Things were done differently in the US up through the 1960's. Different company but yesterday I learned that a P-47 Thunderbolt landed carrying a 500 lb bomb where there was a malfunction and the bomb exploded. Not only was the pilot okay, but though the tail was obliterated, the wings stayed on. That was one of the things about the P-47: the wings never came off. Those things were built incredibly tough. This is a part of the reason why the P-47 had such great dive performance. (Only late model Spitfires could beat the P-47 in a dive, and only in a narrow altitude range.)
There was another incident where a FW-190 pilot came across a P-47 limping home, with its canopy stuck. So the P-47 pilot had no choice but to go back and land at his airbase. The FW-190 pilot emptied all of his magazines into the P-47, but it just kept on flying.
Greg's airplanes and automobiles is a great channel. Another thing I learned from watching it: Logistics in the form of better fuel refining actually was responsible for a big part of the performance advantage of allied planes in WWII. The allies could supply better quality higher octane fuel, which meant they could run their superchargers and turbochargers at higher pressures to get more horesepower from smaller engines. (Which is why late in the war, BF-109s were using water and methanol injection to try and keep up.)
I find that interesting because every time I hear "Grumman" I think of the big brouhaha in the 1980's in New York City. The MTA ordered dozens? hundreds? of new "flexible buses" from Grumman and within months they all cracked down the middle. There was a transit shortage while the buses were sent out to Long Island to be repaired.
It was a very long time ago, and Google fails me right now, so I'm not sure what the exact problem was, or what exactly a "flexible bus" meant. The only thing I can think of is that was the term of the day for articulated bus.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), in whose buses where the first cracked A-frame problem was noticed in early December 1980 at their Ulmer Park Depot, yanked its NYC Transit Authority fleet for the first time in 1980 (a separate batch for MSBA was built with the problem rectified the next year) and sued Grumman. This lawsuit would result in a settlement to fix all 870 buses built until that time (2,656 examples in all), along with an early termination of the build contract where the final 200 buses of the order were transferred to General Motors.
Yes. They're actually not that heavy compared to a big plastic boat.
Fun bit of trivia is that they're still made. Grumman sold off the division to another company at one point but about 15 years ago, some ex-Grumman managers bought it and spun it out--and then bought the rights to use the Grumman name again from Northrup Grumman.
