B17 interior colours

[Phartycr0c]

Interior green or bare metal silver?? 

 

Can anyone please help im seeing all sorts of variations. I know the soundproofing was a dark green BTW 

 

Thanks in anticipation 

[Juggernut]

Cockpit and other crew flooring dull dark green.  Fuselage sidewalls natural metal. I think armor plating was also painted dull dark green.

[Phartycr0c]

superb, many thanks

[tomprobert]

As said above, painted areas were Dark Dull Green. 'US interior green' was never used in the B-17.

 

In short: nose, bomb bay, radio room, rear fuselage, tail turret all in natural metal. Cockpit DDG. Floors in the most part wood with black rubber anti slip mats.

 

Tom

 

Edited for typos - damn predictive text!

Edited February 20, 2016 by tomprobert

[Fred Jack]

I love answering collorsof AC in the ETO. I've known pilots, crews, and mechanics. Here is the scoop. Bombers and fighters were factory finished upon completion at factories, but the paints just weren't available in England. What OD got overseas was snatched up by the armor units. Crews especially liked touching up paint chips on their birds, but the only paints available came from British squadrons, so guess what colors were used? If you tried to touch up OD with British Dark Green, no match. Some crews made a sort of blotch camoflouge over the OD, some just painted the whole business. There were a lot of collisions between the partially painted and therefore lighter birds taking off into the fog, and the heavier but prettier fully painted slower birds. Fighters ended up being mostly stripped of Paint. Some squadrons still had paint on the fuselage, but it was RAF Dark Green. Stripes were often roundel yellow, blue, or red. For some strange reason OD turned brown and blue turned faded blue gray until 1945.

[Fred Jack]

Funny thing is, if you asked me what collor things were when I was in the Army, I couldn't tell you.

[Rowen]

A yellow FW-190 like this one? http://www.largescaleplanes.com/articles/article.php?aid=1292

 

-Ro

[Phartycr0c]

I guess the word is my omelette then? although I think bright baby blue might be a little wide of the mark/ 

 

Very many thanks for everyones input, I will post up my progress as I go. 

[Juggernut]

I love answering collorsof AC in the ETO. I've known pilots, crews, and mechanics. Here is the scoop. Bombers and fighters were factory finished upon completion at factories, but the paints just weren't available in England. What OD got overseas was snatched up by the armor units. Crews especially liked touching up paint chips on their birds, but the only paints available came from British squadrons, so guess what colors were used? If you tried to touch up OD with British Dark Green, no match. Some crews made a sort of blotch camoflouge over the OD, some just painted the whole business. There were a lot of collisions between the partially painted and therefore lighter birds taking off into the fog, and the heavier but prettier fully painted slower birds. Fighters ended up being mostly stripped of Paint. Some squadrons still had paint on the fuselage, but it was RAF Dark Green. Stripes were often roundel yellow, blue, or red. For some strange reason OD turned brown and blue turned faded blue gray until 1945.

 

Hmmmm....  I may be responding to an intentional troll?  What do you all think?  But.....

 

I'm sorry, I can't let this one pass unaddressed....  Not to raise a ruckus and in the interests of historical accuracy, where on Earth did you get your information from? From early 1944 onward, 99% of ALL USAAC fighters (the P-61 being one exception) were delivered to the ETO (and most other theatres as well as the ZOI) in natural metal/silver finish.  Yes, British stocks of paint were used by several individual fighter groups (it was not an order from SHAAEF or anywhere above the group level) to conceal them on the Continent (and also in England) but just because one fighter had paint while the next did not is nowhere to my extent of my knowledge, the cause of any collision between aircraft in the fog.  The fog itself is the culprit, not the paint on the airframe.  I've looked at hundreds of official squadron/group records throughout my years of study and have never once seen paint as a cause for a collision.  Please show me one official, WWII USAAC crash report  that states the cause of the crash was paint.  Aircraft don't fly off the runway at top speed or anywhere near it so saying one is faster off the runway than the other because it had less/no paint and that it caused the collision between itself and a slower, painted aircraft is ridiculous.  I don't know what the P-51 Mustang's V1 speed is but I do know it's nowhere near Vmax of the airframe.  Hell, even the slow, loafing little, Piper Cubs didn't take off at Vmax.  You should go back to the source of that information and slap them silly or burn the book as the case may be.  I'm sorry but I believe that information is utterly hogwash unless you can give me chapter and verse where you got that information or an offical USAAC crash report as described above....  I'll then take it up with that person/entitity.  I'm not the smartest guy in the room so I even Googled it but I didn't find anything after repeated attempts.  I'd really like to see an official WWII USAAC collision report where it states that an unpainted aircraft collided with a painted one and that the cause was determined to be the paint on the airframe making the aircraft slower and therefore unmaneuverable. We know the guy in the unpainted plane is faster and he can see better in the fog because of it and he's more manueverable so he should've been able to avoid the crash, right?  It's precisely this kind of bogus information that people start believing and before you know it, the paint was being stripped off all fighters so they wouldn't suffer collisions with the guy that took off after them! 

