September 3, 1943. Randallfield Air Force Base, Texas. The aviation cadet James Howard Martin, recently turned 18 years old, is sitting in a training room watching footage of accidents landing. Around it there are 40 fellow cadets, all under 22 years. None have flown in combat, but what Martin sees on that screen would change the survival of 10,000 pilots forever.
The filming shows a P47 Thunderbolt approaching to a landing strip in England. The plane is damaged by fire German anti-aircraft The pilot tries lower the landing gear. nothing it happens. The hydraulic system has been perforated. What follows is predictable. The P47, weighing more than 4,500 kg, slides on its metallic belly.
The Sparks fly, the fuselage tears against the concrete and then the explosion. The instructor stops the filming. Gentlemen, this is what happens when the hydraulic system fails. The landing gear does not lower. The pilot has two options: eject [music] and lose an 83,000 plane or try to land on your belly and pray Martin raises his hand.
Lord, why can’t they get the train down manually? The instructor sighs. is the question that everyone does. Why KDET the train Does it weigh 227 kg? The manual system exists, but requires the pilot to turn a crank 147 times while holding the plane in the air with only one hand. In a damaged plane with a failing engine under enemy fire.
[music] Nobody has time for that. Martin didn’t say anything else. in that class, but that night in his bunk [music] I couldn’t stop thinking about those 147 crank turns. If you want to discover how an 18 year old cadet without combat experience resolved a problem that had killed hundreds of Pilots, hit that like button. Helps us share more stories forgotten like this.
The problem of landing gear was not new. Since the start of the war, the engineers of the Army Air Forces had attempted solve it. The P47 Thunderbolt was one of the heaviest houses of the war. Its main landing gear supported almost 5 tons of impact during each landing. The system Hydraulic was the only way to move that mass of steel.
But the system hydraulic [music] was also the most vulnerable system on the plane. one single German machine gun bullet could pierce the lines. A fragment of a flag could destroy the pressure pump. The engineers had calculated the statistics. [music] In 1942, the 12th of the P47, who returned with combat damage lost their system hydraulic.
Of those planes, 67 ended up in landing accidents. Of those accidents, [music] on 34 resulted in the death of the pilot. The numbers were clear. Only in 1942, 847 American pilots died trying to land planes with the train locked waves. They did not die in combat against the luft buff. They died in their own landing strips.
The Pentagon had invested 2.3 million dollars in research. equipment Cartis Ride engineers, Republic Aviation and North American had worked for 18 months in solutions. They tested systems pneumatic backrests, they tested mechanisms gravity drop, They tested reduction gears for facilitate manual turning.
[music] Nothing it worked. The pneumatic system added 34 kg in weight and failed in the cold high altitude. The gravity mechanism I didn’t have enough strength to win aerodynamic resistance. The reduction gears reduced the turns from 147 to 89, but it was still too much for an injured pilot. In March 1943, General Henry Arnold issued a classified memo.
The problem of landing gear is killing more pilots that the German houses in the western front. we need a solution before summer, but the America’s best engineers They had an answer. And then a cadet [music] 18 year old noticed something that everyone they had ignored. James Howard Martin He was an engineering genius.
There was Grown on a farm in Iowa. His father had a mechanical workshop where He repaired John Deere tractors. Martin He had spent his childhood disassembling and assembling agricultural engines, but there were something Martin understood better than any aviation engineer east coast. I understood pulleys. The night after that class, Martin He stayed awake thinking about the problem.
147 crank turns, 227 kg weight, a pilot with only one hand free and then he saw it. The manual system of P47 used a connected crank directly to a steel cable. Each turn of the crank pulled the cable one fraction of a centimeter. It was a system direct drive, same principle who used manual cranes since the antiquity, but Martin remembered something of his father’s farm.
tractors John Deere did not use direct driveto lift agricultural implements. They used a compound pulley system. A compound pulley multiplies the force applied. With two pulleys you can lift twice as much of weight with the same effort. with four pulleys the quadrupleé. The disadvantage is that you need to pull more cable, but each pull requires less strength.
Martín did the calculations in a notebook. If the crank system of the P47 incorporated a system of three pulleys, [music] each turn of the crank would move the train three times less distance. But it would also require three times less strength. That meant that instead of 147 difficult turns, the pilot you would need 441 easy turns. Martin He frowned.
More turns was not the solution, but then he had a second idea. What if the crank wasn’t a crank? What if it were a pedal? The pilots had one hand full with control of the plane, but his feet were relatively free during a emergency approach. The pedals of the tail rudder only required adjustments minors, a pedal system with pulleys composites.
