Recon, South Pacific

[Taco]

Recon flight around the island of YAP (PTYW) (CalClassic's Asia Pacific Airports)

[PRB]

Nice! I haven't visited that one yet. Good choice of plane too!

[Moses03]

Kicking the floats on a slightly worn pre-war Sikorsky JRS-1.

[Willy]

Decisions... Decisions.. Milton Shupe or Bill Lyons? Sikorsky S43 or Beech 18?

[PRB]

Found me a nice Navy JRS-1. Those folks at Sikorski do put together a fine flying boats.

[Willy]

Looks like Igor is a right popular fellow :ernae:

[salt_air]

Yeah Willy ...


That shot Paul's got up there is mighty peaceful looking ...

If you zoom in far enough you can see the crab pots hangin' over the side .... and all the hands on board swiggin' a few cool ones.

[MM]

Last day at work before heading out for a South Seas vacation!

[Moses03]

We headed up the slot near AGGA. Nice hop in these flying boats. Taco had to divert halfway through to protect a convoy of hula girls.

[Taco]

Here are a few picture taken before the poopie hit the fan. Hopefully, I can get things fixed before tonights flight.

[PRB]

Had an uneventful flight up from San Cristobal to Malaita, where we dropped anchor for the night near AGGA. Tomorrow we'll head towards Guadalcanal and check out a rumor of IJN warships snooping about. Probably just rumors.

[Willy]

Caught up with the guys at AGGA and headed on to Guadalcanal (AGGH). Nice flight and the boat don't seem to be leaking....

[Taco]

:salute:A very nice flight. Sure was excited about the possibility of spotting a IJN Big Bad Boy (Battleship). Man! Was the crew screaming about that "If we find it what %^$# are we going to do be a bloody target for her guns! Yea right, give those boys some target practice! I Don't think these machine guns will bother her much!" " Just throw those empty beer bottles at her! Hehe. But alas, we never saw her, but we did throw out those beer bottles, and the whistling sound sounded just like bombs going down.

[Willy]

We took off from Guadalcanal in 1/16mi visibility and headed on up the slot to Munda. There was an opening between cloud layers about 2500ft and that's where I stayed for the flight. All in all a fun flight.

[Taco]

Hey There!


Just a few snaps of the cloud formations that we flew thru, and the weather at Munda upon landing. Recon! heck, at times we were luckly to see the wing tips more or less anything on the land or sea below! As Willy noted it was a fun flight!

[Willy]

We headed on to AGGE in some very nice flight weather for a change. Spotted a CVL enroute and flew a low pass for a photo op. Sure was glad the antiaircraft gunners were napping or something...

[Taco]

Well, we went crazy with the picture taking on this leg. Weather was good, conversation was excellent! One worry is that it was mentioned that some of those bad guys still had control of the inland parts of Bougainville! Sure hope those fellow don't start sending some of big shell thing in our direction.

[Taco]

Again, here are a few pictures of a Marine fighter group outpost. Our crew on this low level pass dropped out with parachutes some care packages for the troops, now don't ask me what it was! But I think there will be a few happy Marines and maybe a few tomorrow with a big hangover. hehe.

[Willy]

I got a late start, but managed to catch up with the guys. After a bit, we decided to put down at Buka (AYBK) and landed on the runway there for the night.

[PRB]

In 1926, a portrait artist named Caroline Mytinger, with her friend Margaret Warner, embarked on a four year journey to the Solomon Islands to document the people and culture of the islands. Caroline's account of her experience is, in light of events that would bring these islands to dubious fame less than twenty years later, is fascinating. There was of course no Henderson Field on the island then known as "Guadalcanar." What there was was unbearable heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and other insects. They arrived in 1927 aboard the steamship Mataram, just after “The Malaita Affair”, as they called it. Some of her descriptions bring the place to life almost 100 years later:

On arriving at Guvuto (Tulagi):“The first thing I could see of the Solomon Islands was the gray corrugated-iron side of a huge warehouse. The heat was writhing off it's iron roof so that the top fronds of some coconut palms sticking up behind looked as if they were out of focus. The sky above was the blank white of pure glare...”

As they approached Malaita the first time: “With the early morning sun behind it the island was a long slender strip of solid behind a stretch of water so dazzling with sunbursts that the land itself seemed colorless. It was an abstractionist's marinescape. Both ends of the hundred-mile island were left unfinished, dissolved in hot vapor the colorless note pf sky and water. The portion dead ahead of us was flat gray from jagged skyline, sharp against a glaring sky, to level shore. There was no height to those unexplored mountain tops, no nearness to the white surf below, which looked like teeth clenched on the lower lip of ocean, a barrier to outsiders who would penetrate the mysteries of the island.”

From: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands, Around the Coral Sea, by Caroline Mytinger, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1942.

http://www.headhuntrevisited.org/index.html

[Moses03]

Some snaps from the flight to Buka. The hop started out soggy but cleared up later on. Like Willy said, we landed on the hard surface for a change. Good time to scrape some barnacles off.

[MM]

We encountered a tropical storm shortly after takeoff out of Ballalae. Got the news professionals to take a few photographs--what's a few bottles of hooch, anyway? The guys think that the Navy is swell...but where's the bar?