concludes that. By then, they wanted to—they were looking for
transport pilots, and that’s really what I wanted anyway. So they asked me if I’d go to—
transfer to Wilmington, Delaware in the 7th Ferry Command at that time. And then I
went down to, oh, [unintelligible] Miami. I can’t think of the name of the base right now.
And we went down there to a four-engine instrument school. We flew B-24s, C-87s in
those days, and C-54. So I got checked out in a C-54 and the C-87 both as a four-engine,
instrument-rated pilot, and I was sent back to Wilmington, Delaware. And just about that
time—it was about June 6th or something in that time—why, that’s when they had
Normandy, went across. And so we were all set up to fly the wounded back to the States
on the thing and personnel—one of the fellows got a hold of it and found out that they
needed three pilots to fly out in the Pacific in the Hawaiian Islands on Hickam Field. And
so that was a war I was interested in because my dad had been missing in action. So I
volunteered and ended up over in Hickam.
So we went to Hickam, and our—at that time, they were fighting on Saipan and they had
no airports. So we flew from Hickam, and we stopped at Johnston Island for fuel and then
into Kwajalein. And the hospital ships would bring the wounded to Kwajalein, and then
we were flying them back to Hawaii, Hickam, on the thing. And that went on, oh, for a
little while. And they started on the 54s of flying all the way from Hawaii back to, oh,
Hamilton Field. So I got transferred back to Hamilton there. And so we started flying
from Hamilton all the way out on the thing, the hospital. By that time, we had taken over
Saipan, and we were flying—we didn’t go into Tinian, but we did go into Guam. So
primarily we flew to Guam and to Saipan on the thing. And there were a lot of trips we
made, like down to Tarawa and Guadalcanal.
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And they were—MacArthur was slowly fighting the—coming up from the—Australia.
And I remember when they hit the Philippines. And I wanted to go there, and so we flew
a trip from Saipan to Leyte on the thing, and we landed on a mat—steel mat on the thing.
And they were loading the litters on the C-54—or DC-4 or 54. And about that time, there
was an air raid warning or something like that going in, and they were still loading them.
And some wise guy says, he says, “Well, this is the biggest thing on the field.” He says,
“They’re bound to hit it.” He says, “But they can’t hit anything anyway.” [laughter] And
about that time, they called off the air raid. I don’t know what it was. And we headed off,
taking off there.
And I might mention the—on that strip there there was a B-24 that had collapsed one
gear on the thing. And, of course, they had to keep that runway active because they were
attacking the enemy with fighters and whatnot. And so I saw a tractor destroy a B-24.
One of these great big tractors ran across the wing and broke it off, and then he took the
blade and shoved the whole fuselage and everything off the side of the runway and then
shoved the wing—the rest of the wing off. And the fighter—the airport was ready, and he
opened the airport probably in about 15 or 20 minutes.
SL:
Wow. Was that on that pierced-steel planking, too?
SM:
Yeah, on the steel mat.
SL:
Yeah. Wow.
SM:
So, let’s see. I flew—as we got larger and I’m flying the thing, why, I got transferred up
to [Fairfield?] [unintelligible], so I still flew C-54s. And I remember when we were flying
54s out there, they had four DC-4s. They called them the Green Hornet. And we didn’t
know exactly what they were doing on the thing, but the Green Hornet were actually
supporting the atomic bomb—
SL:
Oh, really?
SM:
—on the thing. And, of course, when they dropped the atomic bomb in—on Hiroshima,
why, with Tibbet [sic – referring to Paul Tibbets] there, he took off from Tibbet—I mean,
Tibbet took off from Tinian, and that was kind of a tough airport because it was at sea
level and the ones at Guam and Saipan had about 100—they were about 100 to 150 feet
above sea level, so they could sag down a little after takeoff. But when you took off from
Tinian, you couldn’t lose any altitude at all. You were right in the water on the thing.
So anyway, they dropped that, and then about three days later, they had to drop one on
Nagasaki. And that’s when the Japanese decided that they should do something better
than what they were doing. So about that time, they rounded up all the C-54s they could
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on the thing, and we went up to Okinawa on the thing. And they had 54s all over the
airport, and so when they—we were there probably about three weeks before the
armistice. They were sitting there negotiating on the thing. So when they finally signed
the armistice on the thing with MacArthur on the deck of the battleship, that morning,
why, we had flown in the occupation troops from Okinawa. We had enough fuel. We
went up there, offloaded them real quick, and came back without even shutting the
engines down.
I might mention, when it comes to loading the airplanes, we didn’t know what they were.
And fortunately, on the military airplane, the jeeps and whatnot, they put a gross weight
on the side of the thing there, but when it came to putting .50-caliber boxes or something,
the people were picking it up and saying, “Well, that’s about 150 pounds or 100 pounds.”
So we really didn’t know what our true weight was on takeoff. And we had only flown—
I believe it was about 68,000 pounds, 67,000, 68,000 pounds. And they said at least we
could go to 100—to 73,000 pounds. So we were flying about 4,000 pounds heavier than
we normally had been flying in the airplane as our margin and with the idea that we
didn’t even know. We were probably over that.
SL:
Right.
SM:
And in 54s—or the—yeah, the 54s—we had a margin on the thing that, if we lost an
engine, we had no problem flying out on three engines. But with the additional weight,
why, you better keep all four going.
SL:
It had to have been a little dicey, yes.
SM:
So that pretty well finishes the—my service.
00:54:19
[Father’s military service and death]
SL:
Well, what about your father?
SM:
I came back, did a little instructing on 54s, and then I got out. And I got out in January of
1946. And I mentioned I got what they called a Chinese promotion. I had been captain
over two years, so I grad—when I retired, why, they gave me a majority. So I was a
major in the Air Force Reserve.
SL:
Okay. One thing you mentioned was going to Hawaii for your father, trying to find—
because he’d been missing?
SM:
Oh, yes.
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SL:
Yeah.
SM:
I might mention that.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
When we went to Manila on the thing, the first flight, I went into town to find out if I
could—or if they knew anything about my dad. And they said no. And I got back to the
base, and I got a call from some sergeant. And he says, “Captain,” he says, “I’m sorry,
but I’ve got some sad news.” That my dad had died of cerebral malaria in the [14th?] of
June of 1942 on the thing.
SL:
So he died almost two years—
SM:
Some of the letters he wrote there—I guess they might even come out with MacArthur. I
don’t know. But he had mentioned there that he found a valentine for my mother. It was a
great big maple leaf that he had sent her as a valentine. And it would have been on the
14th of 1942 that he sent to her. That was probably the last letter that she had gotten.
And, of course, he had mentioned—he couldn’t come out and say, “I was in Guam,”
other than he did mention that, “I could see Guam—or Corregidor and the China Sea.” So
we were pretty sure that’s where he was. And the other thing is he was 56 years old, and
he couldn’t have made that death march, I don’t believe. I think that he was probably in
Corregidor when Wainwright and all of them surrendered, and they were trucked to
Cabanatuan. That was a prisoner-of-war camp.
SL:
Oh, okay. Okay.
SM:
So that concludes that chapter on my dad.
SL:
That’s—that had to have been difficult, though.
SM:
Yeah. And I got home from one of the trips going back and forth to Fairchild, and I was
at home there in San Leandro. And the doorbell rang, and they had a chaplain or whatnot
to announce to my mother that he had passed away. But she had already got the word
from me a couple months prior to that.
SL:
Yeah. That’s an awful tough time, no doubt. You were probably a big help to be there
when that happened—
SM:
Yes.
SL:
—you know, for your mom. Yeah.
