Good evening Madam
So sorry about the late reply but I have been out and about on the town. I think you may be narrowing the mystery down quite well. If we could only get your Son to post on this site to confirm the aircraft, that would be wonderful.
It is possible I suppose that the B17 could perfrom the feat you described. My Wife's Grandfather was staioned at Polebrook England (with Clark Gable) back during WW-Bigone and I do recall a story about the "Turret Snatch" mode of equipment recovery. The experimental equipment was kind of rough, and was simply known as "the snatch". Boys will be boys, and they used the "snatch" as often as they could... and after a while it was getting wore out. They were very happy to have a snatch in thier squadron, even if it was not very pretty to look at. During one of the Schwienfurt raids (on the ball bearing plant) the snatch was destroyed by a large set of balls and an oxygen bottle which was blown into the air by the force of the bomb-loads. Thus ended that version of the snatch, but there are probably many others they could have put in it's place.
I'm not sure if anyone ever used that particualr snatch to snag people however. From what I undersatnd, it was pretty nasty to look at and nobody thought it was safe unless they had at least two pints in them....or so the story goes.
The B-17 is a good plane, but it's awfully hard to find the AVGAS to run them these days. I suppose it's possible that they could have modified them to use turboprops, but if they did, it would surely be classified...and we would not want the Huns to find out if we did.
I'm excited to learn more about the "fast jet" extraction. Looks like your Blokes have beat us to the technology table again.
Gunpig
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Originally Posted by Ruby2Shoes
So are the B17s still flying and would they make sense for this extraction? Would they have a current presence in the Middle East too? Where's that aeronautical pigman gone... bet he'll give us plenty of details.
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