IS AIREVAC MOVING?

AirEvac has asked for a permit from the City of Sullivan to construct a helicopter base next to the Hospital in Sullivan.

WHAT PLAN?

Now that we have heard from Concerned Critter and have gotten the “official” explanation of the MoDOT letter, I want to print my opinion of what it really means. 

It appears that MoDOT has been under some pressure to take a position on the closure.  I do not think that it came from the Feds, closure is off the table at this point.  It appears that outside political pressure has been introduced to get MoDOT to produce this letter. 

Take notice here that the letter simply states that they are not going to oppose.  What it does not state is that they are going to sign off on a closure plan.  What has happened here is that the city has not provided a plan; there is nothing to sign off on.   This does not mean that the city can shove any plan in front of MoDOT and the will sign off on it.  MoDOT is the same as any other governmental agency; they have to follow the law. 

I do know this; there is no support anywhere in the FAA organization for what St. Clair is trying to say is a plan, or what you would call the St. Clair concept of a plan.  It does not appear that the city has a clear understanding of what a plan is supposed to consist of, let alone have the resources to put a plan in front of the Feds.  

CONCERNED CRITTER'S EXPERT OPINION

According to Concerned Critter, the FAA is going to allow closure because MoDOT is telling them to.  That would almost make sense if the FAA wanted to close the airport.

From Concerned Critters comment, "If you want it in layman's terms, the FAA has found its scapegoat in MoDOT and now will say the airport can close on the recommendation from the state of Missouri."

5190.6b 22.3

The Administrator has delegated to ADOs and regional offices the authority to release, modify, or amend assurances of individual sponsor agreements under specific circumstances as prescribed in this chapter. ADOs and regional airports divisions do not have the authority to modify the list of assurances in a grant agreement. In addition, ADOs do not have the authority to effect a release permitting the abandonment, sale, or disposal of a complete airport. (See Order 1100.5, FAA Organization - Field, issued February 6, 1989.)

22.20. Release of Entire Airport.

a. Approval Authority. The FAA Associate Administrator for Airports (ARP-1) is the FAA approving official for a sponsor’s request to be released from its federal obligations for the purpose of abandoning or disposing of an entire airport before disposal can occur. That authority is not delegated. A copy of the sponsor's request, including related exhibits and documents, and a copy of the FAA Airports regional statement supporting and justifying the proposed action shall be provided to ARP-1.

If you want it in layman’s terms, the airport is not going anywhere until the ARP-1 says it is.  That means that closure is off the table until the ARP-1 says the airport is being operated the way the FAA says it will be operated.  The city if they want to continue with the closure will have to prove that they are following all the rules. 

This is one of the rules.

NOTE: Only benefits to the airport may be cited as justification for the release, whether tangible or intangible. The nonaviation interest of the sponsor or the local community – such as making land available for economic development – does not constitute an airport benefit that can be considered in justifying a release and disposal.

In layman’s terms, the airport property will never be turned into a strip mall. 

CANDIDATES DISSAGREE ON AIRPORT FUTURE

I find it difficult to digest this article in the Missourian. It almost made me throw up. Id be interested if this was a joint forum or if these guys were interviewed separately, I’m betting these were separate interviews. Someone please correct me if im wrong.

How appropriate that the great Mayor Blum gets to counteract every comment from the opponent “Ramon”. Its almost disgusting the favoritism Domke gives Blum in this article.

The citizens of St Clair deserve so much more than being force feed by Domke and the Missourian.

This airport isn’t going anywhere soon and if Childers is ready to send a letter saying all compliance issues are taken care of then so be it but he has no idea what compliance is about and he is about to find out from the Federal side. He and Domke are just a mirror puppet in Blum’s game.

3,4,5

April 10. MISSION 2.  Diest-Schaffen, Belgium

This was a lot easier than the first one, a six-hour flight We were only over enemy territory about two and one-half hours The overcast caused us to miss the primary target and we unloaded on the secondary, an aircraft assembly plant.

