Aero News had occasion to speak with pilot and aircraft restoration expert John Hess about his rare and beautiful AT-11 Kansan, the U.S. Army Air Forces’s primary bombing trainer during the Second World War.
Approximately 90-percent of the USAAF’s 45,000 bombardiers trained in the aircraft, which derived of Beechcraft’s Model 18 commercial transport. The AT-11 differed from its civilian forebear by way of a transparent nose, a bomb bay, internal bomb racks, and turrets for gunnery training.
Student bombardiers normally dropped 100-pound, sand-filled practice bombs from AT-11s flown—in many instances—by female pilots of the Women Air-force Service Pilots (WASP) organization. WASP pilots fulfilled flight duties such as testing, ferrying, and flying training aircraft—thereby freeing male pilots for combat roles during World War II.
Mr. Hess’s AT-11—a 1941-built specimen dubbed Tantalizing Takeoff—was the fiftieth AT-11 built, and is currently the oldest flying. The aircraft was delivered to Victorville Army Airfield Bomb Training School in February 1942, where it served as a training aircraft for two-years. In 2011, the airplane was purchased by John and Fran Torbett Hess—its current owners.
Maintaining the eighty-year airplane is a complex business to which Mr. Hess attends with diligence and the help of his family and a few friends skilled in the fabrication of aircraft parts.
Components common to the Beech-18 are readily accessible says Mr. Hess, but parts for AT-11 specific installations—such as plexiglass nose panels, bomb-bay doors, and turrets gears—are nigh impossible to find and must be built from scratch.
Mr. Hess and Tantalizing Takeoff are affiliated with the Liberty Foundation, which is currently restoring a C-47 and lovingly rebuilding its storied B-17, Liberty Belle, which the organization vows will fly again.
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