Museum Mystery On PBS ‘History Detective’ Show Tuesday

July 18, 2011

Tuesday night, the popular PBS television series “History Detectives” will feature a mysterious propeller currently on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. The show will air at 7 p.m. on WSRE TV 23.

“History Detectives” host Elyse Luray followed clues to Pensacola to investigate a 1940’s propeller found along a rural airstrip in Illinois. While visiting Pensacola in March, Luray interviewed Hill Goodspeed, curator of the Pensacola National Naval Aviation Museum, and Bob Bothfield who served as an engineer in World War II, searching for answers to place this propeller in its proper historical context.

Working beside a rural airstrip, an Illinois man dug up an intriguing find — an eight-foot long wooden airplane propeller. A little research online made him believe that his propeller might be from a TDR-1 plane, a pioneering U.S. assault drone plane from World War II. Various websites say the TDR-1 planes were the first drones, the prototype of the unmanned assault planes used today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During the program, “History Detectives” will investigate whether this propeller is an important piece of American military history or whether it simply fell off a local prop plane.

Pictured: “History Detectives” host Elyse Luray and Bob Bothfield who worked on a top-secret assault drone program during World War II. Photo by Nivale Lightfoot for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.

Comments

One Response to “Museum Mystery On PBS ‘History Detective’ Show Tuesday”

  1. Janice Parker on July 18th, 2011 8:50 am

    Don’t know what kind of plane it came from but there was a wooden propeller that hung in Gindl’s Store in Barrineau Park for years.

Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under Archive