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I worked on Maulers in 1951 and '52 at NAS Atlanta. We had a interesting accident caused by a quirk in the planes throttle system. It had an automatic manifold pressure control that regulated the MAP during take off. It gradually opened the throttle as airspeed unloaded the engine to provide max takeoff power without too much torque initially. In most Navy planes, the normal shut-down procedure was to kill the mixture and put the throttle to full open to clear the cylinders. If you did that on the Mauler, it left the throttle wide open on the next engine start until hydraulic pressure built up to control the throttle, which was completely controlled by the automatic system. Proper procedure was to keep the throttle at idle for shut-down.

One morning, a fellow mechanic started the engine on a plane that the previous pilot had shut down the wrong way. The engine roared to full throttle, broke the 3 steel cable tie-down reels, and made it half way through the line shack before the mech could hit the mags off.

I just remembered another Mauler incident from the early 50's. I was an Aviation Machinist Mate and a Mauler we had worked on was flying back to base and radioed that he had lost oil pressure and the engine was about to stop. Tower advised him to bail out, as the plane did not glide well. (It had a 1 to 3 glide ratio, whereas most planes have around 8 to 1. Note: I did not accidentally reverse the first set of numbers. It had the glide of a brick.)

The pilot radiod back that he was over a small town (Cedartown,GA)and was afraid the plane would crash into it and he was going to ride it down. He managed to hit in a rail yard and killed no one but himself.

I was very worried that something we had done (or not done) caused the loss of oil pressure. An investigation of the wreck showed that the oil pump drive shaft had sheared, not something we could have prevented. This happened near NAS Atlanta. The tail letter on our planes was "B"
Bob Cording
Kingsport, TN