 Flak was light.

 We were briefed for 33 guns at the target but received no battle damage to “The Erie Ferry.”
We encountered no fighter opposition had very good fighter escort and saw no ships go down.

April 11. MISSION 3. Sietttn, Germany

Today we had it rough our primary target was Posen. Poland.  We missed it and hit the secondary, an aircraft assembly plant in Stettin, northeast Germany
The fighter support was inadequate, with no help from the Danish coast to the target and back to the Danish coast Jus before bombs away we were attacked by 12 ME, 110’s They made two frontal passes, sweeping under our formation T- did not knock down any of the ships in our group but a plane went down from the group directly behind us.
Flak was heavy over the target — 60 guns — but our ship received no battle damage. We were flying zero-one-three. One of the 332nd squadrons ships.
As we entered Germany one of our Forts aborted for Sweden with number one and number two engines knocked out by coastal flak
On the way out Vaughn’s ship went down He Just made e Danish coast, hot two of his boys bailed out over the Baltic Sea A fire was seen in the middle of the ship.
Donald Cash’s crew, that we trained with at Dalhart, went down on this one. We learned few days later.  They came across and started flying the same time we did, so it must have been one of their first five raids On that crew were Lt. John F. Harris pilot Lt Milton V. Wilson, co-pilot; Flight Officer John Marchetti, navigator; Lt Jim B Goodner, Jr bombardier; S ‘Sgt Thomas 0. Obechina, _engineer: S/Sgt. Clinton M. Gill, radio operator-gunner Sgt Edward A. Braun gunner, Sgt Jennings A. Ball, gunner; Sgt. Roger W. Fuller, gunner, and Sgt Donald L. Cash, gunner.
Some time later Fred received a clipping from his folks, taken from the Pekin Ill. Times, concerning this crew, this raid and this war.  The clipping carried a two-column picture of Cash’s crew, taken at Dalhart, and a sort of editorial which read:
“Sometimes I wonder if we appreciate the SIZE of the battle that is NOW going on over Europe.

I mean the air war.
The world was shocked by Tarawa
Worst death toll in Marine history.
Even a book has been written about it
Say — a battle as costly as Tarawa is going on nearly every day in the air over Europe.
See that picture above”
Take a good look at the man standing on the right hand end of the line
He’s a Pekin boy, just 21
Sgt Roger Fuller.
Last week is parents. Mr. .and Mrs. Dwight C. Fuller. 1220 Charlotte Street, got word that he had
been “missing in action since April 11.”

We checked up in back copies of the Times and found that 64 bombers had been lost by the U.S Air Force alone that day.

April 12. MISSION 4. Augsburg, Germany

This was to be a tough one but the mission was abandoned just after we got over France, because of bad weather and low thick clouds.
We went to bed thinking we would get credit for the mission. When we went down to the operations shack the next morning, however, there was a notice on the bulletin board’ ‘No credit for mission of 4-12-44.” Third Division Headquarters had rescinded the credit.
But on April 16, four days later, another order came through giving us credit for the mission after all. We were very glad to hear this.

AprIl 13. A Close Call for Crew 69

The thirteenth was an unlucky, or in another sense, a very lucky day for Crew 69.   On the way to Augsburg again, we got hit by three 50-caliber machine gun bullets. Some guy in another 17 in the formation was a touch careless with his test firing We always test fire the guns soon after leaving England
One of the slugs came through the nose of 493, barely missing Counihan and ripping through Getz’ pant leg, grazing the skin.
Another bullet knocked out a quarter of the ship’s oxygen supply.
The third was a tracer bullet. It started a fire in the wing, which put itself out a little later. If the tracer had been the one which tore into the oxygen system we might have blown up, they said
We aborted from about half way across the Channel, therefore received no credit for the raid McMeekin’s crew, who shares Hut A with us, claims that Lt. Wertsch is bad luck for their ship, 493. He flew his first mission in it as Mac’s co-pilot with Mahathey flying left waist. They caught a lot of flak and lost the hydraulic system. It was in the hangar for a couple of weeks and then we happened to get it the day it came out We really fixed it up good this time Since the left wing cannot be replaced they have decided to junk the ship.  A lucky day for Getz and Crew 69.

