Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is an amazing video that popped up in my recommendations, and that I could not pass up.

“Out Of The Sun” is a General Dynamics promo film for the F-16. Unlike a lot of plane specific promo films I’ve run across, though, this one concentrates mostly on air combat history and tactics, building towards a case that the F-16 is the “fighter pilot’s fighter”.

What makes this amazing to me is the interviews in this video:

Aces interviewed include W.C. Bill Lambert from World War 1 (footage of Manfred Baron von Richthofen is also in this segment), the second-ranking American ace of World War I. Lambert claimed 18 air-to-air victories, eight fewer than “Ace of Aces” Eddie Rickenbacker, and won the DFC. Also interviewed is the Luftwaffe’s Adolf Galland who flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2; the Royal Air Force’s Douglas Bader and Robert Stanford-Tuck, Norway’s Sven Heglund, American David Lee “Tex” Hill, the WWII Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann; U.S. Air Force pilot Francis Gabreski from World War 2 and the Korean War; USAF pilot Ralph Parr from the Korean War; and Steve Ritchie, the only ace from the Vietnam War.

As best as I can tell, all of these interviews were done specifically for this film. (Mr. Lambert and Sir Bader both passed in 1982: according to the YouTube notes, this dates to 1983, so I think it is possible that the makers managed to get in interviews with both men before they passed.)

While I was checking Sir Bader’s date of death, I ran across this story that I had not heard before:

During one visit to Munich, Germany, as a guest of Adolf Galland, he walked into a room full of ex-Luftwaffe pilots and said, “My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive”.

Bonus #1: here’s a 1965 interview with Sir Douglas Bader.

Bonus #2: I don’t have any other place to put this, and it is kind of related. The backstory: Saturday night, we were watching “The High and the Mighty” and we noticed the Coast Guard was flying B-17s. This, in turn, led me to research the operational history of the B-17 (and, yes, the Coast Guard did use B-17s, in the PB-1G variant, as late as October of 1959). That in turn led me to this rather remarkable paragraph:

On 28 May 1962, N809Z, piloted by Connie Seigrist and Douglas Price, flew Major James Smith, USAF and Lieutenant Leonard A. LeSchack, USNR to the abandoned Soviet arctic ice station NP 8, as Operation Coldfeet. Smith and LeSchack parachuted from the B-17 and searched the station for several days. On 1 June, Seigrist and Price returned and picked up Smith and LeSchack using a Fulton Skyhook system installed on the B-17. N809Z was used to perform a Skyhook pick up in the James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965. This aircraft, now restored to its original B-17G configuration, is on display in the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

As great and good FotB RoadRich said when I brought this up, it’s a wonder that they were even able to get into the air, given the weight of the giant brass balls on everyone involved.

“Fishing from Airplanes for Soviet Secrets: What was Skyhook – Operation Coldfeet?” from Dark Docs.