00:57:26
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[Marriage and career with United Airlines]
SM:
So anyway, that was that. So anyway, I got out of the service, and it was kind of strange.
Orvis Nelson started the ONAT company, and he had got the contract that United
Airlines had to fly from Hamilton Field to Hickam. And unfortunately, I didn’t get it in
time to be a pilot, but he gave me a job as a flight engineer. So I flew as a flight engineer
for about three months there. And at that time, I had been applying to United Airlines,
and they finally gave me an offer to go to work for them. And he was a United Airline
captain, and I asked him, “What would you do if, you know, if you were in my position?”
And he says, “I’d go to work for United.” He says, “We don’t know where we’re going to
go.”
So anyway, I went to work for United in May of 1946. And I went through—back to
Denver to school, and we were there about, oh, a little over—a little less than a month.
And fortunately, I was assigned back to San Francisco. So I flew DC-3s—kiddie cars, as
I call them—for United Airlines. In those days, why, we were flying them up and down
the coast to Vancouver, Washington and down to San Diego and eastbound as far as
Denver, Cheyenne. So I flew copilot on them.
And it was kind of interesting there because we were allowed an orientation flight, and so
I decided that this orientation flight sounded pretty good. I got a cockpit pass on that, and
I could get a quarter fare for my mother. So I talked her and—she and my aunt there, to
go to Vancouver, Washington. So we flew up to Seattle there, and then they changed
crews there and whatnot. And the airplane was getting ready to go. Well, I climbed in the
cargo door up on the nose. And my mother was concerned that I might not be on the
flight. She asked the stewardess if she would go up and see if the third pilot was there.
And I said—yeah. And I said, “That’s my mother back there.” She said, “I didn’t know
that was your mother.” [laughter]
But anyway, we got up to Vancouver, and they were going through customs and whatnot,
and I got to talking to the stewardess. And I thought, “She’s kind of an intelligent
woman.” I said no more about her. But be as it may, why—we went back to San
Francisco, and I flew first on the San Francisco until just about Labor Day of 1946—no,
‘47, on the thing. And I got transferred to Seattle on the thing. I had my choice to go to
San Francisco—or Seattle or Los Angeles. And I didn’t care for Los Angeles. I didn’t fly
down there. So I went up to Seattle.
So I get to Seattle, and lo and behold, about my second or third trip up here was an early
morning one there and this good-looking stewardess came in there. We filed the flight
plan, and I went into the coffee shop. And it’s still there on the old terminal on Boeing
Field.
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SL:
Yeah.
SM:
And we had a cup of coffee. [laughs] And from there on, it was—that’s how we all kind
of met there. And we ended up getting married in December 6th, 1947 on the thing.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
And I might mention I continued to fly for United Airlines and all through ’47. And our
firstborn was in October of 1947 and—no, excuse me, ‘48. Yeah, October 1948 on the
thing. And a month later, I got news that United Airlines was furloughing 88 pilots, of
which I happened to be in the group on the thing. And what was happening, I can’t fault,
you know, looking at it now. But they were coming with putting DC-4s, four-engine
airplanes, to fly the same routes we were flying. DC-3s were 21. So it was just a matter of
statistics. If you put a 54 on the run, and you get rid of two DC-3s. And so there was a
surplus of pilots on the thing. One thing that had happened is that the junior pilots to us,
they were making flight engineers out of them. So we thought, “Well, this won’t be bad.
We’ll just be a flight engineer.” And United says, “Uh-huh [negative]. We don’t have—
we’ve got two pilots’ lists. We’ve got a pilots’ list, and we’ve got an engineers’ list. And
the engineers’ list is full, and so you’ve got no job.”
SL:
Wow.
01:03:15
[Career with Boeing]
SM:
So here I am with a wife. And this was starting in November—no, December. That was
it. They furloughed us in November, and no job December. Well, fortunately, I was able
to go to work for Boeing Airplane Company. So I went to work for Boeing Airplane
Company. My first job was writing pilot handbooks on the thing, and I did that until
about June, May or June, of 1949 on the thing. And it was great. I had a chance to meet
John Fornasero. He was chief pilot in those days. And Clayton Scott, who was head of
production of flight test.
And there was an offer, the job, to become a pilot in June of 1949 on the thing, and that
worked out real well because I’d had quite a bit of experience and whatnot on the thing.
So I was flying captain on B-50s, production flight test, in October of 1949. And a little
after that, United Airlines called me back from furlough and said, “You can come on
back.” And so I went out to SeaTac there and talked to [Bill Grohn?], the chief pilot at
the time. He says, “Well,” he says, “You can come back and fly copilot for us on the
thing, you know.” And it was a lower salary, and I said, “That isn’t much of a choice.”
[laughter] So I got a chance to fly.
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And I might mention here now, about that time, Boeing was getting into this aerial
refueling. We had what’s called KB-29s. Initially, they made a couple of B-29s into
tankers, and then we’d refuel behind them. And I—it was kind of a unique position, is the
fact that I had flown a lot of formation flying in B-17s in combat. So the way I look at it,
flying large airplanes close together was old hat. And a lot of the pilots there that hadn’t
had that experience on the thing, they were a little bit more concerned about flying that
close in formation, refueling where—flying the other.
And I might mention one thing, too, is on this refueling, one day we were flying a whole
group—we were coming back from a mission—and we were flying in a formation, and
our flying position, the whole works, and everything was fine. And I looked down at the
attitude gyro, and we were in a 30-degree bank. And you didn’t realize—here you were
in space with respect to the ground. You were in a 30-degree bank. Well, when it came to
refueling, it was the same thing. You never looked at the ground. You looked at the
airplane you were flying at. So all you had to do was to hold the same attitude that the
airplane that you’re refueling. So there were times where we had no problem at all of just
refueling in a turn or something like that. It didn’t make any difference.
SL:
That’s amazing to me.
SM:
So I might mention, I was lucky. I’ve flown the B-17, and then I flew the B-50s. And we
had B-29s, the KBs, and then we had the Stratocruiser. I had a chance to only copilot on
the Stratocruiser. And then we had the C-97s. I think we built 270 or something, the
Stratocruisers. And I went down to Wichita, where the B-47 was being built, and got
checked out in a B-47 and flew a little of that here. And then the B-52 came on, and so
we flew the B-52. And then the KC-135 was a military tanker. And about that time, we
started in on the 707-series of airplanes. So I had a chance to fly the 707-100 and -300,
and then came along the 727. We flew all the 727s, and then we flew the 737, which was
built after that. And then I had the chance to fly the C-47—747, excuse me. The 747. And
I flew that from the 100 through the 200s.
And they got about that point in time that Boeing got the idea the airlines were
furloughing—or not furloughing. They were retiring the pilots at age 60 on the thing. It
was Quesada’s rule on the thing. He wasn’t much thought of by the airline pilots. But
anyway, Boeing adopted that, and they had a pretty good program. They had a pilot relief
program that we retired at age 60. And today, now they can go up to age 65 or something
and still fly. But those rules have changed.
SL:
So what was your transition from prop planes to jet planes? What—did you transition,
like, on the 367-80 with Tex Johnston or [unintelligible]?
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SM:
Well, what happened is—see, in a jet—the big jet was from the B-47—propeller to the B47. From there on, it was all jets. There was—I was flying the B-47 and then the B-52
and then the KC-135. It really didn’t—the KC-135 and the 707 were very similar. They
were four-engine airplanes, and going from one to the other wasn’t any problem.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Okay. Did you get a chance to fly with Tex Johnston a little bit?
SM:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SL:
Any stories about him?
SM:
Not that I’m going to tell about.