The boys from the PRO — public relations office — took Getz’ picture with his pant leg ripped open to show what a close call he had. The picture appeared in lots of stateside newspapers, especially in sunny Cal. The caption they wrote for the picture was dramatic as hell, even if it didn’t pay a great deal of attention to humdrum facts The caption read:

A bullet from a German fighter plane cut the leg of his trousers 

MODOT LETTER

March 22, 2013
Mr. Jim Johnson
Airports Division Manager
FAA Central Region
901 Locust
Kansas City, MO 64106

Re: St. Clair Regional Airport

Dear Mr. Johnson:

For the past several years, the City of St. Clair has pursued closure of the St. Clair Regional Airport. During this time, MoDOT worked closely with the Federal Aviation Administration and the City to identify alternatives to closure, but these efforts have not impacted the City’s desire to close the airport.
Because the City has made its desire clear, MoDOT will not oppose the City’s request to close the airport. However, all federal airport closure requirements must be met by the City.
Sincerely,

MODOT letter

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If anyone would like to read the letter from MODOT to St Clair that seems to be confusing. These are the Compliance issues that need to be fixed first. Then the letter from MODOT

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Obviously the english major forgot to read the second line on the second paragraph.

Definition of COMPLIANCE

1

a : the act or process of complying to a desire, demand, proposal, or regimen or to coercion

b : conformity in fulfilling official requirements

Looks like more of I told you so than they are siding with the city to me.

The Thirty-Two Missions

Easter Sunday, April 9, 1944.

MISSION 1. Warnemunde, Germany.

On April 9, 1944, the nation observed its third wartime Easter. For many U.S. servicemen, it was a day of war, rather than one devoted to the remembrance of Christ.
On Easter Sunday, 1944, we flew our first combat mission as Crew 69 of the 94th heavy bombardment group, U.S. Eighth Air Force,
from a base near Bury St. Edmunds in West Suffolk, southern England; we took off before dawn for a daylight raid on five targets in northern Germany and Poland. In one of the deepest penetrations made by the 8th Air Force up to that time, an estimated 500 to 750 American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators with nearly 1,000 escorting fighter planes made a wide sweep over the Baltic Sea.
The Forts and Liberators bombed aircraft factories in Poseri, Poland and Four other cities north and northeast of Berlin. Pilots of the escorting Mustang, Lightning and Thunderbolt fighter planes reportedly shot down 20 Nazi planes in an air battle and destroyed others on the ground at
German airfields.
For Crew 69 it was a nine-hour mission, four hours on oxy gen at 25,000 feet, five hours over enemy territory. We got some close flak over the target — an aircraft factory at Warnemunde — but some of the more ‘experienced fliers termed it “just medium.”
We had good fighter escort all the way and saw no enemy fighter planes. Other bomb groups which made the deeper penetrations to Posen, Poland; Gdynia, the Polish port near Danzig; and Marienburg told of fierce, opposition in some instances and placed the number of enemy interceptors at about 600 planes.
Posen, about 150 miles east of Berlin, Was the site of large manufacturing plants for Focke-Wolf fighter airplanes relocated there from German cities to escape destruction. German military men had claimed the city was out of reach of allied bombers It had never been attacked.  
A communiqué issued by Lieut. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz’ Strategic Air Forces headquarters said- that Focke Wolf plants in all Five of the target cities were bombed in clear weather. The plants were described as interrelated factories that constituted a vital production complex for single-engine fighters of the Luftwaffe.
To reach their targets the American bombers crossed and re-crossed the most heavily defended parts of Germany and proved that hardly an acre of Hitler’s fortress was sate from daylight bombing raids.
After nine hours in the air, Crew 69 landed back at its base in England with one mission completed and 31 more to go.
The United States that day lost 31 heavy bombers and eight fighters. Some 318 American fliers were dead or missing in action. Many others were wounded.
We had no way of knowing how many Germans were dead or injured because of the bombings.
That was Easter Sunday, 1944. 

