I can hear the pilot now - with the engine sputtering he slyly makes a quick landing in a wheat field and proceeds to check the engine, "Yep, the snakes have coiled up inside the turbocharger again!" Reaching inside and pulling out several large snakes, he chucks them out onto the ground where after the impact and a few seconds time, the dazed snakes merely slithered away.
Made a skydive from an AN2 back in the 90’s. What was cool was the main cabin door swung open to the inside of the aircraft toward the tail which allowed the door to be closed for the ride to altitude and opened for the exit. Carried 12 jumpers to 5500’ for a demo jump. A clean 35 minute ride to the exit point. Fun jump.
You remind me of Stockton Rush saying that “beyond a certain point, safety is a waste”. Your’s is the attitude that has crashed aircraft since the Wright Bros.
A VERY old, but very simple aircraft that’s still has many uses. Has a good payload and almost unequal at flying low and slow. North Korea used/uses them for their “special forces” insertions.
Some military experts have said that North Korea could potentially use them to deliver smaller nuclear bombs, at least at shorter range targets (their only true bombers are lighter, VERY early jet aircraft built in the late 1940s).
caught one of these going thru Star Wars Canyon last January. They had put a train horn on the thing and beeped it to say hello to all the photographers each time it dropped into the cyn.
It’s funny that everyone thinks this hand cranked gear is terrible. Personally I think it’s a great idea a lot less to go wrong and who cares if you had to turn a crank. It’s just like crank windows in a car. I have 2 cars one has manual cranked windows and the other has those god forsaken electric ones. I’ve never thought about the crank windows but every time I drive the other car with the electric ones I think wow these are horrible. They are slow, don’t work without the key on, seem to break down a lot, ect. I don’t know who decided electric windows where a “feature” but there is a special place in hell for that person.
Can you imagine having to crank this thing down with a bullet lodged in your arm or leg, all while keeping the aircraft on the correct glide path to land on a moving, rocking aircraft carrier?
This is what I was going to say. Everyone is say ohh the stress about returning from combat and the adrenaline and then having to crank. Screw that, what if you’re injured and can’t crank it? That’s the bigger issue. Stress or Adrenaline won’t even be a factor because it’s all muscle memory. Getting injured changes that.
This is just an anecdote, but supposedly it worked as a ratchet system. So many pilots would release the ratchet rather than turning the handle to lower the landing gear, letting gravity or centrifugal forces do the work for them. None of the accounts mention if that damaged the landing gear.
No imagine a pilot fresh from a combat sortie. His adrenaline is spent he wants to get back on the ship without crashing, his muscles feel like jelly and now he has to hand crank his landing gear down.
They usually didn't bother. There was an informal, but commonly used technique where you would simply unlock the landing gear lever and then perform a 90 degree turn to drop the landing gear for you.
@@patrickradcliffe3837except it does. That’s why it’s muscle memory. So it can be done without thinking. It’s also one less thing that can fail or get shot up, then you don’t have gear. That’s why it was like that, to keep it easy.
I completely forgot these things were hand cranked... holy crap if it was me forget it I think I would place here in the drink- massive respect to those pilots who flew her and fly her still