SL:
[laughs] We do have a video of him over there when he rolled the airplane in front of
Seafair, but yeah. [unintelligible].
SM:
Yeah. I know all about it.
SL:
Oh, yeah. I’m sure.
SM:
So, no, that was about it. I might mention here. I got my own airplane. Clayton Scott had
left the company, and it was in building—float airplanes and doing a lot of things. And so
I got interested, and we ended up buying a Beech Bonanza. That’s the V-tail.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
Honestly, it was a lovely airplane. And I had three different models of them, and I had
them for 20 years.
SL:
Oh, wow.
SM:
And we used to—where people had cabins and things like that, why, it was great. What
we did was we’d fly up to [unintelligible] Roche Harbor up on San Juan Island, and I’d
get a—you could get Volkswagens for $50 or $100. I’d put it up on the island, and we’d
fly up there to Friday Harbor and land and jump in the Volkswagen and run on the thing.
And then we could go all over the island.
SL:
[unintelligible]
SM:
And we’d put it over there. We had it over in Port Angeles, and we’d go up to Hurricane
Ridge. And so it was great. Why have a cabin? I could go to one airport to another.
SL:
Right. That’s the way to do it.
SM:
So it worked very well for us.
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SL:
Oh, that’s fun.
SM:
And I had that. I might mention that I gave up flying when I was 85 years old.
SL:
That’s a long time. That’s pretty good.
SM:
And I gave up driving when I was 95.
SL:
That’s impressive.
SM:
So, well, it was one of these things. If they’d had an accident, it would be all my fault
because he was too damn old.
SL:
[laughs] Unfortunately, you’re probably right. Well, a little more maybe about your
career at Boeing. What were you flying there? Were you product delivery, test
[unintelligible]?
SM:
Well, we flew all of airplanes out of the factory. All brand-new airplanes came under
production and flight test on the thing, and Clayton Scott—well, we had—he worked for
Fornasero, and then Tex took over and Tex was the pilot. And then when Tex left, why,
Dix Loesch became chief pilot on the thing. And when Scottie retired—Scottie retired in
about 1966, and fortunately, I was able to get his job. So I had his job as chief production
of flight test starting in 1966 until, well, 1981, when I had to retire.
SL:
So production of flight test, are you flying pretty much every airplane that gets delivered
then or—
SM:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was our job, was to fly all the airplanes that came out of the
factory, new airplanes. We made—that was our responsibility. And what we did is we
would run a B-1 flight, we called it, a Boeing flight, and if the airplane was pretty good
or something, we could—we flew for the FAA. They gave us what they call DARs,
designated authorization, to accept for the Air Force—for the FAA. Excuse me. And then
we’d have a customer demonstration flight, and we were able to get the airplanes in such
good shape that Northwest Airlines were accepting airplanes without any flight at all.
They would just—so—but we were responsible because we had people—we had Boeing
looking at us, we had the FAA looking at us, and we had the customer [unintelligible]. So
we had to do a good job.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. It had to be right. Yeah. So production test flight, does that only
civilian deliveries or are you delivering military as well or—
SM:
Oh, I might—oh, some of the deliveries were great. Like, on Air France in the beginning,
why, they wanted us to deliver the airplane to Paris. And so I’d get a chance to fly the
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airplane from Seattle to Paris on the thing. And I might mention my wife loves being a
stewardess. I took my favorite stewardess on a lot of flights.
SL:
[laughs] I was going to ask.
SM:
So my favorite stewardess. And then some of the customers were great. Just like South
Africa, like they’d take us down to Johannesburg, and we went through the Kruger
National Park there on the thing and then down to Cape Town, where the Table
Mountain—and you could look and see the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans on the thing.
SL:
Oh, yeah.
SM:
And then we’d get a chance to ferry—fly, oh, a 747 to China—Beijing in those days—
and went up to the Great Wall and the whole works. We went to India. And I might say
I’ve been around the world a couple of times. And we went to Taj Mahal and the whole
works.
SL:
Wow. That’s quite—
SM:
So it’s been wonderful.
SL:
It sounds like it.
SM:
I can’t complain about a thing. It’s been extremely fortunate, and all I can say is that
someone up above was looking down.
SL:
That’s a good way to feel about it, that’s for sure. Did you do military deliveries, like the
B-52s or 47s, or was that a test flight or did much work with that?
SM:
No. Military didn’t—
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
I don’t recall.
SL:
So most of—
SM:
Offhand, I can’t.
SL:
Yeah. Experience there was maybe more with the B-52s and the—
SM:
Yeah. The military always wanted to—always wanted acceptance flights. So we would
fly the airplanes, satisfy ourselves, and then we would get over in a copilot seat and they
would fly the airplane [unintelligible] flight. And then when they were happy with it,
why, it’d be gone.
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SL:
Oh, okay. I didn’t understand how that worked.
SM:
Yeah.
01:17:07
[Connections to The Museum of Flight]
SL:
That helps. That helps. Well, there’s—I do have a couple of other just kind of minor
questions. You know, I know you’re familiar with The Museum of Flight.
SM:
Excuse me, what was that?
SL:
You’re familiar with the Museum over there.
SM:
Yeah, a little.
SL:
Did you—well, did you fly, like, our 727? We have the number one 727 over there.
SM:
Yeah. I think I have, yeah. Yeah. Some of those airplanes that are in there I have flown.
SL:
Probably have flown, yeah.
SM:
Right.
SL:
Yeah, yeah.
SM:
On the thing. Because I remember when the Museum first started on the thing and Jack
left for United Airlines, did a lot to get it started, he found the old—the trimotor—
SL:
Yes, the Model 80.
SM:
Yeah, on the thing.
SL:
And the 247.
SM:
And then—oh, I’m trying to think of his name—Renton Coil and Spring.
SL:
Hmm. Don’t know.
SM:
He had [unintelligible] got the 247. They bought that down there in Fresno, I believe.
SL:
Yeah. It was somewhere in California.
SM:
And they went down there and flew the airplane back. And I can’t think—God, I can’t
think of his name on the thing. And he was on the Board for a long time, and then they
moved it. And I asked him. I said, “Aren’t you upset about not being on the Board any
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longer?” And he says, “Oh, no.” He says, “They’re moving uptown where the money is.”
[laughter] He says, “I’m glad to be out of it.”
SL:
It’s a good time to be done with it, yeah.
SM:
Yeah. And I can remember when they took the Red Barn when it was on that site down
there on the Duwamish, and they floated it up there by the Development Center. They
had a hangar there by Isaacson Steel. And it was parked there on wheels on the thing.
And that’s when they moved it up Marginal Way to its present site.
SL:
Yep.
SM:
So I kind of watched the thing. And, of course, I know Bob Mucklestone and people that
are interested.
SL:
Right. Exactly.
SM:
On the thing. Like I say, I gave my logbooks to The Museum of Flight. And then I got the
Legion of French—Legion of Merit Award, and we had it there in The Museum of Flight.
And the ambassador came up and gave me a kiss on each cheek. [laughter] And you
people had that medal there at the Museum.
SL:
Yes. I knew we had it.
01:19:50
[Thoughts on different aircraft and a close call on the runway]
SL:
Of all the airplanes you have flown—there’s been hundreds of different types—any one
that stands out as being a real good one, a real favorite, or some that are really bad?
SM:
No. It’s one of the things. I look at it this way. If I want to take a long flight, I like that
old 707-300.
SL:
Oh, yeah?
SM:
It had a good range. I liked that airplane. And if I wanted a kiddie car, why, the 737 was
ideal. [laughter] And I can remember bringing a 37 back from Europe, you know. And
you’d sit there and count the engines. Has it got four or two? [laughter] As long as
everything was working well.
