4/30/2023 0 Comments Vintage mailplane picsabsolutely amazing,” Smithsonian museum specialist Pat Robinson said last month. The Pearl Harbor attack, which plunged the United States into World War II, killed an estimated 2,400 Americans, wounded about 1,100, and destroyed ships, planes and facilities. Seventy-five years later, the Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibian, with its boat hull for the water and big tires for the runway, sits in the Udvar-Hazy Center’s restoration hangar, a venerable witness to the event that helped create modern America. “This is going to be a one-way trip,” Ruth later said he thought. Their task: Report the location of the six Japanese aircraft carriers, two battleships, assorted escort ships and hundreds of enemy airplanes that had been involved in the attack. With Pearl Harbor a scene of death and devastation that Sunday morning, Plane No. 1063 - its insignia a pelican carrying a mailbag - was ordered to seek out the enemy.įor armament, the 28-year-old pilot, Ensign Wesley Hoyt Ruth, and his five-man crew were issued three World War I-era rifles. It had window curtains and a restroom with porcelain fixtures. Then painted silver and orange-yellow, with a bright green tail and red trim, it was an unlikely combatant.ĭesigned as a small airliner - a “baby clipper” - it was unarmed and part of a unit called Utility Squadron One, which hauled mail, sailors and Navy photographers around the Hawaiian islands. aircraft in existence that flew against the Japanese armada that day. The ungainly Navy airplane at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., is one of the few original U.S. Gray from age and years in the service, the veteran of Dec. 7 sits with other World War II antiques, weary and in need of attention.īut with the 75th anniversary of the 1941 attack this week, and commemorations scheduled in Hawaii and around the country, this survivor, like most who were there that day, has a story. Navy” emblem the old bird got before the war. The tattered Pearl Harbor survivor looks every bit of 78, with weathered skin, rusty bones and the faded “U.S. Its only armament: three old rifles, which the crew would have had to fire through the windows. The mail plane was sent out in search of the Japanese fleet after the Pearl Harbor attack. A Sikorsky JRS-1 flying boat sits in the restoration hangar of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Va.
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