"Size 36" The first public movie film with details of the B-36 "PEACEMAKER"

Very cool -- and check out what else they recommend on the B-36 page: an introduction to the B-58

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnwZLk7s6PI[/ame]

 

15 men is all???... it's darn near as big as a city block.

I grew up right under the end of a runway at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque.
B-36's landed right over our house. Pictures fell off the walls, cabinet doors flew open, etc. as it flew over. LOUD!

One can't imagine how big they were.

 

Nice display of a B-36 at the Strategic Air Command museum just outside of Omaha. The plane sat outside for a long time so it's a little rough but it is now inside and I think they're going to be doing some work on it.

 

Yes, I saw the SAC B-36 a couple years ago...

I wonder if that one flew over my house when I was a kid.

 

Back then, they had to stay firmly in the closet!

It always staggers me to see how fast technology advances with aircraft. The B-36 first flew one year after WW2 ended and only eleven years separates it from the first flight of the B-17, and look at the differences: size, range, crew, nuclear payload, remote controlled gun turrets that lock on to targets, etc. Staggering.

But even more amazing is the relatively short life it had. The B-52 surpassed it only a few years later.

 

The B-36 was quite a step forward. To think that the B-29 was initially classified as a "very heavy" bomber (which it was, relative to the B-17s and B-24s that already carried the "heavy" moniker), and just a few years later found itself demoted to "medium" bomber!

I'm sorry that I'm not old enough to have seen the 36 fly. At least we have "Strategic Air Command"!

 

Only about 30 years from the Wright Flyer to the B-17, 11 to the B-36, and another 6 years to the B-52

... and another 17 years until we landed on the Moon.

I had no idea about those guns on the B-36... pretty advanced.

Time flies...

My grandmother was born before there were ANY motorcars and lived to see men on the Moon.

 

The display at the Strategic Air Command museum listed the max t/o weigh around 400,000 lbs which is about what the 767 weighed that I flew from Shanghai to Seattle last week.

 

About half of a MTOW of a current 747.

 

The history leading up to the design, etc.

And implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHSmGOvIO7M

 

During the 1950's, I believe a hot B-36 had a 'special item' suddenly pop out of it's belly while on final to Kirtland ?

 

Yes, there was that little 'accident' in '57...

Hydrogen bomb just fell out. 42,000 pounds. The conventional explosive trigger exploded but not the weapon obviously. Still left a 20 foot deep crater about 2 miles from our house on vacant land.

Not made public until the 80's.

 

Wow, that could have turned out much worse!

 

Just looked it up... it was a Monday.

I would have been in school about a couple miles from the drop.

16 kilotons.

 

Jimmy Stewart in Strategic Air Command.

I loved this movie as a kid!

 

That's probably the best B-36 movie. I saw it a couple years ago, the library had it.

 

megatons ?

The HOT New Mexico Hatch Chili would have arrived before August.

 

Yup, those big boys were so inaccurate, they needed megatons to ensure target destruction. Plus deterrence then was MAD, so they were city killers and not really military target type of weapons like those used later.

 

Yes, Megatons... sorry, I was just reading about the Hiroshima bomb that was 16 kilotons.

I think the area where it fell is the UNM golf course now...

 

I knew the flight engineer of "Dauntless Dottie" crew who was lead on the first raid on Tokyo. He told me that every one of their bombs ended up in Tokyo Bay. They didn't know why until they figured out the Jet Stream and wind shear in that area.

 

Bob- Differential ballistic winds were causing errors up to 1500' on BUFF drops in Desert Storm. We worked up a LIDAR differential wind sensor for the B-52 that measured aerosol velocities from the surface to the ground and took out all the DBW errors. Tested, worked great, but never implemented. Would not have worked in IFR conditions, obviously. Same for the AC-130Q, where they would not have needed a wind ranging round but would have had first shot capability. Same end result. For the BUFF, JDAM and other PGMs solved the issue.


The Jet Stream over Japan had 3-4 times the wind velocities we saw in Desert Storm, so errors up to a nautical mile (6076.1') were easily believable. The bomb sights they were using worked like a drift meter, and took out wind errors assuming surface winds were identical to winds at 25-35,000', obviously not true. My F-111s had a DBW wind correction you could enter, but PGMs basically made the capability mostly superfluous.

 

Thanks, Terry. Good info.

 

Yes, thanks...

What was the drop altitude over Tokyo, do you know?

For some reason (probably the movie) I thought they were flying very low.