SL:
Yeah. Well, that makes some sense.
SM:
No problems.
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SL:
Let’s see. Kind of—we’re kind of drawing to a conclusion here, I kind of think. So as
someone with so much life experience, is there anything that for future historians that are
going to look at this and maybe write history or learn about history, anything that you’d
like to say to the future historians or to the young people who will be seeing this?
SM:
Well, there’s one thing, one comment that happened, and the fellow that it happened with
me is dead. And he said, “I don’t talk about it because nobody will believe it.” But the
copilot and I went out to the hardstand for our airplane, and we were walking back, and
we’re going by a runway that was never used. Or rarely used. We’ll put it that way. And
the weather was bad. So consequently, we weren’t flying. And all of a sudden, we looked
up and this airplane was landing right on top of us. And he undershot the runway. And
we couldn’t run or anything. We just fell to the ground on the thing. And the airplane
undershot and it went over us. And the tailwheel missed our heads like this, and the main
gear missed our feet on the thing.
And he called the tower and said, “I just killed a couple of people out on a runway.” And
they sent the ambulance out there to pick us up, and we said, “We’re the ones you’re
looking for.” And my copilot smokes. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and he—we are
standing there just putting a second one in. [laughter] So you can see we were pretty well
shook up.
SL:
Oh, wow.
SM:
But nobody will believe this story, but it actually happened. And we know the—and
because the mud tracks were right where—
SL:
Oh, yeah.
SM:
—between where they lay. So you figure out the distance between the main gear and the
tailwheel.
SL:
Oh, yeah. Oh, man.
SM:
And it went over us.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
But you can tell that one or you can discard it.
SL:
Oh, it’ll be there. [laughs] That’s fascinating.
SM:
And that’s why I said, of all these experiences that happened, why, somebody was
looking over, taking care.
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SL:
Yeah, yeah. How about when you were flying your Bonanza around? Did you have any
close calls with that or was it just [unintelligible]—
SM:
No. The Bonanza was—no.
SL:
A good airplane to fly.
SM:
No, that was just a lot of fun.
SL:
Yeah. Well, that’s good.
SM:
We’d go down to San Francisco or over to Salt Lake, where my wife lived with the
airplane. But I didn’t go any long distances because I could do it so much faster.
SL:
Yeah. Why would you do that in a Bonanza? That’s—
SM:
Right.
SL:
Yeah. That’s more fun.
SM:
Yeah.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
No. It was just for local flying.
SL:
Well, any last other things that you want to say?
SM:
No. I think we’ve covered the ground, unless you can think of something.
SL:
Well, that’s what I was going to say. If there’s other folks here, that anybody else has a
question.
01:24:23
[Ferrying a B-17 from Hawaii to California]
SCOTT SANFORD MCMURRAY: Tell him the story about ferrying the B-17 from Hawaii to
San Francisco and—
SM:
Oh. Oh, yeah. That was a—yeah. That was a—it was a mistake on my part. When we got
transferred back from Hickman Field back to Hamilton, I didn’t want a ride. I wanted to
fly the airplane. So I asked about ferrying the airplane, and they said, “Yeah, we got this
B-17 they want to bring back.” So I said, “Well, that sounds interesting.” So it was in
pretty bad shape on the thing, and we flew a flight. They figured that the way it was
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burning oil, we’d probably run out of oil or come close to it before we landed on the
thing. But I flew it for four hours, and the oil consumption wasn’t all that bad.
So we took off. And it was a B-17E, which I had trained in but I hadn’t flown since on
the thing. And here it is about 1:00 in the morning. We’ve got two tanks where the ball
turret used to be because it didn’t have the range on the thing, and it had two bomb bay
tanks for the fuel, about 450 each bomb bay, as I recall, on the thing. And about 1:00 in
the morning, why, the engineer comes up, and he says, “Captain,” he says, “I can’t
transfer any fuel. It’s not transferring any fuel onto the right-hand tank.” And I said, “My
God, we’re going to have to need that fuel to make land or something.” So he came back
in a little while, and he’s says, “It’s running and running.” And he says, “It’s getting hot.
It can catch on fire.” And I thought, “Boy, the transfer pump was right there between the
two fuel tanks in the bomb bay.” So I said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea.” And so he says,
“Well, it’s not been shut off, and I can’t shut it off. [unintelligible] circuit breaker.”
So we cut all the wires. That’s the only way you can do it is up and cut the wires. So we
turned off all the electrical on the thing and flew with a flashlight on the instruments. The
instruments, fortunately, were pneumatic and not electric. So we flew with a flashlight at
night at 1:00 in the morning over halfway between Hawaii and Hamilton. And so we cut
all the wires, and now we’re sitting here with 450 gallons of fuel that we can’t use. And
fortunately, I remembered that we—and I hadn’t checked it—that we always kept the
transfer—manual transfer pump in the camera well, which was in the radio room. I told
him to go down and look in the radio room and see if a transfer pump’s there, and lo and
behold, there was a transfer pump there.
So then we take it and hook the transfer pump up in the bomb bay on the thing, and they
have to disconnect the thing. Well, all of a sudden, we’ve got fuel. You can feel the fuel
moving around in the thing.
SL:
Holy smokes.
SM:
So here again, we cut off all the electrical on the thing, flew with a flashlight, and opened
up all the windows and everything to blow all the air out. And so we got it. Well, we
figured clean up and put the electrical back in. And then we had to take tanks, cranking.
And then we had everybody go back, and I think we made everybody go about 50 turns
of the crank and then somebody else would take their place.
So anyway, we ended up back there at Hamilton Field on the thing, and we go to stop.
And lo and behold, there’s no brakes because we had cut the hydraulic pump off. On the
B-17, they didn’t have engineering hydraulic pumps. They had electric, and we had
sheared—cut off the things.
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SL:
That was the wire.
SM:
But fortunately, there’s a great big pump on the copilot’s side. And I remember I says,
“Start pumping.” And we pumped the airplane up, and I says, “That’s enough.”
SL:
[laughs] Oh, my God.
SM:
So that was the end of that experience.
SL:
Oh, man. That was a long flight.
SM:
It was.
SL:
Well, okay. Well, with that, I’d like to say thank you very, very much for allowing us this
time. Thank you for serving our country.
SM:
Well, I hope we covered the ground.
SL:
I think we did. I think we did. Kelci?
01:29:16
[Memories of the Red Barn]
[production talk]
KELCI HOPP:
You mentioned briefly that you had witnessed the Red Barn traveling
from its location to where it is now. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about
that.
SM:
Excuse me, I can’t—
SL:
Talk a little bit about the Red Barn moving.
SM:
I don’t know too much about the Red Barn. All I remember is, when they first started
ferrying airplanes out of Seattle, this friend of mine was an engineer, took me to the Red
Barn, and that was where they built the B-47. The first B-47 was built in the Red Barn
over there.
SL:
I didn’t know that.
SM:
And then they took it over to Boeing Field. And I remember I was flying for United
and—at the time, and they said, well, they flew the B-47 this afternoon in a big cloud of
black smoke off of Boeing Field. And they went over to Moses Lake on that. And as far
as the Red Barn, I can remember driving by it and seeing it there. And, of course, they
had a nice brick building, which was their offices and engineering and whatnot, and then
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the Red Barn was one of the first ones of building the float airplanes and whatnot that
Boeing built.
SL:
You never worked in the Red Barn or anything? It was pretty much out of—it wasn’t
being used when you were there, really?
SM:
That’s correct. It was. Yeah, by then—well, because the Red Barn was there, and then
when the war started, of course, they built Plant Two.
