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In Fairchild's favor, reports through 1943 and 1944 showed that gunners in Europe needed better training. Fairchild turned his attention to a target airplane. In the first half of 1944, a flirtation with the twin-engine, combat proven Douglas A-20  gave way to Bell's single-engine P-63, which the Army deemed more like a Messerschmitt Bf109. Like its P-39 ancestor, the P-63 had been ignored by the Army in favor of the P-51 and the P-47 Thunderbolt. And like the P-39, the P-63 was exported through the Lend-Lease Act to the Soviet Union and France.

The Pinball was given modified cockpit glass that was more than an inch thick, and its wings and forward surfaces were heavily armored with a special aluminum alloy. Beneath the armor sensors registered hits, which were displayed on a counter in the cockpit. In the nose, the 37-mm cannon was replaced by a light that lashed red with every hit.

Beginning in early 1945 at air bases in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada, Pinball pilots began to take off and rendezvous with B-17s and B-24s. From the skies over Florida Everglades, the Gulf of 

[[image: color photograph of parked airplane with red star on tail and body]]
[[caption: The P-39 and P-64 saw action mainly with the Soviets, who received several thousand of them via the Lend-Lease Act. Below: One P-39 made it back to Las Vegas in 1986 to attend the U.S. Air Force's Gathering of Eagles[[/caption

Mexico, and huge swaths of western desert, countless shell casings and spent bullets began to fall. In each bomber's waist were 12 student gunners with 2,000 rounds each, taking turns as the RP-63 swooped down from above in an attack pattern.

"We'd fly curves of pursuit, like fighters did in battle," says Henry "Hank" Rodrique, then a 19-year-old second lieutenant flying Pinballs at Harlingen, Texas. "Sometimes when I'd break off, they'd still shoot."

Robert Corson, a crew chief at Yuma Army Airfield in Arizona, says, "The Pinballs would come in with holes in the empennage, because gunners would freeze on the trigger and keep on firing when the Pinballs pulled up at the end of a run, and the rudder and horizontal stabilizers were vulnerable. We'd just patch he holes with small squares of cloth and glue them on, and go on our way."

One gunner, Harry J. Byer, recalls, "The RP-63s were making high side passes, and about the last couple of hundred yards the instructors would make us stop firing. Then the guy would break down under the ship, come up on the other side, go up on the perch, and make another pass. When they'd finish a pass, they'd call the ship and say, 'You got six hits, or ten, or three.'"

"We would normally fly two or three missions a day," says Ashenfelter. "The missions would last about an hour and a half. The RPs would hold gas for about two hours' worth, but by the time you got up there and did your thing with each airplane you had to attack, you'd be out of gas."

The Pinball pilots were a mixed lot. Some were newly minted 19 or 20-year-old second lieutenants on their first assignments. Others were veterans of combat missions with fighter groups in England and Italy. After flying frontline fighters, adjusting to the RP-63 was not a problem for veterans, but deliberately letting themselves be shot at took some getting used to. "We'd get pilots with combat experience in Europe," says Corson, "and they'd come to our base after a month or two of R&R. The first time around in an RP-63, the first mission, they were definitely twitchy. They'd been shot at, after all, and then going up and doing it on purpose was something they didn't really like. But they'd all come down after that first mission with big grins on their faces."

John Aranyos had flown 82 combat missions in the P-47 and been shot at plenty of times by Germans, but wasn't sure about being fired on by Americans. "I'll tell you what," he says, "I was a little apprehensive. I got to my altitude and made my first pass at the bomber, a B-17. He was at 9,000 feet and I was several thousand feet higher. And I though to myself that I was deliberately setting myself up as a perfect target for some eagle-eyed kid aspiring to be a top-notch gunner at my expense. I felt I was the world's greatest idiot.

"As I made the first pass, I was expecting to feel the impact of the frangible bullets - and there was no impact! I couldn't believe it. I thought they were dry firing at me or something. And the recorder showed I had been hit 14 times. That is when I started being able to feel confident that the airplane was going to give me a good ride."

Though the RP-63's Allison V-1710-177 liquid cooled engine generated up to 1,800 horsepower, the armor made the aircraft challenging to fly. Still, Ashenfelter liked the extra weight. "It was not as maneuverable as the regular P-63, but it was smoother," he says. "On the downside, you could get a little bit of a high-speed stall if you maneuvered it too abruptly, and then you had a real problem."

Barrie Davis, flying Pinballs at Las Vegas after a 70-mission tour in Italy in the P-47 and P-51, found that out the hard way. "I made the mistake of trying a

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[[right margin]] LEFT: USAF/TSGT MICHAEL J. HAGGERTY; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE USAF [/right margin]]

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[[image: color photograph of Pinball airplanes side-by-side on tarmac]]
[[caption: Pinballs get revved and ready to be shot down - sometimes for real when a frangible bullet found it way into the cooling duct at the wing root. War's end and new technologies sent the Pinball to the ground for good]]

loop one day," he says. "I dived to pick up airspeed, and I went up and over the top in good shape. But coming out of the loop, every time I'd put a little back-step pressure on the thing, I'd hit a high-speed stall. So it was just a question of which was going to happen first: Was I going to stall into the ground, or was I going to fly that machine out of the loop? Well, I made it out of the other side, but I was below the mountains."

According to Merlyn Franck, who flew Pinballs out of Laredo, Texas, "The whole secret was to keep your airspeed up and a little power on at touchdown. One of our pilots neglected this advice and allowed his RP-63 to get too slow on final approach. He dropped it in so hard it drove both main gear struts up through the wings."

The RP-63's real Achilles' heel involved wing root ducts that fed air to the engine's cooling system.  When a bullet found the duct, its fragments would puncture parts of the system. As the engine overheated, the pilot had to choose a bailout or a dead stick landing. The latter happened plenty of times on the dry lakes of Nevada. After taking a round in the air duct, Captain Ingvar Jacobsen found a lake bed before his engine quit. On another mission, the pilot of a bomber Jacobsen was working with was having engine trouble. When Jacobsen flew closer to inspect, the waist gunner opened up on him. At such a short range, the frangible bullets were as deadly as real bullets, and they shot out his engine. Jacobsen bailed out. 

There were variations in the performance of the RP-63s, especially in the hit-counting system. Vibrations from the flight of the airplane itself could set off phantom hits. On other occasions, the counters failed to work. "Back on the ground," says Davis, "we'd take a grease pencil and go over the whole plane and mark all he hits." The ones from previous missions had been circled; the new one appeared as dust spots.

Through most of 1945, the Pinball program gave gunnery students their only realistic practice at aerial combat. In all, some 300 P-63s were converted into Pinballs, but the war's end made them obsolete. A few continued to train B-29 gunners after the Japanese surrender, but by the end of 1947, all the Air Force's RP-63s had been mothballed. When centralized gunnery control was developed for the B-29 and introduced in the spring of 1944, automated shooting took over. In the first version of the B-52, a gunner was located in the tail, but in later versions, he was moved to the cockpit, where he operated the guns remotely.  In the decades since, Pinballs were replaced by target drones. In fighters, heat-seeking missiles replaced machine guns, and some  bombing missions are not flown by unmanned vehicles directly by armchair pilots thousands of miles away.

In his book Operation Pinball, Pinball pilot Ivan Hickman recounted, "Most of the pilots I knew felt that the [P]inball program, despite its shortcomings and inherent dangers, was the training device of the future." Those pilots weren't totally wrong. But the future they spoke of turned out to be one measured in months. And, as Horace Ashenfelter noted, "It was fun."

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