Page 26 - MY STORY

control systems of B-29’s. Our bomb wing was

transferred to Davis-Monthan AFB, Tucson, AZ about a
year later.

ALMOST LEAVENWORTH FOR ME!

This story takes a little setting up so bear with me. I’m
not sure it’s relevant to my professional life, but it has a
bearing on my being here. Lord, it was hot! During

Tucson summers temperatures could easily reach into the
100’s, which was boosted by at least 30 degrees in the
interior of a shiny-skinned B-29. You could fry eggs on

the aluminum skin.

We could tolerate maybe 15 to 20 minutes inside the

fuselage before we had to get out and let the evaporation
of sweat cool us off in the shade of a wing.

Our squadron had returned from a gunnery training flight
the previous night, and our job was to perform a
post-flight checkout of the B-29 gun (fire) control system

in the morning. My job that morning was to run checkout
of the tail guns. Without getting into too much boring
detail, I’ve got to point out that the B-29’s fire control

system was an engineering marvel for its time. The