SL:
Plant Two. Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Okay.
01:31:08
[Additional stories from wartime service, part one]
SSM: Tell them the story about flying over the Japanese-inhabited island when you were doing
Ferry Command in the Pacific.
SM:
What was that?
SL:
Yeah, about flying over the Japanese-inhabited island when you were ferrying airplanes?
SM:
Oh. [laughs] Yeah, when we were—oh, that was one there. Let’s see. I think it was called
Wotje. And we used to fly, when we were going from Johnston Island to Kwajalein there,
We hit that Marshall Island chain, and there was an island there called Wotje on the
thing. And I guess there were Japanese on it that we just bypassed it and let them starve
themselves to death on the thing. And I remember one time I was going over in the
evening, and I wanted to see I could see any signs, you know, fire or anything over there.
And so I was looking down there and flying over it. And the navigator jumped up and
down and told me I had no right flying over the island because I was jeopardizing his life,
and he was married and I wasn’t. [laughter] He didn’t get a lot of sympathy from me. I
says, “I’ve been shot at.”
SL:
I can’t imagine any sympathy. Yes. Oh, man.
SM:
You know, they did that—the same thing over there in the Marianas. We bypassed an
island—there was Guam. I can’t think of the name of the other island. Tinian and Saipan.
SL:
Yeah. We island-hopped.
SM:
We island-hopped and just let them—
SL:
Didn’t have to—didn’t have to—
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SM:
And they found—up in Guam there, they found people nine months later, you know,
finally surrendering or something that lived up in the islands.
SL:
Wow. That had to have been an interesting time to live. Dangerous time to live.
SM:
It was.
SL:
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
01:33:11
[More on the Red Barn and stories from flying career]
PEDER NELSON: So I guess one question is about when the Red Barn became part of The
Museum of Flight, you had mentioned where it—when it was barged down the river—
SM:
Right.
PN:
—it was rolled up into a location and then transferred.
SM:
Right.
PN:
What was the location and do you remember the transferring? Did you watch it?
SM:
No, no. I didn’t watch it personally. I was jogging around that building there, the
Development Center, and we saw it there. And I don’t think it was there on that wheels
there maybe a week at the most? Less than that. And they had to—I think they had to
take some wires down or whatnot to go down Marginal Way. And so I think they had
prepared for it. They were just on wheels and whatnot, but I think it was done—once it
was underway, I don’t think they had any trouble moving it. It probably got there in a
couple hours at the most. You know, this is like that B-52 they brought down from
Everett.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. That was fun to watch.
SM:
Yeah, and they brought it back, you know, and got it back. And I remember Scott took
me down there, and we saw them assembling it and whatnot.
SL:
Yup, yup. Would you have flown that B-52?
SM:
I didn’t fly it.
SL:
No?
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SM:
I think that’s a short tail. You know, that’s another thing. The B-52s we built here were
what we call long tails. I think they were through the Ds, and then the—Wichita went
onto the—what we call the short tail.
SL:
Right. That is a Wichita aircraft tail.
SM:
Yeah. And they were all Wichita airplanes, Gs and Hs or whatever they were.
SL:
Right, right. Okay.
SSM: Tell them about transferring—training the pilots from the pistons to jets back in the early
‘60s prior to simulators.
SL:
Yeah. Training the—training pilots for transitioning from piston to jet before simulation?
Before simulators?
SM:
Yeah. Well, what happened, it was kind of—it was tough because everything’s done on
seniority, and we got a lot of older pilots initially to train. And they had—and I can
appreciate themselves—is vision problems. Initially, we had this red light or something
instead of white light on the thing. So they had trouble necessarily transitioning with the
lighting on the instrument panels.
Well, one thing—and the other thing was that you lose your depth perception. Now,
depth perception, they told me, is done by peripheral vision. In other words, as your
peripheral vision comes in, your depth perception is what you lose, from what my eye
doctors told me on the thing. So when I get eye checks now, they keep checking my
peripheral vision. When we get with the older pilots, as it starts to come in, your depth, so
when they come in to land, they always used to land higher, whereas when you’re
younger, you’d come down a level and touch down because you knew exactly how far off
the ground you were. As you get older, you feel for the ground.
SL:
Well, interesting.
SM:
And so those are some of the problems that we had. And then they were getting—we
were getting more into ILS approaches, where they had been making range approaches
and things of that order. So they probably weren’t as sharp on ILS approaches as some of
the others. So these were some of the problems as we went down and got more and more
airplanes, why, you start training younger pilots, why, they made it a little bit easier.
SL:
Is there a difference in the actual landing? Because it seems like, a propeller airplane, you
get more of a flare, and in the jet airplane, it seems like they come in pretty level.
SM:
Well, you know, there is a cushion, an air cushion—
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SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. [unintelligible].
SM:
—with the flaps. And for about the last 50 feet with flaps down, you can trap some air on
the thing. You know, and that was interesting. There was a—Pan Am had a fuel problem.
They lost an engine and the fuel. I can’t remember. And the pilot was smart, and he got
down and flew at about 100 feet, and he was able to get the thing into the Hawaiian
Islands instead of Oahu. And he was flying what you call on ground effects.
SL:
Ground effect.
SM:
And there is a definite ground effect, yes.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. It seemed like some pilots had some transition issues with that,
from what I’ve heard from a couple of others.
SM:
Well, it’s—we got several kinds of flying. You take the DC-3 and the 4, they were
[unintelligible] landing flaps. All they did was [unintelligible] really change the stall
speed on the thing. All they did was they gave you a steeper approach, where you could
make a steeper approach on the thing. And when you get into—when we get into the 727
example, then that flap was a split flap and it produced lift. So the airplanes today that we
built, their flaps are producing lift.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. They’re not stopping lift or anything.
SM:
Right.
SL:
They’re actually helping.
SM:
No.
SL:
Yeah. That make sense.
SM:
Other than they can give you—because you can have a lower—they are producing more
lift, why, they give you an appropriate—a lower approach speed.
SL:
Right, right. It makes sense..
SSM: Tell the story of how Clayton Scott came to hire you.
SL:
How did Clayton Scott come to hire you?
SM:
What was that?
SL:
How did Clayton Scott come to hire you?
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SM:
Oh, I don’t know. Well, I guess we’re both Scotsman. And Scottie had flown for United
Airlines at one time. Not many people realize that, but he had flown for United for a
couple months as—on the C-47 as a copilot on the thing. So he realized that we had quite
a bit to offer with the airline experience.
SSM: Tell them about the phone call you got when your mother was here and your grand—your
mother was here, and you got a phone call.
SM:
Oh, that? Well, that was a good flight. What happened was that one evening, my mother
was here and it was about dinnertime. And Scottie called me and says, “I need a copilot
to fly in the Stratocruiser.” He says, “Can you make it?” And I said, “I can make it in 10
minutes.” [laughter]
So we went down there, and we took off in a Stratocruiser and did all the work up there at
altitude and came down. And he tapped the wheel, and he says, “You can go ahead and
fly the airplane.” Well, I had been flying for—in and out of Boeing Field, you know, for
a year and a half, so it was just a piece of duck. I just flew the airline pattern on the thing,
you know, and I figured he’ll take the control of the thing all the way around. And so we
came down and got in final gear and flaps down and all that in the landing, and I
remember I says, “Do you hold 130?” And he says, “Yeah, that’s a good speed.” So we
came in and landed, and I caught a roller. I mean, the airplane just started rolling on the
ground. I didn’t even feel a touchdown.
SL:
Nice.
SM:
And I remember some guy in the back, he says, “Why can’t they all be like this?”
