Convair B-36 Peacemaker

[TheGreenGoblin]

Interesting video on this extraordinary aircraft...



and a visit to the UK.

[CharlieOneSix]

There was another B-36 visit to England that didn't go so well. In January 1952 Jim Connor flew his B-36 from Carswell AFB in Texas towards Boscombe Down for his first visit to England. A Wiltshire snowstorm hid the airfield and the bomber circled for some two hours. At last the crew were relieved to see the recently installed obstruction light on the spire of Salisbury Cathedral and then, a short distance away, the runway lights of the airfield. They started their approach.

However, what they saw was a funnel of lights which led to the runway. They were part of the wartime Drem system that was still in use at Boscombe Down. The B-36 crew had experience solely of American airfield lighting in which only the runway was outlined in lights. They were therefore unfamiliar with and confused by lead-in lights.

The Boscombe Down controller said ‘You are two miles from touchdown, on centre line’. The pilot responded ‘I’ve landed’ and, after a slight pause, ‘My, isn’t your field rough’.

743994_orig.jpg (20 KiB) Viewed 492 times

The B-36 had touched down in a field, ploughed through a fence, demolished a haystack and a shepherd’s hut, crossed a couple of ditches and the Amesbury-Salisbury road and ended 400 yards short of the airfield boundary fence.

The VHF/DF operator in his little hut near the end of the runway rang the tower to say there was an aeroplane outside his hut. He was told ‘We haven’t time to talk to you now. We’re waiting for a very important aircraft’. Meanwhile, the B-36 shut down all but one of the engines which was kept running to provide electrical power. A crew member shone a torch on the spinning blades to prevent anyone walking into it. A Boscombe Down staff member was driving home after a night out in Salisbury and stopped his car. He politely told a crew member ‘If you want the airfield it’s over there’ and drove off.

Despite the embarrassment, some redeeming features emerged. It was a cold night and the ground was frozen hard and it had easily taken the weight of the bomber. The next morning, a bulldozer borrowed from the construction workers who were building the airfield at Greenham Common scraped off the thin topsoil revealing the hard chalk beneath. The B-36 was towed through a gap opened up in the perimeter fence. Boscombe Down engineers made a new bolt to substitute the broken one in the port undercarriage and the propeller damaged by the shepherd’s hut was replaced.

Before the exercise, General Curtis LeMay had told the pilots that if anyone damaged their aircraft they could walk east until their caps floated and then carry on walking. As it was, the B-36 was safely flown home within two days. Jim Connor, apparently demoted from Colonel to Lieutenant in a phone call by LeMay himself, rode as a passenger with the gunners in the back.

Extracted from https://www.a-e-g.org.uk/convairs-mighty-b-36.html

[Boac]

Lovely story! C-16. I recall standing at Horsham station waiting for the bus home from school one day when this
incredible noise appeared in the sky to the north-west and a B36 flew gracefully over.

[CharlieOneSix]

I was 8 at the time and remember the incident as my father borrowed a friend's car so we could drive up from Bournemouth to try and see it. The car broke down near Ringwood so we never got there!

[Pontius Navigator]

Apart from the 10 engines it also carried a spare in an underwing chamber. I didn't have time to check both sides to see if it might have had two.

[G-CPTN]

Apart from the 10 engines it also carried a spare in an underwing chamber. I didn't have time to check both sides to see if it might have had two.

Jet?

[Pontius Navigator]

No, spare piston engine.

It had 6 for turning and 4 for burning. It was in the SAC Museum but no longer looking at Google Earth.

Also look at Strategic Air Command a 1955 film staring James Stewart.

[Pontius Navigator]

Look for a film
Strategic Air Command Computer Control System

[TheGreenGoblin]

No, spare piston engine.

It had 6 for turning and 4 for burning. It was in the SAC Museum but no longer looking at Google Earth.

Also look at Strategic Air Command a 1955 film staring James Stewart.

Available for rent on Google..

[TheGreenGoblin]

Look for a film
Strategic Air Command Computer Control System

I love the punch cards. My first ever Cobol Program was run on a Univac Computer and was fed in using punch cards.

[TheGreenGoblin]

First Broken Arrow...

The USAF claimed that the Plutonium core was not in situ.

[Pontius Navigator]

I wonder how big their core was. One of ours was about the size of a softball and gold plated. Even handling the training one was spooky.

[Pontius Navigator]

I have the DVD of that and also Gathering of Eagles.

[tango15]

I suppose I was about nine or ten when one flew over the house on its way into Burtonwood. The reason I remember it so well is because my mother got very upset. Having lived in Liverpool (which took the second biggest hammering after London) throughout the war, she somehow thought it was German bomber, no doubt the noise it made was a factor in this. I ran into the garden to see this huge beast flying over quite low. Of course no comment was made about it anywhere and I was too young to go to Burtonwood and see it and my dad was at work, but it was an amazing sight.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Another Convair aircraft built at Fort Worth...

The Convair B-58 Hustler, designed and produced by American aircraft manufacturer Convair, was the first operational bomber capable of Mach 2 flight.

The B-58 was developed during the 1950s for the United States Air Force's (USAF) Strategic Air Command (SAC). To achieve the high speeds desired, Convair designed it around a large delta wing, which was also used by contemporary fighters such as the Convair F-102. It was powered by four General Electric J79 engines in underwing pods. It had no bomb bay; it carried a single nuclear weapon plus fuel in a combination bomb/fuel pod underneath the fuselage. Later, four external hardpoints were added, enabling it to carry up to five weapons.

