My Dad sent me a link to this video. Its from the movie “Strategic Air Command” with James Stewart. As a casual military buff and a vet, I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of this monstrous aircraft before.
The coolest thing to me about this clip is the way the B-36 sounds when its taking off, as well as the massive amount of controls/dials within the flight deck, and the weird difference in the angle of the prop engines versus the jet engines. There’s a term for that and I can’t recall what it is.
But Jesus Christ, what a HUGE airplane! It has TEN engines!
You can still see a real one at the Air Force Museum in Dayton.
Here’s a cool pic of one next to a B29, which IIRC was the biggest operational bomber before the b36.
And it was originally designed during WWII without the jet engines. Note the one in the pic above doesn’t have jets. Here’s another picof the first flying version.
Holy crap! That nose wheel must have hung in the air a good 10 seconds before complete lift off!
FGIE, as an Army brat and Air Force vet in SAC (70’s) (my era’s warplanes were the B-52’s), I don’t mind telling you I got goose pimples watching that film. Thanks for sharing it with us.
The engine angle relative to the plane is called thrust line, my educated guess about the jet engines on the B-36 having down thrust (the jet flow is directed upwards) is that it keeps the wings from twisting along the span. The engine pods were an after though so the wing probably wasn’t designed to take the torsional load from an engine mounted on a pod under the wing.
By the way, the jet engines were meant to be used as boosters, so the intake has plugs that streamline the front of the engine when they are shut down during normal flight.
There’s also one at the Castle Air Museum. They have an open cockpit day once a year. The inside of that thing is pretty cramped. Most of the instrumentation is missing, but it’s still pretty impressive to see.
Thank you! I watched that and one of the crew was responding to the pilot during the checklist in a positively “Sherman…E…POTTER!!” voice and I suspected it was him.
Hilarious.
Does anyone else remember when MTV used to put up that quick “Security man, security man…can’t you stop that noise?” clip of him back in the day?
That’s what I came in to say. It urks me that they don’t show one set of engines with the intake shutters engaged (at the WPAF Museum). The original B-36 had single tires on the mains which are ginormous. The dual wheel assembly later adopted allowed it to land on any runway due to better weight distribution.
The building where they tested the wing structural integrity is still there at the base. they hung the bomber by it’s tail to do the test. Can’t find a photo of it or I’d post it.
The movie is well worth watching as it is highly accurate and is based on actual events.
A question: I really haven’t read the Wiki link I provided, but why were the prop engines placed with the props facing backwards? Was that some kind of design concession to the added on jet engines?
From Wiki: **This unusual configuration prevented propeller turbulence from interfering with airflow over the wing, but also led to chronic engine-overheating due to insufficient airflow around the engines, resulting in numerous in-flight engine fires
**
