1956 Featherweight B-36 Reaches New Heights

B-36 climbs to 50,000 feet plus ... Ca. 1956, Texas. Film made by MATS for USAF base theaters. (National Archives)

Category:

Autos & Vehicles

Tags:

• B-36
• 1956
• USAF
• n1014f

[RobSar63]

Comon you clowns, stop talking politics. Demo or Repulican it don't matter, they've both sold out our country to special interests. Let's just enjoy these moments of yesteryear. You know when we were a true world power, when we had a president who really cared about the country, like John F. Kennedy.

[barkochba132]

Thanks for posting this. The announcer erred in staying that at 50,000 the plane was cruising in the "troposphere". He meant "the stratosphere"...the troposphere is the lowest part of the atmosphere.

[lincbond442]

Great footage, especially the worm's view. Aircraft is an 11th BW B-36 out of Carswell.

[fiverats1]

An early version, first, the rail wheels. Future ones were fitted with just one large one. Second, the tail belly radars. They are missing.

[racer500gp]

@MaxxGladiator You can blame that idiot Stuart Symington, then Secretary of the Air Force, for killing the Flying Wing because he was in bed with Consolidated Vultee/Convair and stood to gain personal profit by forcing Jack Northrup to merge (which as you stated) refused. My brother worked at Northrup and had a rare chance to meet the great man a few years before his death.

[bad74maverick1]

@RobSar63 yeah I asked the cubans that were at the bay of pigs about that, they didn't share your enthusiasm.

[oldfart387]

@RobSar63 All JFK did was bang Marilyn when he had a babe at home!

[555bladerunner]

@TalksWithDirt HA! "If you can't dazzle 'em with your brilliance..."...No, of course not, but I doubt the engineers who work widebody designs are so rigid as to mandate an optimum as a design criteria. Once you find a configuration that meets load requirements then you would proceed to find a solution that minimizes cost and maximizes reliabilty; the later, of course, being the most important criteria, since damage to the runway, although critical, is not a crew/passenger safety issue.

[MaxxGladiator]

I have a grad degree in aeronautics, and we studied this monster in a class. Not exactly efficient, but it worked.

However, it was selected over the Northrop Flying Wing because Jack Northrop refused to 'share' the win he was told to do by the US Government.

The 'Wing' was far more efficient.

Hell - they made Northrop even cut them all up. Sad indeed.

Something like Obama would like our military to do with our stuff. A true traitor.

[TalksWithDirt]

@555bladerunner Can you provide the optimization function? By my pin headed understanding it will be a function that will have a local first derivative of zero when you take the derivative of concrete load vs number of wheels. See by my pin headed understanding pressure is force divided by area. So a 200,000 lb airplane whos tires constitute a rest area of 16 ft^2 the concrete would have to be rated for 12,500 lb/in^2. But you see in that there is no optimum at 4 wheels/truck. Please explain.

[555bladerunner]

@TalksWithDirt No. I was referring specifically to the 4-wheel configuration used in all commercial widebodies today. The MULTI-wheel landing gear was first introduced by the Germans during WW2. However, the current 4-wheel undercarriage that was developed by Convair provides the best equipment mass-to-load bearing ratio and is the least complex of all multi-wheel configurations. It also takes up less internal space... ...all of which make the 4-wheel the carriage of choice for widebodies.

[TalksWithDirt]

@555bladerunner Sorry Charley. Think about it. What aircraft before the B-36 spread the load with multiple wheels on the mains? Think about it.... It looks kinda like a B-36. I'll bet if you look it up you'll find a paper on runway loading via multi wheel landing gear on some NACA/Langley publication from the 1930's.