The B-58 entered service in March 1960, and was operated for a decade by two SAC bomb wings: the 43d Bombardment Wing and the 305th Bombardment Wing. It was considered a difficult aircraft to fly, imposing a high workload upon its three-man crews. Designed to replace the Boeing B-47 Stratojet strategic bomber, the B-58 became notorious for its sonic boom, which was often heard on the ground by the public as it passed overhead in supersonic flight.

The B-58 was originally intended to fly at high altitudes and supersonic speeds to avoid Soviet interceptors. But with the Soviet introduction of high-altitude surface-to-air missiles, the B-58 was forced to adopt a low-level-penetration role that severely limited its range and strategic value. It was never used to deliver conventional bombs. The B-58 was substantially more expensive to operate than other bombers, such as the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, and required more frequent aerial refueling. The B-58 also suffered from a high rate of accidental losses. All of this led to a relatively brief operational career of ten years. The B-58 was succeeded in its role by the smaller, swing-wing FB-111A

Convair B-58 Hustler

[TheGreenGoblin]

[Pontius Navigator]

It was an amazing aircraft for the time, individual crew escape modules, astro tracker for navigation and a one - piece instrument panel.

On one flight, post maintenance, as the pilot rotated the panel went dark and every instrument stopped. The only thing still working was turn and slip.

The Nav had basic instruments such as ASI and altimeter and the pair managed to recover the situation. The pilots panel had been removed during maintenance and replaced but the 4 screws securing the panel had not been tightened. All instruments were connected through butt connectors.

I think the pilot discovered he could get it working by pushing it forward.

[TheGreenGoblin]

It was an amazing aircraft for the time, individual crew escape modules, astro tracker for navigation and a one - piece instrument panel.

On one flight, post maintenance, as the pilot rotated the panel went dark and every instrument stopped. The only thing still working was turn and slip.

The Nav had basic instruments such as ASI and altimeter and the pair managed to recover the situation. The pilots panel had been removed during maintenance and replaced but the 4 screws securing the panel had not been tightened. All instruments were connected through butt connectors.

I think the pilot discovered he could get it working by pushing it forward.

Stick and rudder skills allied to partial panel skills certainly saved their butts!

[TheGreenGoblin]

However, the Hustler’s small size created one of its biggest shortcomings for a jet designed to penetrate Soviet airspace — an unrefueled combat radius of only 1,740 miles. This would require the flying branch to base its Hustlers in Europe or devote substantial numbers of tankers for aerial refueling.


The short range was a serious concern in the Air Force, according to the 2012 book Rearming for the Cold War, 1945-1960 by retired USAF Col. Elliott V. Converse III.

Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay of Strategic Air Command disliked the bomber and wanted the planes kept away from SAC. “In 1955, Maj. Gen. John P. McConnell, LeMay’s director of plans, commented wryly that as long as the Soviet Union and not Canada was the enemy, range would matter,” Converse wrote.

To make matters worse, the bomber was mechanically complicated, expensive — three times as much to operate than the B-52 — and difficult to develop. To redesign the fuselage into the “coke bottle” forced delays in the program and an increase in costs.

The number of planned B-58s changed — the Air Force would end up buying 116 Hustlers, a third of what the flying branch wanted. And because the bomber traveled so fast, the Air Force needed a new navigation and bombing system — the Sperry AN/ASQ-42 — which proved most troublesome of all to develop.

The J79 engine ran into problems, as did the braking system and ejection seats, the latter of which Convair ultimately swapped out for ejectable pods. “Despite the several speed records that it established, the B-58 may not have been worth its high cost,” Converse wrote.

More than anything else, two factors ultimately doomed the Hustler. The first was the development of better Soviet surface-to-air missiles in the 1950s culminating in the May 1960 shootdown of a high-flying U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers. The weapon, an S-75 Dvina — known by NATO as the SA-2 Guideline — could reach thousands of feet higher than the B-58’s maximum operating altitude.

One solution was to fly low, but flying low also means flying slow given the heavier air. Not only did that defeat the purpose of the Hustler’s design, the plane handled poorly at lower speeds. Twenty percent crashed.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ ... ries-87666

[TheGreenGoblin]

S-75 Dvina

The S-75 (Russian: С-75; NATO reporting name SA-2 Guideline) is a Soviet-designed, high-altitude air defence system, built around a surface-to-air missile with command guidance. Following its first deployment in 1957 it became one of the most widely deployed air defence systems in history. It scored the first destruction of an enemy aircraft by a surface-to-air missile, with the shooting down of a Taiwanese Martin RB-57D Canberra over China on 7 October 1959 that was hit by a salvo of three V-750 (1D) missiles at an altitude of 20 km (65,600 ft). This success was credited to Chinese fighter aircraft at the time to keep the S-75 program secret.

This system first gained international fame when an S-75 battery, using the newer, longer-range, higher-altitude V-750VN (13D) missile was deployed in the 1960 U-2 incident, when it shot down the U-2 of Francis Gary Powers overflying the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960. The system was also deployed in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it shot down another U-2 (piloted by Rudolf Anderson) overflying Cuba on October 27, 1962, almost precipitating a nuclear war. North Vietnamese forces used the S-75 extensively during the Vietnam War to successfully defend Hanoi and Haiphong against US bombing.