John Cole Wrote:
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> My dad was a flight engineer with 25,000 hours on
> C97s. (not hard to do as slow as they flew...)
> He said those old Pratt 4360's would burn so much
> oil that on many long overseas trips in the
> Pacific they would have to turn around because
> they were low on oil. They worked out a mod that
> had a 55 gal tank of oil in the fuselage that they
> could hand pump oil into the wing tanks when they
> got low.
>
> Condensation trail? How about oil smoke trail
> across the sky....
Not to steal a thread here, but to add to the above comments...
my dad had a lot of time on Pan Am's B-377 Stratocruisers
with their P&W R-4360 radials. This was the only engine that
he ever spoke of in disparaging terms and his negative comments
also included the props which caused a great deal of trouble.
There was one loss over the Pacific account of a runaway prop.
However they were fast. One of his log book entries, Jan 3/4, 1953,
showed a record betrween Tokyo & Honolulu, 4000 statute miles in
10:14 to average 390 m.p.h. ground speed with an average tail
component of 97 knots.
One of this type 30V, flew out of Chirstchurch, NZ in Oct of 1957
as the first commercial airliner to go to Antarctica. My dad was
the 1st officer.
Logbook entries for this type showed many R.E.M. (return emergency
maintenance)?