I was going by the Purdue pictures taken along the flight route, mainly in India. I purposely chose them, and not earlier pics, because there could always have been the possiblility that something was changed after the Luke Field incident. Pictures of the Electra at Lae would be great, but I sense that no other markings are on the Electra.
Are there Hamilton-Standard decals on the props? Probably not now.
Tom
I think your summation is accurate, Tom.
I saw decals on the props in one of the pix posted here (with the guys working on the engines), so they were there once upon a time.
What years of exposure have done to them is anybody's guess - likely long disintegrated is mine.
In recent years it was discovered that the darn things (decals) actually retained moisture and could create a nasty little corrosion cell behind the pretty things - which can create a stress riser in a critical plane of the propeller blade. I've forgotten if there were actual blade failures associated with that, but Service Bulletins and possibly an Airworhiness Directive did emerge for some types calling for removal of decals for that reason. I don't recall if it was specific to a brand - Sensenich, Hartzell, McCauley, Ham Standard, but maybe one or all. Stuff just doesn't always behave like you think it might - that's for sure.
Your mention of stress risers in connection with prop blades reminded me of a case I had. A Bonanza shed a prop blade in flight and several people got killed. The failure was caused by a small scratch made during manufacturing in the base of the threads on the shank of the blade creating a stress riser and, because of the particular profile of the threads (I don't remember the name of the thread type,) this resulted in a fatigue crack propagating more than half way though the shank of the blade until there was an instantaneous failure, the blade came off and the plane crashed. I remember counting the beach marks on the fracture surface with a scanning electron microscope to determine how long it had taken for the crack to progress so far. It was a McCauley prop, a D36xxxxx. We found out that other McCauley props had had the same types of failures. McCauley had dealt with these other failures by filling the longitudinal hollow cavity in the the base of the blade (usually used for balancing the blade by placement of lead weights) with red dyed oil that would then weep out through any crack that had progressed from the threads far enough in to reach the hollow cavity which then provided a warning to the pilot on pre-flight not to fly the plane. I came out to Ohio and took the depositions of the McCauley engineers and I was shocked by their attitude when I asked them why they had not used the same warning system for the Bonanza's prop.
"Oh, we only had that problem with a completely different type of prop, a D34xxxxx."
"But they both have the same type of threads, don't they?"
"Yes."
"And the threads are cut using the same technique on both the D34xxxxx and the D36xxxxx blades aren't they?"
"Yes."
"And the same machinery was used to cut the threads on both types of blades wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"So what is the difference between the D34xxxxx and the D36xxxxx blades."
"The shank of the D34 blade is only 3.4 inches in diameter and the D36 blade is 3.6 inches in diameter."
"So the only difference between the blades is two-tenths of an inch in the diameter of the base of the blade?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you consider incorporating the dyed oil in the D36xxxxx props too after the failures in the D34xxxxx props?"
"Well they were different blades."
Yah, they were
so different that the only way you could tell them apart was by using a micrometer!
Think about the attitude of these engineers the next time you are flying a plane with a McCauley prop bolted on the nose.
gl