Consolidated B-24 Tour - Subscriber's Request! - Part 1

Video from the channel Kermit Weeks Channel - Over 480 Videos to See! about Consolidated B-24 Liberator, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 25:55. Language: English. Video type: Onboard.

Kermit Weeks shows the outside and inside of the B-24J Liberator on display at Fantasy of Flight, in a room that serves as a small museum while another part of the facility goes back to being a workshop. This is the first of two parts and responds to subscriber requests. The tour starts with the exterior: access through the nose gear well, the turbochargers under the engine nacelles, the engines, the bomb bay doors, the twin tail, and the tail turret. It then enters through the bomb bay and moves toward the tail, passing the radio operator's station, the waist gunners' positions, and the tail turret.

The aircraft is fitted with 1,200-horsepower 1830 engines, the same type used on a DC-3. Its bomb bay doors do not open outward; instead they roll up along the sides of the fuselage via a chain and sprocket wheel. The control surfaces are fabric-covered and the rest is metal. It does not carry the model's retractable ball turret, because it was fitted for a radar instead. Inside, it retains the zinc chromate primer, bomb shackles, oxygen bottles and equipment, wooden ammunition boxes, the ADF loop antenna, the socket for heated flight suits, the toilet, and the bomb hoist mount. In the tail turret, Weeks explains the azimuth and elevation controls and the dead-man pedal that must be pressed for the turret to work. The original radios were replaced, and the aircraft has never been restored: it has only gone through an inspection with repairs as needed.

According to Weeks, the aircraft flew with British aviation in the China-Burma-India theater. At the end of the war it remained in India, where the Indian Air Force kept using it. In the early 1970s, its previous owner bought it and flew it to California, still with the .50-caliber machine guns on board. Weeks acquired it in the early 1990s along with a B-26, picked it up at Palwaukee near Chicago, and on its first flight had to stop at Kankakee because of engine trouble. He considers it an excellent candidate for restoration given the amount of original equipment it retains.