Days That End in 'Y' - editorial 'toons & memes

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Days That End in 'Y' - editorial 'toons & memes

'Life in prison for all abortionists on demand, and without apology!' edition.

March for Life 2020

The P-82 Twin Boom Mustang Aircraft. Last of the long-distance escorts. No Twin Mustang Has Ever Been Restore... Until Now.

I'd never heard of this airplane. Have you?

The only flying Twin Mustang leads the way for a Boeing B-29 (the restored Doc), a flight reminiscent of the P-82’s intended—but unrealized—role as a bomber escort in World War II. (Scott Slocum)

Test pilot Ray Fowler, sitting in the left cockpit, took the XP-82 for a ride last June. When the airplane first took to the sky in 2018, it had been more than 60 years since the type had flown. (Scott Slocum)

Master restorer, Tom Reilly.

"Reilly’s latest undertaking might be his most challenging: a North American XP-82, the second prototype—but the first to fly—of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Twin Mustang. Invented by German-born aircraft designer Edgar Schmued and greenlit by the U.S. Army Air Forces’

General Hap Arnold in 1943, the Twin Mustang is unique: It mates two North American P-51 fuselages with a common center wing and a horizontal stabilizer. Schmued’s double aircraft could accommodate a two-man crew, which would lighten workload and reduce pilot fatigue—a necessity for the airplane’s expected long-range missions. In February 1947, Colonel Robert E. Thacker flew a P-82B nonstop from Hawaii to New York without refueling. The 5,051-mile flight is the longest nonstop flight ever made by a propeller-driven fighter.

The P-82 arrived too late in World War II for its original mission as a bomber escort in the Pacific, but it performed a crucial, if short-lived, role in the Korean War: flying combat patrols over the 38th parallel. Before its ultimate retirement in 1953, the aircraft, which had been redesignated as the F-82, would also fly ground-attack missions in South- and North Korea."