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Description
Mr. Kondra describes the German strategy of attacking the unprotected belly of a Lancaster, where vulnerable fuel tanks led to many aircraft exploding in mid-air. He goes on to describe countermeasures to make fuel tanks less vulnerable.
Transcription
Later, the night fighters had a method of mounting the guns on top of the fighter at an angle. He’d sneak up underneath and fire his guns and if he was right underneath you, he’d hit your fuel tanks. If that happened, then you’d just explode. At the start of the war, the fuel tanks didn’t have protective sealing meaning if there was a hole in the tank it would just leak out. But later fuel tanks had the protective rubber coating where it would seal but I know we had damaged one fuel tank one time and the flight engineer, now his duties were to see that the systems in the Lancaster worked properly. He kept an hourly log of the engine instruments and he was responsible for the consumption of the fuel. And he could cross-feed whereby he could feed all four engines from one damaged tank or each engine from each tank depending so if you have damaged fuel tank that’s leaking you would cross-feed all your engines from that fuel to use it up before you lost too many.