Playlist Pilot Legends Explain :
What was it really like to fly one of the largest bombers ever built?
Former B-36 pilots and crew explain the strange reality of operating the enormous Convair B-36 Peacemaker.
With ten engines, marathon flights, huge crews and systems unlike almost anything flying today, the B-36 created challenges its crews never forgot.
Yet pilots also remembered something surprising about how this giant aircraft actually felt in the air.
A long-form aviation story told through the people who flew it.
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Chapters :
00:00 – Why the B-36 Peacemaker Was Unlike Any Other Bomber
02:35 – The Incredible Complexity of Its 10 Engines
05:28 – When Crews Had to Crawl Inside the Wing
07:17 – The Strange World Inside the B-36
09:52 – What the B-36 Was Actually Like to Fly
11:48 – The Cold War Mission It Was Built For
13:26 – The B-36’s Dangerous Fire Problem
15:26 – How Crews Kept This Giant Flying
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In 1993 I worked with a fellow Realtor, then in his 70’s, a retired USAF major who had flown C-47’s and C-36’s over the Burma road in WW2, was Chang Kai-shek’s personal pilot, then piloted nuclear armed B-47’s and the B-36. I was the only person in our firm who knew this.
Speaking of crew comfort, on the later "featherweight" models built for high endurance and higher altitude, things like the food galleys were eliminated to save weight.
8:15 WTF is an image of another entirely different Convair aircraft, the supersonic B-58 Hustler, doing in a video about the B-36, aka the Aluminum Overcast?
I remember going to the cinema to see "Strategic Air Command" with James Stewart the leading actor. All colour film and I think Cinemascope too, and you see lots of shots of B36s flying.
I saw one for about 2 minutes when I was a boy, flying over our house to land at Greenham Common airbase in England. This airbase operated B47s which I often saw taking off over our school in Newbury.
I used to know a guy who started his career in the 36 and finished as Weapons Officer in a FB- 111. I remember him once mentioning climbing around inside the wing doing inflight maintenance. IIRC he mentioned adding oil to the engines and similar checks. At the time I thought I had heard him wrong and he was referring to the cart tunnel. It sure must have been a pain dragging oil around in there to feed those massive engines.
I could not imagine the noise level for the poor sod that had to crawl into the wing during flight. Flying for that many hours had to prove how tough the men that flew it were.
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