The Convair B-36 Peacemaker is a giant in aviation history monument to the scale and ambition of mid-20th-century military engineering.
Conceived sometime during World War II to meet the requirement of the U.S. Army Air Forces for a strategic bomber of intercontinental range, the B-36 was born from the prolific imagination of Consolidated Vultee, later known as Convair. The first flight occurred in August 1946, and by June 1948, the Strategic Air Command had taken delivery of its very first operational B-36.
The B-36 from 1949 to 1959 became very short and marked by rapid obsolescence in its most carrier existence. The aircraft carries the file for the most massive mass-produced piston engine plane ever built and boasts an impressive wingspan of 70 meters, larger than any other combat aircraft in history.
Born out in 1941, when Britain was reeling under the strain of her looming decline in ability to Nazi Germany, the B-36 became a bomber that would carry its mission from North America to Berlin. The real specs for B-36 were powerful, with a top speed of 450 mph, a service ceiling of 45,000 feet, and quite many 12,000 miles.
These needs, however, proved impossible with the generation of the time, mainly due to a cutting down of the specifications. It was October 1941 when Convair received the contract, even before the U.S. entered the war. With the U.S. now part of the struggle, the focus changed to the B-24 Liberator, putting back the B-36 development.
Still, the needs of the Pacific theater bailed out the task, and the B-36s were intended to bomb Japan from Hawaii.
The final configuration of the B-36 was a monstrous aircraft with a fuselage measuring some 49 meters long, powered by six Pratt & Whitney R-4360-53 Wasp Major 28-cylinder radial piston engines producing 3,800 hp each. To prevent propeller wash interference over the wings, the engines were mounted along the trailing edge of the wings.
In addition to all of that, the aircraft contained within its power plant four General Electric J47-19 jet engines. “Six turnin’ four burnin'” was soon the adopted moniker for this combination. Together, this came to some 40,000 hp. Its abilities were marvelous. Being able to cruise at more than 40,000 feet, most anti-aircraft guns and interceptors that existed at this time were below its position, with its big flight surfaces it could outmaneuver smaller fighter aircraft at such altitudes.
This plane had almost a 4,000-mile combat radius and a 10,000-mile continuous radius, staying in the air for up to 40 hours. This airliner also carried an enormous bomb load of 39,000 kilograms in four bomb bays that were bigger even than the successor B-52 Stratofortress.
Yet, all that size and complexity meant heavy maintenance. It had six 28-cylinder engines which required 336 spark plugs and ran rather unreliably. The wings were also huge, and so big that at their thickest points, they were 2.1 meters in thickness, which allowed engineers to get through a tunnel to crawl to service the engines while in flight.
However, not long after it was introduced, into the very late 1940s, the B-36 began to exhibit some spec cred problems, because innovations made into anti-air missiles and jet-powered interceptors would not only negate its significant altitudes but also out-accelerate some of the other faster bomber aircraft.
The brute force entering service at the close of the 1940s meant it came to life during a time of technological change that was very much another era’s relic. The brute force of the B-36, though, was enough to still largely give it the place as the mainstay nuclear weapons delivery platform for the Strategic Air Command in the earliest part of the Cold War.
The B-36 also made for a testbed of a vast amount of new technology. The second, the NB-36H, was designed to carry an 18-ton nuclear reactor in its bomb bay and a booster 4-ton lead shield to protect the crew inside. The reactor itself did not power the bomber but did run for 89 hours during flight. This plane tested parasitic aircraft.
These were aircraft that could be dropped and make their way back to complete a mission before returning to the bomber. The B-29 was also going to be used to test the largest aerial camera in the world – one that could snap a photo of a golf ball from 45,000 feet.
The B-36 itself was caught up by obsolescence, and once the B-52 Stratofortress arrived, the die was cast for the B-36. Other weaknesses of the aircraft were its inability to refuel in mid-air and inability to fly at a speed; it was frightfully slow, and thus easily shot down by faster, newer fighters.
The scuttling of the B-36 started early in 1956 when aircraft were flown directly from the airbases to the scrapyards. Today, four B-36s are left for posterity of this tremendous Cold War deterrent.