At Seymore we'd find pine needles in the gear after our birds came back from a low-level training run..
In Guam it was salt spray from the wave tops that was all over the wheels..
"Kick the tires and light the fires-It's the MISSION!"

 

With spoilers only for roll, it was a bit odd to go forward initially on the yoke in a turn. Although I only got about :30-45 in the seat of an H, I was impressed with the handling and the climb ability. We were light but coming out of an old "oil burner' the IP pegged the VSI through about 20,000ft.

An incredible airplane and one that would not have been made had not LeMay jumped, stomped, fumed and raged that he was NOT going to accept a revised, upgraded version of the B-47.

Also interesting is the Tu-95/-142 is quite similar in wing sweep and design although the Bear uses t-props. Both are still in active service and over the last year the Bears have been doing more roaming. (FWIW, the -95 was an evolutionary follow on to the original Tu-4 Bull which was the Russian copy of the B-29)

 

I was watching the Military Channel's Top Ten Bombers yesterday. The B-52 was chosen as the top bomber of all time! The fact highlighted above was something mentioned in the show and new information to me.

USMCFLYR

 

Raw furry!!!!

 

Boeing did try to get away with tandem pilot seating (like the B-47 had) in the XB- and YB-52s. Tex Johnston predicted that LeMay would insist on side-by-side seating for the production airplane, and he was correct.

 

Yeah, those prototypes were funny looking if you weren't around to have seen them first. I only flew the buff in the sim, but I was a comm/nav avionics tech on the G models at Castle when I was in.


* Reuse: Courtesy U.S. Air Force

 

the -29 cost more to develop and build than the bomb. And the B-29s built at the Bell bomber plant in Marietta were so bad initially crews were refusing to fly them. Also, with the tightly cowled 3350 engine, for a while more B-29s were going down to engine fires than combat.

Three B-29s landed in Russia and the Russians reverse engineered them.

On July 29, 1944 Ramp Tramp, a B-29-5-BW serial number 42-6256, was unable to return to its base after a raid in Manchuria and landed in Vladivostok.

On November 11, 1944 The General H.H. Arnold Special, serial number 42-6365, was damaged during a raid against Omura on Kyushu was forced to divert to Vladivostok

On November 21, 1944 Ding How, serial number 42-6358, also landed in Vladivostok.

In January, 1945 the crews of these aircraft were quietly returned to the U.S. via Teheran, but their aircraft stayed behind.

After flight tests of Ramp Tramp, Stalin launched a program to exactly duplicate the B-29 on June 22, 1945. The aircraft was initially called B-4, but was soon renamed Tu-4 after Andrei Tupolev became manager of the project


There were stories about some of the mistakes on the original B-29s were copied exactly because no one wanted to cross Stalin. Reportedly not true.. but the Tu-4 surprised many in the US after the war as few thought the Russians had the skill to build such a bomber.


The Chinese, never missing a chance, built their version and later even added turboprops (sorry for the huge images)