Click here for the manual
(Acrobat format, 1.4 megs)

Left-click to open
Right-click to save the manual to your hard drive

MAN PICKUP: A SECRET WORLD WAR II PILOT RESCUE MANUAL
by Michael Ravnitzky

During World War II, a dedicated bunch of engineers and aviators developed a
means of rescuing pilots downed in enemy territory.

This rescue device used a "trapeze" system invented in the 1930s to allow airplanes to snatch gliders off the ground, which itself was based on a system invented by a Pennsylvania dentist in the 1920s as a way to pick up parcels from the ground with an airplane. The dentist went on to start a company called All-American Aviation which won contracts to service mail stations along dangerous mountain routes using this method.

The first "volunteers" to test the device were sheep, picked up in July 1943. After a number of sheep trials were successfully completed, the first manned pickup occurred on September 5, 1943, when Lt. Alexis Doster was retrieved near Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio.

According to Harry C. Conway, an engineer on the project and the third man to be picked up from the ground, the system was used in China and Burma toward the end of World War II, and later in Korea. (An air-droppable version of the system was also used by the British to extract operatives from occupied Europe during World War II.)

However, a CIA history says that the first operational use of the system came in February 1944, when a C-47 snagged a glider in a remote location in Burma and returned it to India.

The CIA document goes on to say:

"During the Korean war, CIA became interested in the All American system. In the spring and summer of 1952, CIA tried to establish a resistance network in Manchuria. Civil Air Transport (CAT), its air proprietary, dropped agents and supplies into Kirin Province as part of a project known to the pilots as Operation Tropic. The All American system seemed to answer the problem of how to bring people out of Manchuria.

In the fall of 1952, CAT pilots in Japan made a number of static pickups,
then successfully retrieved mechanic Ronald E. Lewis. On the evening of 29 November 1952, a CAT C-47 with CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau departed Seoul for Kirin Province, intending to pick up members of a team that had been inserted the previous July.

But a double agent had betrayed the team, and the Chinese shot down the C-47 as it came in for the pickup, killing the pilots and capturing the CIA officers. Fecteau was not released until December 1971; Downey was freed in March 1973."

The CIA favored the Skyhook system developed by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr. (now usually called the "Fulton System"), but Conway and others favored their trapeze system and derided the Fulton system as technically inferior.

Conway became the "go-to" man for aerial retrieval for the next forty years, and worked on many interesting aerospace projects.

Conway, who died in October 1995 at the age of 71, volunteered to be the first civilian and the second person to be picked up using the Man Pickup system during its test phase.

He also developed a manual for Man Pickup that was intended to be dropped to pilots. Recently, I donated Harry's rare original copy of this manual to the National Air & Space Museum Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. (Ironically, Alexis Doster III--the son of the original test subject, Lt. Doster--was an editor with Smithsonian magazine.)

The Smithsonian curators describe this manual as follows:

U.S. Army Air Forces Booklet "Man Pickup" [Technical Order No. 03-1-57] prepared by Miscellaneous Branch and Specifications Drawings Office, Equipment Laboratory, Headquarters Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. Illustration by unidentified artist depicts an incident from "Tales of the Arabian Nights," in which Sinbad the Sailor, having found himself at the bottom of a sheer-walled valley, ties a chunk of meat to his back in hopes of being picked up by a hungry roc (giant eagle).

This ground to air pickup technology was later used by the United States Air Force to retrieve hundreds of reconnaissance satellite space capsules in mid-air during the 1960s and 1970s in the Corona and successor programs.

front page | newest additions | index + search
about | contact | donate