I attended a presentation tonight (8/23/06) at the Grissom Air Museum by World War II veteran Harry Tharp. He was an aviation technician in the Army Air Corps and served in fighter squadrons in the South Pacific. He was terrific! What a memory!
When shipped out, his squadron first trained in some Australian outback. They had to literally level the anthills to make a runway. Besides ants, there were some trapdoor spiders and a type of python ranging in length from 10-14 feet. In addition to the interloping pilots and aircraft maintenance crews, those were the residents of that desolate area.
Mr. Tharp told of one pilot returning from a training mission talking about the snake that crawled from the engine into the cockpit after takeoff. “What’d you do?” he asked. I could imagine all kinds of screaming and potential hysterics. Instead, he told us that the pilot exclaimed, “There was only room for one of us, so I flipped the plane over and threw it out!”
I suppose that wouldn’t provide even the most creative director enough material for a feature length film.
(photo: P39 trainer/fighter)
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