The dark mushroom shaped cloud rose some 3.7 miles into the sky so large that it could be seen from Kyushu, one of the Japanese home islands, 98 miles away. The aircraft was purchased by the Pima Air and Space Museum in 2014 and is reported as being stored offsite. FF443 was found at an airfield in Tullahoma, TN in the 1970s by the Military Aircraft Restoration Corporation based at Chino, CA, where some stabilization and restoration was carried out (Picture 7). It is displayed as a US Navy SB2A Buccaneer (Pictures (5 & 6). FF860 can be seen at The National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, FL. Both are former RAF Bermuda aircraft that were never delivered. The USMC - needing an aircraft for night fighter trainer - took some of the SB2A-3s and assigned them to two squadrons at Naval Air Station (NAS) Vero Beach, Florida. The US Navy stuck with the aircraft, buying around 80 aircraft used the ones that did not make it to the Netherlands East Indies and actually placed an order for a carrier version (the SB2A-3) with folding wings in 1943/1944. The Royal Navy cancelled the balance of the order using the few they received as target tugs, ground maintenance trainers or scrapped them outright. In the case of the UK, the SB2A (Picture 4) was determined to be “totally inadequate’ for service. Only after receipt did the buyers find out how badly it performed. It the meantime, the design was sold to the US and The Netherlands. It took Brewster from mid-1937 until mid-1941 to finish the prototype. 50 caliber machine guns in the nose, two. When completed, the SB2A (Picture 3) weighed in at 12.200 pounds, had two. 30 caliber machine gun facing rearwards and a 500-pound bombload. The quality of its work was so poor that in April 1942, the company was seized by the US government and began assembling Corsairs.īrewster had previously designed a dive bomber, the SBA (picture 2), which the US Navy bought but had it manufactured as the SBN by its in-house Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, PA The SBA was a smallish dive bombe r (3,759 pounds) with a 950 hp engine, a single. It was beset by labor unrest and corruption. It is important to say Brewster Aeronautical Corporation - a former carriage maker - was poorly managed and operated. This is the Brewster SB2A Buccaneer (Picture 1), a proposed Scout Bomber so poorly designed and manufactured that many were simply scrapped upon arrival at US Navy, Royal Navy/Fleet Air Arm and USMC bases.
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