[laughter] And I was about 10 feet high. I just lucked out on a roller. And after that, why,
you know, he and I got along very well.
SL:
Very nice, yeah. [laughs]
SM:
So I just lucked out.
SL:
Oh, that’s good.
SSM: Do you want to tell them about the Tex Johnston flight? [laughs]
PN:
He’s egging on the Tex Johnston story.
SM:
What about?
PN:
The Tex Johnston flight. Scott’s saying that—asking you if you will tell it.
SM:
I don’t know anything about it. [laughter]
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Understood.
01:41:57
[Additional stories from wartime service, part two]
PN:
I do have a question. We’re updating our World War II exhibit down at the Museum, and
I was wondering if you could just talk about where you were the day you found out that
the war was over.
SL:
Good question.
SM:
That the war was over? Which—VED or—
PN:
Both.
SM:
Well—
SL:
Yeah, yeah. Both would be good.
SM:
VED was—put it this way. I knew that was in about May or whatever it was on it, retired.
And they started building airfields over in Okinawa because they were going to launch
the invasion of Japan on Flying—B-17s. They were going to bring them over there and
saturate. I might mention, the B-29s there, they—with LeMay there, they were bombing
at altitude initially on the thing. And I remember one—they decided that the Japanese
didn’t have enough antiaircraft or any defense, that they lowered the bombing altitude
down to about 8,000 to 10,000 feet on the thing. And, of course, the crews say, “Oh,
they’ll murder us,” which they didn’t.
And two things. I think they ran out of bombs one time, and they took Tokyo and they
made a shell out of it. I mean, they literally ran out of targets in Japan before the war
really ended. And, of course, when they dropped the atomic bomb, why, they wanted to
initially, you know, [surrender?]. And as I understand it, Hirohito wanted to retire,
wanted to [surrender?] and Tojo wanted to continue fighting or something. And then
when they hit Nagasaki on a couple—three days later, whatever it was, why, that’s when
they did away with Tojo and the war ended.
SL:
Right.
SM:
So we knew the war ended probably, oh, three weeks before they actually had the
surrender itself. But as far as fighting was concerned, I don’t think there was much—too
much fighting. There probably was some, but there was not near the fighting that they
had been previous.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Where were you and what were you doing at that time? Do you remember?
SM:
I was flying airplanes back and forth to the Pacific. And I don’t know where there—I
guess I was back home. And then they wanted to hurry up and fly out to Okinawa
because we—once we got to Okinawa, I think I had to wait, oh, about a week. I think I
had one trip. I went down to Manila and picked up a load of lumber or some damn thing
and flew it back up to Oki from Manila. Some fighter outfit or something was going to
move up there, and we got up their portable housing for them. And it was ridiculous.
You know, it was kind of interesting. During the war, you know, towards the end there,
all these colonels and high-ranking officers were all coming out to the Pacific. I got a
little forward service I got to get, you know.
SL:
That’s right. That’s right.
SM:
So they all went out—wanted to go out there and get all these forward service because
they knew the war was ending.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah.
[cellphone rings]
SM:
I remember I gave a copilot landing, and he was having kind of a hard time. And some
colonel was upset with the fact that I had given the copilot a landing.
[production talk]
SSM: To answer your question, during this signing [unintelligible], they had all the airplanes
put in the sky.
PN:
Yeah.
SL:
Right.
PN:
He did talk about the signing, yeah. I was just wondering, like—
SSM: He flew over when they were signing.
PN:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. We definitely got that. I was just wondering about, like, if
he got an announcement that it was over, like, the reaction.
SL:
Yeah. That’s a good question. Do you remember getting, like, an announcement or
something from headquarters saying the war is over?
SM:
No.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Anything like that?
SM:
No. We knew it pretty well because the thing is they held us in abeyance at Okinawa until
they announced that they were going to sign the peace treaty between Eisenhower—or
rather, MacArthur on the battleship the Missouri in Tokyo Bay at 11:00 on such and such
a day.
SL:
Right.
SM:
So that’s when we really knew that it was over. But as far as fighting and all that, that
was all.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
But when we were going to Okinawa initially, they were still shelling, you know, the
island, and we were going in and bringing them out. And I remember one night we were
coming back from Okinawa there, and I went back there in the litters. I think we had like
44 litters or something. And this kid motioned down to me or something. And it was
some young kid, and he had a leg off. And he says, “I’m lucky.” He says, “I’m going
home. Me and my buddy.” And his buddy, Christ, he was in horrible condition, it seemed
like.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
And I said, “Well, what were you?” He says, “Oh,” he says, “I was in the Marines.” And,
I says—and he says, “Me and my buddy, we’re the only two left.” And I said, “How
many?” And he says, “200.”
SL:
Wow.
SM:
And up there at Iwo Jima, when they fought on the thing, the—it was a bad—it was a
Marine operation pretty well, but they had the Army, which was in the middle, so they
had two divisions up here and the Army back. And the Marines, they don’t have anything
in the way of armor other than mortar fire or something, howitzers. And the Army had
artillery. And so they told them to move up on the thing, and the Army general says, “I’m
just going to sit there and shell them all night, and then we’ll move up.” And what
happened, the Marines moved up and the Japanese got behind the Marines in front of
the—
SL:
Wow.
SM:
And so the Marines were getting hit in front and back, and so that’s when they got pretty
well banged. And they court-martialed the general or some damn thing.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Wow.
SM:
But, you know, Pearl Harbor was set up. Pearl Harbor was set up. Maybe not as bad. But
we had to get in the war with Japan—or the [unintelligible], as they called it in most
days. Because if you stop to think, if Hitler had ever taken England, what a disaster
would that would have been for us. We had no anchor, no place to go at all, and Churchill
and Roosevelt had to figure some way of getting us into the war. And the fact is that
when they didn’t—they lost track of the Japanese fleet, so to speak. That’s what we
understand. They lost them, and I don’t know—
SL:
Right. That’s what we’ve been—
SM:
—on the thing. Maybe they didn’t think it was going to be quite as bad. But they said
they had—that Saturday before—they struck on a Sunday on the thing—that they were
all on leave partying and everything else like nothing was going to happen. And, of
course, they court-martialed—I can’t remember. There were two of them, the two
generals, they got—
SL:
Right. I don’t remember their names, but that’s right. They did.
SM:
They [unintelligible] court-martial on the thing and—but somebody had to pay the price.
But if you stop to think about it—and it’s like when my dad first got to the Philippines,
the people who lived out there says, “Has the war started yet? Are they going to do—” Or
something like that. And my dad’s letters wrote there, and he says, “It finally started.”
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
You know, they knew that the—they were going to get hit.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah, they were there preparing for it. They knew something
was going to happen.
SM:
Yeah.
SL:
Yeah.
SM:
Everybody knows it’s just a matter of time before it’s going to happen.
01:51:46
[More on his father’s career and service]
SL:
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. It’s sad to lose your dad in something like that.
SM:
Well, he—that’s the way life goes.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
That’s right. That’s right.
SM:
He was only 56 when he got—did away. But he had gone out—see, my dad, in 1914, he
was the young one. He graduated from law school or something. He and his brother
were—had some kind of a law practice down in Tennessee. And they just weren’t doing
very great. And they had this thing where they had the Philippine Constabulary. So he
signed up for the Philippine Constabulary, and so he was a—as I understand it, he
worked for the Philippine Army at the Constabulary as a U.S. officer or something. He’s
a—as a second lieutenant. So he did a two-year stint with it in 1914. The war went on,
and it ended at 1918. My dad had an offer as a—I guess he was a second lieutenant or
first lieutenant—I can’t remember what—to go out to the Philippines in the military.
