The 1943 St. Louis Glider Accident 

It's hard to believe that the subcontractor didn't have a ruler or couldn't even eyeball such an error. Can you spell s-t-u-p-i-d?

surferdude44444 From the German perspective that would have been hilarious.

@Tucsoncoyote 2019 I would be more concern for the 14 lives lost in the shuttle disasters then the money lost.

@Tucsoncoyote 2019 Maybe that was their game! Selling more coffins by intentionally killing people with their crap-ily built gliders! Lol

A factor difference of 6..... Imagine your heart suddenly became six times as big (or small), and what consequences that would have 🤯

Phantom

I own a laister Kauffman glider that I’m restoring and Howard blossom is in the log books as the first guy who flew it!

​@@jayolah6127Pro Tip: Perform a dimensional inspection of your lower wing strut fittings. Hopefully you can obtain the drawing to compare the results against.

Dsdcain Here, here. I second that!

And I third it. Well done History Guy.

I fourth this comment!!!!

And I fifth it. Well said Dsdcain.

I sixth that.

Would you please contact the National WWII Glider Pilots Association at nwwiigpa@gmail.com we would very much like to know about you and your experience in glider training?

Oh, this was in Canada. Around 1986. Our gliding club (Rideau Soaring in Gananoque Ontario) owned one. Everyone else was afraid to fly it (I was the only guy with jet time), so it was pretty much mine if I could talk the guys into helping me pull it out of the hangar. I found it had a bit of a rattle in thermals. Later found out there were mouse bones in the wings. Apparently, they found the glue appetizing. I stopped flying it then.

I’m restoring a tg 4 can’t wait to have it flying!

UTubeGlennAR Thank you Glenn for a true story of a patriot who loves and serves our country and of bringing back to us the history of your Dad and all those who served so loyally 🇺🇸 Stroudsburg Joe right here !

UTubeGlennAR k

UTubeGlennAR Thx for your remembrance of this and sharing your young life story with those of us who really care!!

Thx for Sharing, and cheers from EDFZ 😉😉🛫

Paul Woodman ... not to mention condoms.... to protect a soldiers other weapon. ( i.e., his rifle muzzle! )..... m_m

Paul Woodman Yes Paul. My beloved Dad was a civil engineer working for the government at the Brooklyn Army Base during WWII. He recounted hundreds of issues with contractors and subcontractors who deliberately made the war products with poor material which could lead to a failure under combat conditions. These companies were hauled into court during and after the war . Their corporate officers and others were convicted, made to pay heavy fines and sentenced to prison terms.

And all of that was done with NO COMPUTERS, internet and Fedex. Of course there was little consideration paid to environmental pollution and to the NIMBY disease while there were no endless studies and lawsuits to hinder progress. The global supply chain we read so much about today exits only because it is cheaper, not better than what the Greatest Generation accomplished in record time.

It helped having the entire economy and manufacturing base dedicated solely to producing war materials. Would be impossible today with all of our manufacturing capabilities having been shipped overseas.

In Ann Arbor Michigan, there were two dwarf houses for the Willow Run Factory, as unlike our allies, we didn't use children to connect the wiring, controls, fuel lines, etc. The houses had been built with tall rooms, so they added floors, and even built special furniture. Also, they were always transported in two busses to the factory, in case one should crash...

Maybe the history guy could make an episode on factory.

Neil Anderson This is true but we are talking about quality control which is a different kettle of fish. This requires training and the appropriate equipment, such as gauges, to check each part. I understand quality control is a big problem with the F22 Raptor. Parts are arriving for assembly and are having to be worked on before the can be used. The problem seems to be related to the fact that there are so many factories around America making these parts that quality control has suffered.

Not to mention when lobbying and big contracts($$$) are involved, quality control can be "overlooked." Still an issue today.

Just ask the WW2 italian navy about the quality of the shells they got...

I was familiar with the incident but not the full details. Excellent video. The story of combat gliders in World War 2 is a fascinating one. Maybe it could be covered in a future episode.

@@TugIronChief Every troop carrier glider landing was an emergency landing - and they often ended badly.

Jonny Dingo ford built a B-24 every 62 minutes at the willow run plant, one complete plane every minute.

