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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

John L. Buchanan volunteered for U.S. Army Air Forces upon completion of three years at Texas University's engineering school. He took flight training graduating from Ryan School of Aeronautics April, 1941. He then attended the secret Norden bombsight factory school, and Honeywell's electronic flight control school at the University of Minnesota.

The wartime Manpower Commission, seeking the highest wartime emergency usage of any/all autopilot/bombsight experts, transferred him to Sperry Gyroscope Company's aeronautical instrument laboratory in New York where, he participated in the accelerated development and test program of electronic flight control and bombsight equipment. In November of 1943 he became a flying field engineer instructing B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bomber crews in the correct usage of the Army Air Forces' first all-electronic secret bombing system. This system's convoluted security-grid was only exceeded by that of the Manhattan atomic bomb project.

From 1943 to the end of 1946 Buchanan instructed thousands of fledgling multi-engine aircrews at dozens of Second Air Force stateside bases, and at Twentieth Air Force overseas combat installations on Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima in the South Pacific. It was from these bases that the U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers took the war directly back to the Japanese homeland. The targeted industrial cities were devastated by the Twentieth Air Force's B-29 bombers applying visual, daylight, high-level-precision bombing procedures. Precision bombing was made possible only when the electronic automatic flight control equipment and bombsight were correctly engaged and adjusted by pilot and bombardier prior to and during the bomb-run.

One of Buchanan's most serious challenges as an instructor for this technically sophisticated equipment was to convince many pilots to accept (to their own advantage) the absolute fact that the autopilot and bombsight, when correctly set-up and engaged, were fully capable of executing flawless bomb-runs while vastly improving bombing accuracy. Certainly this did not occur in the classic-textbook Enola gay atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan which hurried the surrender of the Japanese Empire September 2, 1945.

Following the war he rejoined Honeywell's Aeronautical Division as a B-29 aircraft field engineer supporting the Air Force Technical Command at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. He also served in the Pacific Air Service Command in Manila, in the Philippines.

With this service behind him, beginning in 1948 he constructed his own licensed commercial radio stations in Colorado, Denver, and Dallas-Fort Worth. In the late Sixties he branched out into the cable television industry becoming vice president of Ameco, Incorporated of Phoenix, Arizona.

He retired in 1985, living in Solana Beach, California and Prescott, Arizona before settling in Green Valley, Arizona in 1997. He has held life-long interest in aviation and broadcast technologies and was a member of the founding group of Colorado businessmen who worked for the establishment of the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado. His broadcast station, KWBY, was the "wild-blue-yonder station" from its inception and devoted many hours to promoting public support for the Academy.

He was a docent at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson and in his later years became a published poet. He was also a devoted family man.