The Halifax bomber

That's what the squadron were using when we arrived. And there were two main Halifaxes. There were the first one with the Merlin engines, and it was called the Mark 2. It was rather badly under-powered, and just at this time as we were arriving, they were getting the new Halifaxes with the radial engines, which added, I think, about 340 horse power to each of four motors. So, at this time, the CO, who was Joe Lacombe from Quebec, I flew with him one day. He was bouncing his brand new Hali and, which you didn't do, you didn't bounce the old one, the same as you didn't bounce the Wellington. Anyway, he was having great fun bouncing it. So it had loads of power, very, very fine bomber. Now, I, I know the people that flew Lancasters would be all worried about me praising the Hali, but the Hali 4 was just as powerful as a Lancaster. It had some, a couple of small, inferior ceiling. It flew at 19,000 feet, where the Lanc would fly at 22. And I think the Lanc also did slightly faster, maybe 15 or 20 mph faster than the Hali. But it didn't take a bigger load. We had big loads. In fact, my log book shows in great many cases the load that we actually carried. Well, by today's standards, it was pretty small. The wingspan of 103 feet, the length of about 72, and four motors of course. And our craft normally would carry 8,000 pounds of, of bombs. Of course, now, this varied depending on where you were going. If you’re going on long missions, you had to cut your bombs down seriously to add petrol tanks. And we had, our plane had petrol tanks in the wing, and there were, there were drop tanks too, and, which carried extra load, and you dropped the whole thing as, as it was emptied. But normally we carried about, about four ton, about 8,000 pounds.