Where can you buy authentic WWII aircraft manuals, VHS tapes including
WWII gun camera footage, simulations, and other unusual flight related
items? At Planestuff.
Max at Planestuff sent me a few of his manuals to check out, and they
are impressive! I have a P51-D manual, a Boeing B17 manual, and a P38
and P47 manual. Max also sent me an unusual item: an F4 manual in a
ring binder that must be over 400 pages!
The above image is scanned from page 38 of the B17 manual, and shows
the complete instrument layout in the Boeing B17G. For an excerpt from
the text of this manual, go to B17 Starting Procedures. A scan of the checklist follows below:
But there is lots more, and the image below comes from page 12 of the
P51 manual, showing a rendering of the Merlin engine. The gunsight
follows at the top of the page, right hand column.
K14A Computing Sight
Max also took the time to transfer some
Gun Camera Footage
to the .mov format (3.2 MB 7 minutes.) Click the link to view it. The
clips below are from a very close range encounter with a Boeing B17.
The footage is original German WWII Luftwaffe gun camera
footage assembled by the Luftwaffe Air Combat School in 1944. It was
transferred from WWII German 16mm film onto quality VHS format. This
footage is believed to be unavailable from normal archive sources.
The video contains 36 minutes of unrestored, silent black and white
film dramatically showing attacks and destruction/shootdowns of
American, British, and Russian bombers and fighters. Much of the action
occurs among aircraft of the 8th Air Force during their daylight raids
over Germany. Attacks on P38, P47, and P51 AAF fighters are shown, as
well as RAF and Soviet Air Force fighters and bombers being shown shot
down by ME 109's, FW 190's, and ME 110's.