That’s on the thing.
And so he had met my mother, and he proposed to her and the whole works
[unintelligible]. In 1919, they went on a military transport, and they got married, and they
went on their honeymoon, and they were over there in Manila, living in style. And my
mother did not like military life. There was General So-and-So’s wife was running a tea,
and you had to go and drinking tea and all these niceties. And that wasn’t my mother’s
thing.
SL:
She didn’t want to do that.
SM:
So she didn’t want it. So they got out. My dad got an offer from—whatever—Frazier and
Bright—Frazier Company. They were import/export people. And so he went to Shanghai.
And one of the big customers was Dodge Automobile, among others. And then I guess it
kind of got enlarged there, and they opened up an office in Beijing. Peking, in these days.
And so he volunteered, and he went up there. And so he kind of got to run the office. He
was so responsible with the people in Shanghai. But anyway, he had a chance.
So they lived up there in China—or in Beijing. And they were kind of closing that office,
and he was going to go back to Shanghai. And I interfered. I was on the way. [laughs]
My mother was expecting me in June or something, and this all happened about April or
May. And so they just—and the other thing was that, once you get out of the military,
you are allowed two years to go back on an Army transport. And so he would have lost
this going back on an Army transport. So that’s when they decided to come back to the
States on an Army transport, free.
SL:
[laughs] Yeah. That was a smart decision, I’d say.
SM:
Well, it wasn’t much of a decision. But this is all what they’re telling me.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Yeah. Well, that’s good. A lot of folks don’t know the stories around their own birth,
that’s for sure. Okay. Well, let’s—
SM:
No. That’s fine.
01:56:00
[Bailing out of a Curtiss C-46]
SSM: Tell him the story of how you got your Caterpillar pin.
SM:
Oh, the Caterpillar. Oh. Yeah, this is the one. I got a—I bought a 1950 Cadillac—not a
Cadillac. The Buick. I could get it at the factory and save $500 on it. It was a good, good
deal. I could buy the car for about $1,600, a brand-new car, delivered in Flint. So I got
the Air Force—and they were going back to Dayton on the thing in a C-46. So that was
great. I could go back and just take the train up to Flint and get my car.
So we took off. And this was just about the time of the Korean War was going on on the
thing. And we went to Denver and refueled. And the copilot got over in the pilot’s seat,
and I think I did most of the flying or something on the thing. And it was just getting
around about, oh, 7:00 in the morning or something, and the pilot came back—he had
been sleeping—and took over the pilot’s seat. And the copilot got over in the copilot seat,
and I went back to sleep. And I was asleep about, oh, an hour and so, and somebody—the
sergeant [unintelligible]. “You better wake up,” he says. “We just lost the right engine.”
He says, “You better put your parachute on in case we lose the other engine.”
So they were heading north on the thing, and they said—well, they got up north there,
and they came up to this airport, nice, great big, long airport and whatnot, and I figured
they’re going to land. So they’re starting to fly down, and he says, “Oh no.” He says,
“This isn’t Dayton. It must be further east.” So they pass up this runway on the thing, and
the left engine quit. All I hear is [makes sound effect]. [laughter] No engines, 1,000 feet,
1,000 feet.
SL:
You’re low.
SM:
And I started back to the back end of the thing on the airplane, and the—one of the
enlisted men had saw me and he had opened the door to bail out, and I went, [makes
sound effect], right out through the door. I remember looking up and seeing the tail go
by. [makes sound effect]
SL:
Oh, geez.
SM:
And a couple of swings, and I landed in a cornfield.
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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SL:
Oh, man. Yeah, 1,000 feet is low.
SM:
So, anyway, I—so some people there took me in. They took me in the car and wound up
the parachute and whatnot and wound it all up, and they took me to this airport. And I
can’t think of the name of it now. Decatur. Decatur, Illinois, on the thing. And so I called
collect to Operations at Dayton and tell them that we—I think we’ve got a C-46 down
somewhere east of this airport. And he comes [unintelligible] and he says, “No. Is he
hurt?” And they says, “No.” He says, “Well,” he says, “It just landed about a half hour
ago on the thing.” And he says, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Fine.” He says, “Well,
we’ll come over and pick you up on some airplane.” So about an hour or so, a couple of
AT-6s came in and they snuck us in the back of an AT-6 and flew us back.
And when we got back where the Operations [unintelligible], and the C-46 was running
with both engines running. So I didn’t find out about this for about another month. And
what had happened is the—when the right engine quit, we were burning our auxiliary
tank. And when the engine ran out of fuel, he feathered the engine rather than switch
tanks.
SL:
Oh, really?
SM:
Now, they descended, and they’re going down with the other engine shut down. And they
got down to about 200 feet, the co-pilot in the right tank realized what was going on and
switched tanks. So that’s how they came back and landed with both engines.
SL:
Oh, my God. [laughs]
SM:
I did not find out about that. This pilot, afterwards he says, “You’re not going to hold that
against me, are you?” And I says, “No.” But they—he was—they put him out of the
service.
SL:
I was going to say, he’s probably not flying, yeah.
SM:
Yeah.
SL:
Wow.
SM:
He was all through flying.
SL:
[laughs] That was—you’re lucky to have not broken something or something. At 1,000
feet, that’s not a lot of room to get that parachute deployed. That’s pretty good. Wow.
SM:
[unintelligible] I did get the one parachute. But I remember these guys not pulling the
parachute cord, you know, and the chute not opening. Boy, I remember as I pulled that
thing, well, I was looking at it, like—
2020 © The Museum of Flight
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02:01:53
[Closing thoughts]
SL:
It’s here. [laughs] Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s great. I appreciate you adding in. Okay.
Well, I’d say let’s go ahead and wrap it up then. And I want to say, again, thank you very,
very much for this time.
SM:
I hope the computer gave you enough data.
SL:
Oh, yeah. It certainly did. I think that’s wonderful. And also, thank you for the service
that you did in the Second World War and thereafter.
SM:
Well—
SL:
It is appreciated.
SM:
I was lucky I was a survivor.
SL:
Yeah. That is good. I’m glad you did.
SM:
Oh, I had a—I’ve got no complaints on my flying. And I have wonderful family. I’ve
got—I had three children. My oldest son passed away, but my younger one takes good
care of me, and my daughter is doing real well.
SL:
That’s excellent. That’s all you can ask, yeah.
SM:
I’ve got a granddaughter with three children.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Do they live around here, too?
SM:
Yeah. They live in Woodinville.
SL:
Yeah. That’s nice. That way you get a chance to see them. Yeah. Yeah.
02:03:04
[END OF INTERVIEW]
2020 © The Museum of Flight
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The <strong>Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</strong> chronicles the personal stories of individuals in the fields of aviation and aerospace, from pilots and engineers to executives. This collection, which dates from 2013 to present, consists of digital video recordings and transcripts, which illustrate these individuals’ experiences, relationship with aviation, and advice for those interested in the field. By the end of 2019, approximately 76 interviews will have had been conducted. The interviews range in length from approximately 20 minutes to 4 hours and 45 minutes. Most interviews are completed in one session, but some participants were interviewed over multiple occasions.</p>
<p>The personal stories in this collection span much of the modern history of flight, from the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1930s, to the evolution of jet aircraft in the mid-twentieth century, to the ongoing developments of the Space Age. The selected interviewees represent a wide range of career paths and a diverse cross-section of professionals, each of whom made significant contributions to their field. Among the many interviewees are Calvin Kam, a United States Army veteran who served as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War; Robert “Bob” Alexander, a mechanical engineer who helped design the Hubble Telescope; and Betty Riley Stockard, a flight attendant during the 1940s who once acted as a secret parcel carrier during World War II.</p>
<p>The production of the videos was funded by Mary Kay and Michael Hallman. Processing and cataloging of the videos was made possible by a 4Culture "Heritage Projects" grant.</p>
<p>Please note that materials on TMOF: Digital Collections are presented as historical objects and are unaltered and uncensored. See our <a href="https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/disclaimers-policies">Disclaimers and Policies</a> page for more information.</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-current
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://archives.museumofflight.org/repositories/2/resources/6">Guide to the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights Holder
A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource.
