Night Fighters And Fuel Tanks

Heroes Remember

Night Fighters And Fuel Tanks

Transcript

Later, the night fighters had a method of mounting the guns on top of the fighter at an angle. He'd sneak up underneath and fire his guns and if he was right underneath you, he'd hit your fuel tanks. If that happened, then you'd just explode. At the start of the war, the fuel tanks didn't have protective sealing meaning if there was a hole in the tank it would just leak out. But later fuel tanks had the protective rubber coating where it would seal but I know we had damaged one fuel tank one time and the flight engineer, now his duties were to see that the systems in the Lancaster worked properly. He kept an hourly log of the engine instruments and he was responsible for the consumption of the fuel. And he could cross-feed whereby he could feed all four engines from one damaged tank or each engine from each tank depending so if you have damaged fuel tank that's leaking you would cross-feed all your engines from that fuel to use it up before you lost too many.

Description

Mr. Kondra describes the German strategy of attacking the unprotected belly of a Lancaster, where vulnerable fuel tanks led to many aircraft exploding in mid-air. He goes on to describe countermeasures to make fuel tanks less vulnerable.

William Kondra

On January 14, 1922, William Kondra was born in Prudhomme, Saskatchewan. He finished Grade 8 at his local school, and, with difficulty, finished high school through correspondence. He was working on local farms for a pittance, so he decided to enlist in the Air Force, where he trained as a bomb aimer/front gunner. Mr. Kondra's tour of duty was completed with his original crew members aboard a Lancaster Bomber, and primarily consisted of air strikes on industrial Germany. Mr. Kondra offers many insights into the technology, strategy and stresses of flying in a bomber.

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