LEADING LADY PREFACE

Fred Arthur Muehler told me these stories in his own words; we went over them mission by mission. 

Part I

By Preston P. Clark. Jr.

PREFACE

These are pages from a gunner’s diary They were written at a U.S. Air Force base in England during the spring, summer and fall of 1944 The story actually began in November, 1943, when ten Americans in their teens and 20’s, trained in various specialties of aerial warfare as practiced on heavy bombers, were brought together as a combat crew for training at Dalhart Army Air Base, Dalhart. Texas.

Unfortunately the diary does not date back to those days at Dalhart. Let it suffice to say that it was snowing cats and dogs when we got there, we were snowbound on Christmas day, and we saw nothing but snow below all the way to Nebraska when we flew away in February.

At the Point of Embarkation, Kearney, Nebraska, they gave us a new crew number — 165 — another clothing check and several more health, security and survival lectures It was blowing up a snow storm when we taxied out and took off from the Kearney strip headed for New England We called at Grenier Field. N.H. and Presque isle, Maine, then hopped up to Goose Bay, Labrador, across to Iceland, and then over to Prestwick. Scotland. 

Fred often rode just behind the pilot and co-pilot seats, and told me that when they took off it was snowing so hard that they took off on instruments, because they could hardly see the runway.   After they got off the ground, air traffic control told them to come back and land, due to the weather, the pilot refused to do so, he would have never found the field, so they went on to Scotland.

We left our airplane at Prestwlck and rode an English train down to a U.S. Air Force staging base. “Somewhere in England ‘The whole crossing from Dalhart to England covered only about a week even with the time lost eating, sleeping and briefing at the various way stations.

The enlisted men were sent from the staging base to The Wash, over on the southeast coast, for a bit of brushing up on 50-caliber machine gun marksmanship. We never did find out what the officers were doing those two weeks, but general consensus was that they were holed up in some swank London boarding house, enjoying their last, fast-fading days as non-combatants.

We finally got a reprieve from The Wash and headed south again, arriving some five hours after at the typical little English town of Bury St Edmunds. The picturesque hamlet got its name from the boy King of East Anglia. Name of the town was switched from Beodericsworth (“full of happiness and prosperity”) to St. Edmund’s Bury where St. Ed was laid to rest there in 987A.D. –

The officers must have grown tired of London, or wherever they’d We found them awaiting our arrival at the base, some six miles or so gut of Bury, at a little wide place In the road called Rougham.

We found that we bad become Crew 69 of the 410th Bombardment Squadron, 94th Bombardment Group (Heavy). We were assigned bunk space In one of the Nissen huts, which looked like giant oil drums cut in half down the middle with the oval side up The 94th was scattered about over some eight or ten square miles of thickly wooded southern England We thought at first we’d landed in the middle of  Sherwood Forest. It was a beautiful place, at its freshest and greenest when we arrived.

We didn’t have much time to enjoy the scenery. They put us right to work. We got there in March, just when the cold days of English winter were fading into the good-flying- weather days of spring We arrived about the time they ‘started sending the heavies over in lots of 800 to 1,000, with an equal number of fighters to go along for protection. Every time the weather was clear enough they were sending out a maximum effort — all the ships they could put into the air.’ Idea was to destroy German resources and to weaken the enemy in every way possible so that the invasion of the Continent, which came four months after our crew reached England, would have the best possible chance for success.