The Museum of Flight Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Permission to publish material from the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2019-00-00.100
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
McMurray, Henry S., 1921-2021
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Little, Steve
Biographical Text
<p>Henry Sanford “Sandy” McMurray was a retired Boeing Production Test Pilot with a career spanning 32 years, from 1949 until 1981.</p>
<p>McMurray was born on July 14, 1921 in San Leandro, California to Welborn and Harriett McMurray. He lived there with his parents and younger sister, Elizabeth, until joining the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941.</p>
<p>McMurray went to McKinley Grade School and San Leandro High School, transferring to Hayward High School from which he graduated in 1939. While in high school he filled out a questionnaire about possible careers and indicated that he was going to be a pilot. Working toward that goal, mechanically-minded McMurray attended San Jose State College taking engineering classes. The Civilian Pilot Training Program had just started there and McMurray was one of the first 50 candidates selected. Earning his Private Pilot Certificate by the summer of 1941, he took his physical and was accepted into the U.S. Army Air Corps on November 7, 1941. Attending training at “Kelly-on-the-Hill,” he selected multi-engine training, knowing that would further a civilian career as a pilot.</p>
<p>On July 3, 1942 he was assigned to the 305th Bombardment Group, subsequently known as the “Can Do” group, at Muroc Field. Completing his B-17 training there, McMurray found himself and his crew in Chelveston, England by November. McMurray flew his first mission on December 12 to Rouen, France in the B-17 “Unmentionable Ten” and his 25th mission on July 26, 1943 striking Hanover, Germany. Returning to the United States, he was transferred to the Air Transport Command, where he earned his Instrument Rating while delivering bombers, fighters, and transports. Assigned to the 7th Ferry Command, he was based in Wilmington, Delaware on D-Day when he had the opportunity to fly in the Pacific Theater. McMurray’s father had disappeared in 1942 with the fall of the Philippines and he was eager to see what information he could find. He learned that his father had passed away at Cabanatuan on June 14, 1942 of cerebral malaria. McMurray spent the last year and a half of the war bringing wounded troops out of battle and flying in replacements.</p>
<p>Discharged from the U.S. Army Air Forces on January 3, 1946 at McClellan Field, California, McMurray quickly found work as a flight engineer for Orvis Nelson Air Transport (later Transocean Airlines). After three months with ONAT, he was hired by United Airlines, flying as copilot primarily on West Coast routes. On one of these flights, he met his wife, Marjorie, a United Airlines stewardess. They were married in San Francisco on December 6, 1947. About a year later, United furloughed 88 pilots, McMurray included.</p>
<p>McMurray was then hired on at the Boeing Company. When United Airlines asked him back in October 1949, he opted to stay with Boeing. For his first couple of years at Boeing, McMurray wrote pilot handbooks. He subsequently moved to a test pilot position. As a test pilot, he started out copiloting Stratocruisers, C-97s, B-50s, B-29s, and other variants of these airframes. He transitioned to jet-engined aircraft with the B-47 and also flew the KC-135 and B-52 as part of the team developing jet-engined refueling capabilities for the U.S. Moving to the civilian side of Boeing, he flew the 707, 727, 737, and 747 extensively in Production Test Flight. In 1966, McMurray’s manager, Clayton Scott, retired and McMurray was promoted into his position as head of Production Test Flight. He held this position until his retirement in 1981.</p>
<p>McMurray died in 2021 at 99 years of age.</p>
<p>Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by interviewee.</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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OH_McMurray_Sandy
OH_McMurray_Sandy_transcription
Title
A name given to the resource
Henry “Sandy” McMurray oral history interview
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection (2019-00-00-100), Digital Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Description
An account of the resource
Born-digital video recording of an oral history with Henry "Sandy" McMurray and interviewer Steve Little, recorded as part of The Museum of Flight Oral History Program, February 27, 2020.
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
<p>Pilot Henry Sanford “Sandy” McMurray is interviewed about his military and commercial flying careers. He discusses his service with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, including his flight training with the Civilian Pilot Training Program, his service with the 305th Bombardment Group in the European Theater, and his service with the Air Transport Command in the Pacific Theater. He then shares highlights from his time as a commercial pilot for ONAT (Orvis Nelson Air Transport) and United Airlines and as a test pilot for Boeing, where he rose to the position of head of Production Test Flight before his retirement in 1981.</p>
<p>McMurray’s son, Scott Sanford McMurray, also participates in the interview.</p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
<p>Introduction and personal background -- Flight training, part one -- Service in the European Theater, part one -- Flight training, part two -- Service in the European Theater, part two -- Service with the Air Transport Command, part one -- Story about an ill-fated takeoff in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress -- Service with the Air Transport Command, part two -- Service in the Pacific Theater -- Father’s military service and death -- Marriage and career with United Airlines -- Career with Boeing -- Connections to The Museum of Flight -- Thoughts on different aircraft and a close call on the runway -- Ferrying a B-17 from Hawaii to California -- Memories of the Red Barn -- Additional stories from wartime service, part one -- More on the Red Barn and stories from flying career -- Additional stories from wartime service, part two -- More on his father’s career and service -- Bailing out of a Curtiss C-46 -- Closing thoughts</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-02-27
Subject
The topic of the resource
Air pilots
Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress
Boeing Company
Boeing Company--Employees
Civilian Pilot Training Program (U.S.)
Curtiss C-46 Commando Family
Douglas C-54 Skymaster Family
Douglas DC-3 Family
McMurray, Henry S., 1921-2021
Transport planes
United Airlines
United States. Army Air Forces
United States. Army Air Forces. Air Transport Command
United States. Army Air Forces. Bombardment Group, 305th
World War, 1939-1945
United States. Army Air Forces. Air Force, 8th
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
California
England
Guam
Japan
Northern Mariana Islands
Seattle (Wash.)
United States
Washington (State)
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
1 recording (2 hr., 3 min., 4 sec.) : digital
Language
A language of the resource
English
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
born digital
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/5bc9ca5cbbbe1fdd0bd445b90f461dd1.pdf
540efc9cd98db63776262a0e304091bd
PDF Text
Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Box: 1, Folder: 4 - Homer Metz -- pilot rating book, 1943
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2019-11-01, Box: 1, Folder: 4
Description
An account of the resource
Homer Metz -- pilot rating book, 1943
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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2019-11-01_text_004
Title
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[CPT pilot rating book owned by Homer Metz]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Iva and Homer Metz Space Collection (2019-11-01), Box 1, Folder 4
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
United States. Civil Aeronautics Administration
Metz, Homer L., 1924-2009
Description
An account of the resource
<p>CPT (Civilian Pilot Training) pilot rating book owned by Homer Metz, 1943.</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943
Subject
The topic of the resource
Metz, Homer L., 1924-2009
Air pilots
Civilian Pilot Training Program (U.S.)
Extent
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1 logbook (partially digitized, 55 scans showing cover and filled-out pages) ; 22 x 14 cm
Language
A language of the resource
English
Format
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logs (records)
Bibliographic Citation
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The Iva and Homer Metz Space Collection/The Museum of Flight
Rights
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In copyright