FORT BRAGG 4

Kaiser

While we were working on rewiring the H-21's at Bragg, the army was testing a couple of Cessna side by side jet planes.  I don't know what the army wanted them for but they were around Simmons Field for a couple of weeks.  We had a guy in our team I will call "Jones" (Not his real name)..  Jones saw them park the "Jet Fuel" tanker near our truck one afternoon to leave it overnight.  He mentioned a couple of times about how great his Kaiser car would run on "Jet Fuel".  I thought that he was kidding.  He wasn't.  Sometime that afternoon, before we left to go back to the barracks, Jones swiped some "Jet Fuel" and put it in his Kaiser car.  Jones had someone else riding with him and they left first.  I was riding back in another car and Jones car made it a few hundred yards before stalling.  We stopped to see what his problem was and he told us that he had just added some "Jet Fuel" to his tank and it should be running great.  Well, "Jet Fuel" is basically kerosene but he didn't know that.  Again, ignorance is dangerous.  They took the rest of us back to the barracks and someone drove back to help Jones.  He had to drain the tank and the carburetor, buy more gas, and was not back until late that evening.

H-13

There was a lot going on at Bragg.  They were just starting to experiment on arming H-13 choppers with two 30 cal machine guns mounted to the skids.  They aimed roughly and watched the tracers to put the rounds on the target.
They had the first "Flying crane" chopper there for testing.  The crane had two pilots.  One facing forward as normal and another facing backward to operate the crane part.  The thing could lift a large tank or a "Pod" full of soldiers or equipment and drop it off quickly and go back for more.  From the looks of it they are still the same basic configuration now.

They had the army "Square dance" team there practicing. I guess it was the army equivalent of the Blue Angles. Well, sort of.  They had orange and white H-13 choppers with stripped rotors so that it looked like pinwheels spinning as they were flying.  No, it wasn't for looks.  It was so they could see each others rotor during their maneuvers.  They would do-se-do and spin around and do something like square dancing.  They must not have kept it long because I can't find anything on YouTube about it but I did find the link below.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/do-si-do-in-the-sky-the-u-s-army-helicopter-square-dance-team

I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.
Charles Lindbergh 
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_lindbergh.html#GZVWRFbffjpLgM6W.99