"The one entitled "crashed plane", is the same plane in the other photo. My grandfather is standing and is the 2nd one from the right. In the previous picture I sent you, my grandfather is standing, and is the 3rd one from the left. In the picture entitled "Heffner" my grandfather is sitting and looking at his watch. I am also including a description of the mission of the plane that was cut in two, in my grandfather's words. The story of this plane and mission have been included in quite a few books and my grandfather finds them to be very factual, but here is the story as he saw it."

"As far as the Feb. 19th mission is concerned, the stories I’ve read in different books are pretty factual.

We got hit in our #3 engine and it caught fire. We dove about 10,000 feet to put the fire out - the prop on #3 could not be feathered and it windmilled out there whining like a banshee from hell. Finally, the prop spun off, drifted forward and then came back and smacked the plane right about the engineer’s seat behind the co-pilots seat. The fire went out, luckily, but now we had a plane with a gash in the fuselage and no controls on the co-pilot’s side. The wheel could be turned completely around and #3 was dead and gone. The #4 engine kept doing it’s job, but we couldn’t control it. We had to drop down to 500 feet where we found that we could control the plane from the pilot’s side, although we had a huge problem. The #1 and #2 engines were performing at maximum efficiency -#3 of course was gone and #4 was working on it’s own. Power was overbalanced on the left which caused the plane to crab to the right. Also, at the lower speed we had to live with, the controls were mushy and you had to fight the wheel all the way. Pearson and I had to take turns at the controls because it took a lot of physical strength to keep the plane level. We struggled that way all the way back and got the plane down. However, when the wheels touched down, whatever hydraulic fluid was left was lost and we could do nothing but close down #1 and #2 and sit there and pray. We could not shut down #3 and it forced us off to the left. At this time, we had absolutely no control. I saw a parked B-29 coming at us. We sliced through it like it was made of butter. Next, a cletract appeared and the nose wheel was ripped off at impact with the cletract. Now we were skidding along with the front of the plane on the ground. Suddenly, we hit a small hill which stopped us and at this time the plane literally broke into two pieces. Front flat on the ground and rear sticking up at about 45 degree angle. Like this:

Everybody came out of this without any physical injury, although the trauma was acute. Our engineer never flew after that. The upside of this experience was that we got a rest leave in Hawaii. " Edward Porada

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Read the synopsis of the pictures below this table.