 

Did paint play a role in the overall top speed of the aircraft?  Yes, it most definitely did but not when it comes to takeoff and/or landing and is certainly not the cause for an aircraft collision in fog (or in clear skies for that matter).

 

Jennings, what about the red-orange Ta152H's and Me163?  Those existed and someone must've seen them at some point?  Maybe there was an overall yellow Fw190.  I do know the Abbeville kids (JG 26?) had yellow nosed 190's...maybe one of the pilots/groundcrew got happy with the paint.  At least that has an aire of plausibility....

Edited February 23, 2016 by Juggernut

[Phartycr0c]

Ok crew question, so as not to open another thread. 

 

Like the fighter pilots, did the pilot & co pilot sit on their parachutes during flight? 

Edited February 25, 2016 by Phartycr0c

[Fred Jack]

Juggernaut, my main info came from Ssgt Marine, crew chief of The famous Millie G of Maj Gilliard in 1969, when I worked with him. It was a former pilot, I knew, who told me about the collisions of faster and slower 17s in the fog. I learned much of this in the 50s talking to pilots and crews at the GM hangers as a kid. Yes paint added weight. That's why when it was realized that planes didn't need to be painted, they were left aluminum. Were you in the Service? When I was in, official directives stayed pretty much in their binders, never to be seen again except by historians who took them for fact.

[Fred Jack]

I also see you mentioned 1944, I was referring to pre 44, when all A/C came Factory OD to the ETO who had no OD paint for repairs or wear and tear.

[Fred Jack]

The three times repetition of my post was accidental. No dig on Mr. Juggernaut. I apologize if it seemed that way.

[Juggernut]

Juggernaut, my main info came from Ssgt Marine, crew chief of The famous Millie G of Maj Gilliard in 1969, when I worked with him. It was a former pilot, I knew, who told me about the collisions of faster and slower 17s in the fog. I learned much of this in the 50s talking to pilots and crews at the GM hangers as a kid. Yes paint added weight. That's why when it was realized that planes didn't need to be painted, they were left aluminum. Were you in the Service? When I was in, official directives stayed pretty much in their binders, never to be seen again except by historians who took them for fact.

 

Funny you should mention B-17's....  I have the entire combat history of the 91st BG on microfilm and in the multitudes of pages of combat loss reports (including assembly collisions) there's no mention of paint causing collisions in the fog.  From all the veteran pilots I've spoken with ( and  there's been a couple or three, including Robert Morgan before he passed) none have ever mentioned anything about flying in the fog other than it was nerve wracking and dangerous as all hell because they couldn't see, not because their plane did or didn't have paint on it.  

 

The decision to remove the paint from aircraft was an order issued because air superiority over the European Continent had been declared and it freed up vast resources that otherwise would've been used for painting aircraft.  Clarence (Bud) Anderson said in a video I have, that the 357th FG would keep their aircraft silver in the winter and painted during the summer months for obvious reasons.  Again, this was done at the group/squadron level.

 

Me?  USAF born and bred.  I don't know about the Army but directives aren't ignored in the United States Air Force.  If they are, somebody usually ends up going from Major to Captain PDQ.

 

I'm sorry, I just don't believe your source information; there's too much primary and secondary source data  that says otherwise including SOP's, flight manuals in addition to the official USAAC documents.

 

As far as the triplicate postings are concerned, you can delete the ones you don't want. 

Edited February 25, 2016 by Juggernut

[Fred Jack]

When I used to hang out at Detroit City Airport, where my dad worked, virtually all the pilots and mechanics were WW2 vets, and they were always talking about the War. All of the twin engine planes were WW2. There were B-25s, B-26, A-26, C-46, C-47, Lockheed Lodestars, Hudsons, a B-24, and two 17s, and I rode them all. The Air Force you knew was not the WW2 Army Air Force. I was in the Army teaching when you were in first grade. A friend of mine Fred Karakas was written up with his F-100 in Life Magazine. In Vietnam he was on a weather recon when he spotted an enemy convoy miles long, so he dropped bombs on the front and rear trucks and stopped the convoy. He then radioed the location and a bomber force went and destroyed it. He was busted by Washington because his orders didn't allow him to drop bombs on a weather recon. Two months later, he was on a bomb run to an enemy target, when he looked and saw enemy flak boats hidden in some trees. He attacked and became a hero for saving his wing in Nam, only to be sent Stateside to be court marshaled because he broke formation. He quit the Air Force. When he told me, I was considering the Air Force, but went Army instead.

Edited February 25, 2016 by Fred Jack