Downtown office workers looked to the skies at 12:20 p.m. on Oct. 1, 1946, as the Truculent Turtle, a propeller-powered plane designed to carry atomic weapons, came into view at the unscheduled end of a record-setting 11,235-mile, nonstop flight without refueling.
The twin-engine Lockheed P-2V Neptune long-range patrol bomber had taken off from Perth, Australia, on Sept. 29, carrying 50,000 pounds of fuel in tanks that filled much of the plane. The plane’s journey was front-page news in papers across the country as the Cold War began. The plan was to fly to Washington, D.C., but the crew, running low on fuel, decided to end the flight in Columbus.
The Ohio State Journal reported that the aircraft had only about 100 gallons of fuel left when it taxied to a stop at Port Columbus’ Naval Air Station after 55 hours and 17 minutes of flight.
City officials, a crowd of people drawn by the news and 150 newspaper and radio reporters from throughout the country descended on the airport as the plane homed in on Columbus.
The plane, decorated with nose art showing a turtle smoking a pipe while riding the propeller-driven equivalent of a unicycle, carried a crew of four and a caged kangaroo, a gift from Australia to the National Zoo.
Columbus Mayor James A. Rhodes made a pitch for the kangaroo for the Columbus Zoo but was turned down.
Tom Torr, then a 12-year-old boy and now a 78-year-old Gahanna man, recalled in a recent email about riding his bike to the airport to see the plane and the kangaroo.“Ah, those were the days,” he said. “I often visited the airport. You could walk the flight line and look in the windows of all the airplanes. … No one ever questioned you; there were no fences.” Piloted by a fresh crew, the plane left Columbus that afternoon and is now on display at the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla. Its record for a nonstop flight stood for 16 years.
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