JULY 2018 AH 43OPPOSITE: (TOP) NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, (BOTTOM) COURTESY OF RICHARD BOSLOW; RIGHT: U.S. NAVY
(In 1962 the Navy redesignated P2Vs as P-2s, but
to us the Neptune will forever be a P2V, just as a
Mustang is a P-51, not an F-word.)
The Neptune grew in fuselage length as more
and more sub-hunting and electronic intelligence
gear was loaded aboard, including the charac-
teristic tail-stinger extension to hold the mag-
netic anomaly detector boom. The fuselage was
extended with a section inserted forward of the
wing starting with the P2V-6. This was relatively
simple to do, as the Neptune was designed for ease
of manufacture, and the entire fuselage from just
aft of the cockpit to the beginning of the tail cone
is a straight-sided, uniform cross section oval can.
Throughout its Navy career, the P2V was pow-
ered by a pair of Wright R-3350 twin-row Duplex-
Cyclone radials, which had proved troublesome
aboard B-29s. But wartime experience had pin-
pointed the R-3350’s weak spots—mainly cooling
problems and an improperly designed exhaust
system—and the engine turned out to be reliable
on the Neptune.
Most Neptune variants mounted straight
R-3350s, but with the P2V-4, the Wright engines
became turbocompounds—R-3350s with three
power-recovery turbines that each added about
150 hp. The PRTs were essentially exhaust-driven
turbocharger impellers, but rather than driving
compressors, they imparted their torque mechani-
cally, straight back to the crankshaft via shafts driv-
ing fluid couplings. (Horsepower figures for the
R-3350 and its turbocompounding system vary
substantially from source to source. The always-
reliable Aircraft Engine Historical Society says
that the Neptune started life with 2,400-hp engines
and ended its career with 3,700 hp each.)
A far more substantial power boost came from
the addition of two 3,500-pound-thrust turbojets
in underwing pods on the P2V-5 and succeeding
marks. The Navy had by this time loaded four tons
of extra electronic gear aboard the Neptune, and
the airplane could barely get off the ground. “I
learned early on that the -7 is a four-engine air-
plane on takeoff,” says Russ Strine. “It does burn
fuel going down the runway, nearly 2,000 gallons
per hour, but you get off that power setting right
away and then can throttle the jets back. Typically,
I left them at idle until I got the recips cooled down,
then I went ahead and secured them.” Strine kept
the jets at idle during low-altitude airshow displays,
but unlike Navy SOP, didn’t leave them running
during landings.
Though it was hard to hear the jets inside
the airplane, the R-3350s were another matter,
thanks to a lack of any interior insulation. “The
guys who flew Neptunes are mostly deaf,” says
Richard Boslow. “Ninety percent of them wear
hearing aids, and the other 10 percent need them.
The patrols you didn’t look forward to were the
ones where you were out in a patrol box in themiddle of the North Atlantic in midwinter and
you got a radio message ‘PLE,’ which meant fly
to the prudent limit of endurance: Stay out until
you have just enough gas to get home. We had
one mission that went 15½ hours.” Sonobuoy
operator Ron Price remembers that “We had gas
heaters, but if we got even the slightest whiff of
gasoline, we had to secure them. We did 10-hour
flights without any heat.”T
he Neptune is a big airplane. A casual
glance at a photo of a P2V might have you
thinking in B-25 terms, but the Neptune
is bigger than a B-17 in every dimension
and carried a larger crew—as many as 12 pilots,
observers, weapons-system operators, a radioman,
a navigator and other electronics specialists. The
P2V also had a flight engineer, whose official title,
oddly, was “plane captain,” but who was not a pilot.
He sat in a jump seat just behind and between the
pilots and was responsible for a variety of duties,
including balancing the substantial fuel load.
Despite the size of the crew, it was almost impos-
sible to bail out of a Neptune. The fuselage was
studded with antennas and radomes, many of
them close to the two bailout hatches—one below
the flight deck and a second in the aft compart-
ment. “The only way to bail out of a Neptune
was the after hatch,” says Boslow, “and there were
number of antennas out there that could cut you
in half. Or you went out the nosewheel well and
hoped you didn’t face-plant into the radome.”
Ditching was considered a better option.
Ditching was indeed part of the mission for the
dozen P2V-2s and -3s that the Navy outfitted as
nuclear bombers in the late 1940s. The P2V-3Cs,
as they were designated, were supposed to take off
from carriers and, assuming they somehow pen-THE P2V WAS
A SUCCESS
STRAIGHT OUT
OF THE BOX.
PRE-JET POWER
Mechanics uncowl a
P2V-3’s Wright R-3350
engine at Naval Air
Station Patuxent River,
Md., in the early 1950s.