Clair as a landing field, using other MB-3As that had been equipped with skis, rather than wheels. On that same day, pilots decided to use the frozen Lake St. With the added fuel from the tank, an MB-3A had a flying radius of about 400 miles, a marked improvement over previous pursuit-type aircraft.Īs it turned out, new drop tanks weren’t the only thing that made the news at Selfridge Field on March 5, 1923. The original tanks were designed to be jettisoned once empty, rather than to be kept aboard the aircraft and only jettisoned in an emergency situation, as are today’s tanks. A releasing device was available to the pilot in the cockpit. The tank was suspended from the aircraft’s bomb rack along the centerline of the bottom of the fuselage. The tanks were delivered to Selfridge and on March 5, 1923, several MB-3As took off with the new 37-gallon tanks. With the MB-3As in place at Selfridge Field, Army Air Service engineers at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, began developing an external fuel tank that would expand the range of the new fighter. On Mathe 1st Pursuit Group of the US Army Air Service flew their Boeing MB-3As Pursuit planes with 37 gallon centerline drop tanks and achieved a radius of action of 400 miles! Boeing built and Thomas-Morse designed MB-3 assigned to Billy Mitchell, at Selfridge Field, Michigan, Source: Wikipedia. The problem with the history above is that the first operational use of drop tanks pre-dated the founding of Sargent Fletcher by almost 18 years. (It was bought by a British company in 1994.) So the recorded American aircraft drop tank history looks as follows: Sargent Fletcher drop tank history from 1940 to 2000 The biggest historically American manufacturer of drop tanks Sargent Fletcher only reaches back to its 1940 founding. This blog post is my attempt to answer that need.ĭrop tanks have been around over 90 years in American aviation, but their history prior to the 1942–1945 Combined Bomber Offensive is very obscure for a lot of reasons. The flying services of the American military pioneered the use of fighter drop tanks, but there is no one place where you can go to get a historical ‘thumbnail sketch’ of their introduction and history of use.
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