Ford did get commissions for every German military vehicle assembled at it's plants in France, after the Nazi take over. Also, the Rockefellers got paid for each barrel of oil processed at their refineries in Romania by the Nazi's during WWII, and were re-imbursed for the destruction of their refineries during the war. In addition to all of this, ITT (International Telephone & Telegraph) was also paid by the Nazi's for their use of the telephone systems if France and Germany. I believe Chase-Manhattan Bank acted as the part of the go-between for these payments with the Nazi's gold (taken from Jews & occupied country's gold reserves) through Switzerland's banks. I believe this was made public in the book, "Trading With The Enemy"

@ Check your math

Hmmmm.....I'd always thought wartime industries pulled us out of the Depression, and hadn't even considered that the military personnel themselves had an impact - but i'm sure all those GI's sending home their paychecks sure helped.

L

raydunakin America is in decline,the ebb and flow of history,at work.

The one dislike might have been someone who accidentally touched the wrong button (so-called dyslexic finger) :)

Dislikes aren’t necessarily bad, it lets the algorithm know what you like and don’t like

Or in this case, "wing."

Nah, that's the private sector. The government still gets better results.

@@petergray2712 Do you mean SpaceX?

probably a drafting or typing error.............. 11/32 can end up 1/32 or even 1132 if someone types or writes or reads it incorrectly. So I'm not surprised it ended up a little over 1/32" thick when it was supposed to be 11/32" thick.......especially back then when optometrists and glasses were a luxury..........

I study WW2. .Read Newspaper accounts from early 1942...April and May . Wildly busy with War Contracts. .

Schools no longer teach knowledge. They now teach how to pass tests instead.

Javier 86 When was that and what was the cause?

WALTERBROADDUS in 1953 i think...(will get the date) collision with a freighter...benevolence was at flank speed ( too fast for the conditions..its still there.however it was a hazard to navigation and blown up. At the time you could see the red cross at low tide

Javier 86 It is a busy waterway, but never heard of many wrecks entering or exiting. In the post radar era no less.

WALTERBROADDUS the fog and excessive speed wrote its epitaph

had not heard of this before and now looking into it. Thanks!

I work for a manufacturer and I can tell you that's so very true.

32/16=2, 2x1=2, 11/2= 5-1/2 times too thin= visually obvious even without measuring device but being able to divide and multiply small numbers in your head is handy

@Mark Pope my dad is an NDE inspections person for nukes, you should've seen his look when he saw what the problem was and how glanced over it was, just omg

freedomvigilant1234 -- Owens' poem is a condemnation of the attitude reflected in the poem, lamenting the senseless slaughter of war.

More about the Sikorsky R-4 here. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tMrYmy4pabc.html

Singer sewing machine made 1911 pistols for a time during the war, today they are collectors items. Also IBM, International Harvester, and the Rock-Ola jueke box company made M-1 carbines, in addition to Winchester and Springfield Armory. Saginaw Steering Gear, made 1919 and M-2 machine guns. A armory in Philadelphia loaded 2 1/2 BILLION rounds of ammo in 1943 alone, in addition their were about 100 other plants in many major city's loading ammo including .303 Endfield for the British, and 7.62 x 54mm for the Russians. We built over 50'000 M-4 tanks, more than all the models the Germans had produced combined. Altogether we out produced the Germans by 2 to 1. In the Pacific Theater in 1 month alone we made more guns than the Japanese did during the entire war. During the island hopping actions, even very low priority items like uniforms and underwear were dropped in amounts higher than the Japanese could bring in ammo, obviously their highest priority item. The US outproduced the Japanese by 3-4 to 1 The deck was stacked against them, they never had a chance. Once it started the end was inevitable.

George Semel is that the jolly green? my uncle said he rode on those in korea i think.. he said they were tuff

Just read a couple of good books by Peter Stekel about aircraft and crews that crashed in California's Sierra Nevada, some not found for years. "Beneath Haunted Waves" and "Final Flight".

I heard, but haven’t independently verified, that we lost more aviators in training accidents than in WWII combat. I learned this in USAF pilot school. ✈️

My dad was crew on a crash boat that fished pilots out of the ocean off the flight school in FL for some of WW II. The unofficial slogan was "A plane a day in Tampa bay". They trained 1100 navy pilots a month.

@@craigmcdaniel5733 No, not quite. There were 36,000 non-combat deaths and about 88,000 Killed In Action

Wow,that's unbelievable .

Yes, but then, as now, Americans are, by and large, clueless about the Metric system. Sad, but true-John in Texas

@@TheGearhead222 I think everyone 'left' can see the benefits of SI units, We Did. : D

WarblesOnALot . Great post mate. Hadn't heard about the fake F111 wingboxes.

