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The Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" [N 1] is a strategic bomber built by Convair and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) from 1949 to 1959. The B-36 is the largest mass-produced piston-engined aircraft ever built, although it was exceeded in span and weight by the one-off Hughes H-4 Hercules. It has the longest wingspan of any combat ...
[3] [4] The B-36 took off on 13 February 1950 from Eielson AFB with a regular crew of 15 plus a Weaponeer and a Bomb Commander. The plan for the 24-hour flight was to fly over the North Pacific, due west of the Alaska panhandle and British Columbia , then head inland over Washington state and Montana .
The B-36 is a complex aircraft when introduced, but improvements are under constant development. One challenge was leakage from the fuel tanks, but a new fix is introduced to permanently resolve the issue. On their next flight, Holland's crew has to fly their B-36 from Carswell AFB to Thule Air Base, Greenland. The fix does not work and one of ...
The B-36A included several of the new elements developed on the YB-36, including the domed canopy and the four-wheel main landing gear (as opposed to the single-wheel landing gear used on the XB-36 and the YB-36). These new features were in a sense first seen on the B-36A rather than the YB-36, because it was the former that flew first — by ...
The operation was indefinitely suspended on 14 February, as the search planes were sent to the Gulf of Alaska to search for a missing B-36 bomber which had been carrying a Mark 4 nuclear bomb, though this bomb did not have a radioactive core. (The B-36 wreckage was subsequently located.) [3] [12]
July 23, 1943, was the same day that the USAAF submitted a "letter of intent" to Convair, that ordered the first 100 production Convair B-36 bombers to be built - itself a design first asked for by the earlier USAAC on April 11, 1941 - an enormous six-engined, 70-meter wingspan design far superior to either the Heinkel He 277 or Focke-Wulf Ta ...
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The YB-49 never entered production, being passed over in favor of the more conventional Convair B-36 piston-driven design. Design work performed in the development of the YB-35 and YB-49 nonetheless proved to be valuable to Northrop decades later in the eventual development of the B-2 stealth bomber, which entered service in the early 1990s.