The pilot could pump with foot while keeping both hands on controls and multiplication force of the pulleys would make each pumping will move the train with minimum effort. Martin calculated with a system with four pulleys and a racing pedal of 15 cm, [music] the pilot would need 200 pumps to completely lower the train At a rate of 60 pumps per minute, that was 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
3 minutes. That was manageable. a pilot with a damaged engine you could still keep the plane in the air for 3 minutes. The next morning, Martin requested a meeting with his officer instructor. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Fingch he listened to the cadet’s proposal with Visible skepticism. Martin is telling me saying that he believes he has solved a problem in which engineers Republica Aviation have worked for 18 months. Sir, I don’t think they looked at it.
from the right angle. Finch sighed. And what’s that angle, cadet? Sir, they are engineers aeronautical. They think about hydraulic systems, tires, [music] electromechanical. I grew up on a farm, I thought about pulleys. What Martin didn’t know [music] was that Republic Aviation engineers do had considered pulley systems, but they had been discarded immediately.
[music] The reason, the Composite pulleys required space. Space for additional cables, space for the pulley wheels, space for mounting brackets. The P47 fuselage was designed to millimeter. There was no room for anything extra, but Martin had a solution for that Also, do not add the pulleys inside the fuselage, add them inside the own wheel mechanism.
Landing gear compartment of the P47 I had dead space space that was only used when the train I was withdrawn. [music] Martin proposed install the pulleys in that space dead using the wheel axle itself as an anchor point. Finch looked at the cadet’s drawings for a long time, then took the phone.
Put me with Major Williams Rightfield. Two weeks later, James Martin was on a plane to Ohio. Army Air Forces Materiel Command I wanted to see its design. If you are still watching, you are part of this story incredible. Subscribe to War Stories to avoid miss the outcome. What happened at Whitfield on September 19, 1943 [music] would go down in the history of the American military aviation.
Martin presented his design before a panel of 12 Republic Aviation Engineers, Curtis [music] Wright and the Army Air itself Forces. The presentation lasted 45 minutes. Martin [music] used hand-drawn diagrams and calculations written on graph paper of school. The initial response was exactly what Martin expected.
The engineers pointed out the same problems that had ruled out the idea of pulleys from the beginning. space, insufficient, additional weight, installation complexity. Martin He let him talk for 20 minutes. Then showed his last slide. It was a train compartment diagram landing of the P47. Martin had marked the dead space that no one was using and had drawn how the pulleys fit perfectly in that space.
The chief engineer of Republic Aviation, a man named Alexander Carvelli, stared at the diagram for almost a minute without say anything. Finally he spoke, how much does this weigh? additional system? [music] Martin had the memorized number, 3.2 kg, sir. and installation time, we estimate 4 hours per plane if manufactured as a kit, less if it is incorporated into the line of production.
Cartbell looked at his colleagues. Gentlemen, I think this 18 year old cadet just solve our problem. The system that Martin had designed was called officially Emergency Landing Gear Extension Assist System or Geas.But the pilots called it something else Anyway, they called it the Martin trick. Production began in November 1943.
By February 1944, all the P47s that left the factory from Republic Aviation in Fermingale, New York, they carried the system installed as standard. By April 1944, the Army Air Forces had distributed retrofitting kits to all bases in Europe. The results were immediate and measurable. In the first quarter of 1943, before Martin system, 312 pilots of P47 died in accidents landing related failure hydraulics in the European theater.
In the first quarter of 1944, [music] after implementation system, that figure dropped to 23, a reduction of 93. But Martin’s system not only saved to P47 pilots, engineers They adapted the design for other aircraft. The P51 Mustang received a version modified in March 1944. The P38 Lightning in April, the B17 Flying Fortress in [music] June.
For him end of the war, the Army Air Forces estimated that Martin’s system had directly saved the lives of more than 10,000 Allied pilots, 10,000 men who returned home to their families, 10,000 parents, children, brothers who do not They died crashing into their own landing strips. And everything, because an 18-year-old cadet from a Iowa farm thought of pulleys instead of hydraulics.
James Howard Martin never flew in combat. The war ended before to complete his training advanced, but his contribution to Allied victory was recognized. In July from 1945, Martin received the service medal meritorious at the hands of General Carl Spaz. The citation read, “Due to naivety exceptional in system design aircraft safety that resulted in the preservation of lives of personnel allied flight.
Martin was 20 years old when he received that medal. there was not fired a single shot in the war, but he had saved more lives than the most of the soldiers who had fought on the front line. After the war, Martin studied engineering mechanics at Iowa State University with an army scholarship. He graduated in 1949 and worked for 35 years at John Deere, the same company whose tractors They had taught about pulleys when it was child. He died in 2003.
At age 78, his obituary in the Desmoines Register He mentioned that he was a veteran of the Second World War. I didn’t mention who had saved 10,000 lives. sometimes the brightest solutions come from the least expected people. Sometimes an Iowa farmer sees what aviation engineers can’t see allio.
Sometimes what seems like a trick stupid turns out to be the difference between life and death for thousands of people. Martin’s system is still in use today in day. Every modern military aircraft has some variation of your pulley system composed as a backup for the train landing. The principle is the same as Martin drew in that school notebook in 1943.
Pulleys. The solution was in the pulleys all the time. I just needed someone who thought about tractors in airplane place. What do you think of [music] this story? Did you know the role played by a simple cadet in saving so many lives? let us your comment and subscribe to Stories of War.
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