+Phil G'day, Thanks. Ah, well, y'see..., I'm so old that the first time I saw a Jet Fighter overhead it was a De-Haviland Vampire overflying the Schools in my hometown before ANZAC Day in 1966, and the first Airshow I was taken to featured an English Electric Canberra...; then the whole saga of the F-111 losing it's wings unwound as I was growing up, and there were Phantoms going overhead on Navigation Excercises for a while, and then finally the F-111s showed up here in RAAF colours. I live atop the mountains in Northern NSW, and the Aardvarks used to use this area for Terrain-Following Radar approaches to the Evans Head Bombing Range at the Coast, 120 miles to the East of here, and about once every 7 years they crashed one...; 3 went down within 60 miles of here, at Armidale, Guyra, and Tenterfield... I heard 2 go over and only 1 come back the night of the Tenterfield Crash - they hit a Tree on a Hill approaching the Town from the West and thus lost their Lefthand Horizontal Stabiilser..., and rather than ejecting (in their snazzy Cockpit Capsule) which would've put the Crash pretty much in the centre of the town, the Pilot went to full-throttle with afterburner to get enough speed to gain enough control to extend the descent, and they flew low & fast past the built-up area to crash in an empty paddock on a Hill on the Eastern side of Tenterfield... "They died in the finest traditions of the Service....", was the official verdict. I never saw an F-111 go down, but every time I heard one approaching (one got about 3 to 5 seconds warning, a sort of a soft sibilant hissing, the noise of the Airflow separating to go around the Nose & Wing Leading-Edges...!) I used to literally drop everything and run outside to watch... Eventually the RAAF put one Aardvark into a Museum, and they literally used the rest for Landfill about 15 years ago....; and a bunch of Airframe Riggers are still sueing the Dep't of Defence over having been poisoned while conducting Fueltank Deseal/Reseal procedures on the F-111s. It was a "Wet Wing", y'see, and every 10 years the Sealant inside the Tanks had to be removed & replaced - by someone wearing nothing but a Face-Mask with an Air-Line & Goggles, and a pair of Underpants, getting inside the Fuel Tanks with Solvent & manually removing the old Goop & then replacing it a couple of days later....; and the Solvent was so strong that it literally dissolved the Underpants off them while they were inside the Wing, and pretty much all of the men who did that job are now either dead, or dying, from rare & unusual Cancers. All told, in it's Australian service the F-111c was pretty much always controversial and often making the News for all the wrong reasons. Another one was practising a Maritime Strike at night, off the Phillipines, making their low-level approach from behind a Mountain on a nearby Island...; but they misjudged their "Pop-Up" and ploughed into the Hill at barely Subsonic speed, instead of skimming the top and surprising the Boats on the other side... Very occasionally these days a Hornet or a Super-Hornet goes overhead, using the old F-111 low-level-through-the-mountains approach to bomb at Evans Head ; but it's been a lot quieter hereabouts since the Aardvarks were (literally) buried, and as yet I haven't seen any F-35s, but I expect they'll show up eventually.... Guess who's an Aeroplane-Head (!) ? Have a good one, ;-p Ciao !

BeachsideHank Not quite the same thing, the bracket would have been fine if correctly manufactured. It baffles me how items so massively out of spec could ever get onto a delivered aircraft.

BeachsideHank As someone in construction inspection, I know little problems can turn into big or killer events. My company shared blame for parking garage failure that killed a bunch of guys. Not my project thank God. All my stuff is still standing....

BeachsideHank you talk about "still happening today." challenger happened almost as along ago from today as this glider accident happened from challenger.

Justin Pipes Which simply verifies that such events are never going to be expunged, no matter how far technology advances.

I remember the Challenger accident like it was yesterday. However, there IS a major difference. Because of the almost inconceivable manufacturing demands of WWII, we had no choice but to use some contractors that were not really familiar with what they were building. Just about every company in the U.S. participated in the war effort in some way. Hundreds of thousands of women were doing what were at the time considered men's jobs, like building aircraft. Had it not been for all of this, the war could have easily gone the other way. We have all these people and companies to thank for winning the war. The Challenger accident was a whole different thing. There was no war. There was no emergency. There was really not any real urgency. The problem was known before the accident, and there was plenty of time to fix it. Postponing the program until the problem was resolved would have hurt nothing but the pride of NASA. So for that reason, they pushed ahead with a known and very possibly fatal problem unresolved. Now, space travel (if you can truly call low earth orbit space travel) has serious risks. But to proceed with a known serious issue unresolved was unconscionable.