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I’ve been enjoying some time off between contracts, luxuriating in the new house.

Since I can think of no close friends or family that share my love of aviation history, I drove myself down to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum down in McMinnville, about 40 miles Southwest of Portland.

It’s probably best known for housing the Spruce Goose, the enormous, wood-and-fabric seaplane built by Howard Hughes.  That’s only mildly interesting to me, as the museum also houses what I was really interested in - beautifully restored warbirds.

There is a replica of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane.  Here is an old bi-plane, showing the wooden struts normally covered by fabric.

What really got my interest on this visit, since I’ve read so much about their mission in Vietnam, was the F-105 Thunderchief, aka, the “Thud”.   (The huge grey wing over it belongs to the Spruce Goose).

These were originally designed in the 1950’s to fly supersonic into Russia and drop nuclear weapons.

When Vietnam came about, these planes were fitted with conventional bombs, and flown out of several bases in Thailand against heavily protected targets in North Vietnam.  The defenses there were state of the art radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), provided by the Soviets and Chinese.

Some of the F-105s were fitted with electronic counter-measures to jam the North Vietnamese defenses, known as “Wild Weasels”.   They carried an interesting weapon called a Shrike.  When the Vietnamese SAM batteries activated the radar-guidance for their missiles, a Shrike could home in on that signal and fly right down to the battery. That was really high-tech for the time, when there was no GPS, no JDAMs, and laser-guided bombs were still years away.

The bomb-dropping was very low-tech by today’s standards, and not too far improved from the techniques used in WWII.  The flights of Thuds would fly from Thailand, across Laos, and then drop down into the mountain valleys of North Vietnam, using the mountain ridges to hide them from radar.  If the weather was good, they’d continue on until they visually identified the target, pop up to get some height, roll-over and into a dive-bomb, drop their weapons, and afterburner their way out of the area.

They took such heavy losses, that instead of requiring them to serve a specific amount of time overseas, if they lived through 100 missions, they could go home.

Here are some shots of the cockpit of the Thunderchief.

Lastly, I’d just finished reading about P-38 Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater of WWII.   I believe this plane is restored to look like the one flown by the legendary Jerry Johnson, a triple-ace from Eugene, Oregon. (The book is called Jungle Ace and I highly recommend it).

Col. Johnson shot down 24 enemy aircraft in 265 combat missions.  After surviving all that, he was on his way home from Japan after the war to his wife  and child, when his aircraft was lost in severe weather, never having been found. The aircraft (I believe he was flying a B-24 home), had 5 parachutes for the 7 people aboard.  Johnson and his co-pilot stayed aboard while the other crewmen parachuted down to a beach they’d overflown.  Johnson had planned to turn around and make a crash landing on the sandy beach, but was never seen again.