We started out flying an old olive drab colored Fortress named “The Erie Ferry.” It was number 653 Then we flew a couple in number 180, “The Eagle’s Wrath,” before we were assigned an airplane of our own.  They gave us a shiny silver new B-17G. It was the pride of the U.S Air Force (notwithstanding opinions of the average 8-24 crew member to the contrary) and they called it the Flying Fortress because It fairly bristled with 50-caliber machine guns — 12 of them. The Fortress could carry 10 tons of bombs and had a range of better than 3.500 miles. Her wing span was 103 feet 9 inches her height, 19 feet 1 inch and she measured 74 feet 9 inches from nose to tail Loaded; she weighed 65.000 pounds, and empty, approximately 35,000. She got the tremendous power to carry all that weight from four 9- cylinder. 1,200 horsepower Wright Cyclone engines never let an airplane engine be called a motor).  Her top speed was 300 miles per hour; she cruised at about 225 most of the time.

When we started trying to choose a name for the new 17 it was about as big a problem as naming a new baby.  We surveyed the ships around us and noted these names Tuff Eddie. Idiot’s Delight. Airborn Spare. Mighty Warrior (Gagon’s crew), The Gimp (Stopulos’ crew in the 9lth). Dutchess, Frenese I and II, Gremlin, The Shady Lady. Fortress McHenry. Morgan ’s Raiders, My Asam Dragon. The Rebel Queen, Mission Mistress, Flak Buster. Rosie, Joker. St. Christopher’s Kids. Friday 13th, The Latest Rumor (Bavtos’ crew in the 100th), Nick’s Place, Shack Bunny (385th). Puddin, The Better Half and Old Hound Dog.

By the time we got a ship of our own, we had been shifted to another squadron as a Pathfinder (lead) crew.  That’s what really suggested the name we chose lot our new ship, number 668. We christened her the “Leading Lady,” and had the name painted on both sides of her nose in script two feet high. We flew her on a lot of rugged raids and she took a lot of battle damage, but she was still operational when we left England. Last we heard of her they said she’d gotten too old to lead the way so they took the Mickey (radar) equipment out of her and made her a wing ship in the 385th Bomb Group. After the Lady had given up the best flying hours of her life and sustained terrific battle damage, they had to stick her back in the rear end of a strange squadron in a strange group. With “Leading Lady” painted on her nose in letters two feet high.

One more paragraph of preface, and then the diary.  

The members of the crew about which the material was written were:

V. Allan Wertsch, pilot. Delevan, Illinois.

Ralph S. Taylor, co-pilot. Grande Lodge, Michigan.
Richard P. Getz, navigator, San Diego.
Mark J. Counihan, bombardier, Iron River, Michigan.
John S. Stepanski, Jr., Mickey navigator, Detroit.
Fred Arthur Muehler, engineer and top turret gunner, Pacific, Missouri
Cecil R. Mahathey, assistant engineer and left waist gunner, Winston-Salem, NC.
Lloyd Elliott, radio operator-gunner, Bakersfield, California,

 Preston P. Clark. Jr.  Gunner. Abilene, Texas.
In addition to these there was a lad named Alfred Beacon a Bostonian, who was a member of the original crew, from Dalhart until about the time we reached England. He was replaced by a Polish boy named Ted Kosinski. who was with us from Wash days until we became a lead crew Then there was a kid from Staten Island on the original crew whose r.ame was Lawrence Dunn We never called him anything Larry He was the ball turret gunner and stayed with us we became a lead crew arid got the radar hat in place of e bail turret  The diary is reproduced on the following pages,  just as it was first written It is the mission-by-mission account of the  Operational Tour of the “Leading Lady,” a great airplane, and of the crew who flew her, a great bunch of guys. 

NEW HANGARS AT WASHINGTON

$180,000 investment by the city of Washington, and will pay off in 4 years.  That is how an airport is supposed to be operated.  One of the most profitable public projects by the city.  WOW!!  The best part is that they are less expensive than hangars at St. Clair which has no fuel, courtesy car, mechanics, terminal, or indoor plumbing.