May 292011
As built, the Martin B-51 had a pretty unusual layout. But Martin designers couldn’t leave well enough alone… they designed a flying boat version which required some substantial changes to the layout. Most importantly, the underslung engines were relocated to the upper side of the fuselage.
To aid in water landings & takeoffs, the landing gear was either deleted or replaced with hydroskis or “hydro-sleds.” The version shown here used a more or less conventional flying boat hull, with no landing gear at all.
2 Responses to “Seaplane B-51: 1”
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That drawing shows that aerodynamically the B-51 and Martin Matador cruise missiles are fairly closely related.
It makes a lot more layout sense in this version than the land-based one with the fuselage side mounted engines, which looked like some former Ju-287 engineers snuck onto the project.
This actually looks like a pretty decent jet seaplane design, although the wings look small enough that takeoff and landing speeds are going to be very high. In fact, I have my doubt’s that it’s even going to get off the water without a lot of JATO boost as it’s shown here.
The XB-51 did use JATO during tests, so maybe that was the idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_XB-51_rocket-assisted_take_off_061026-F-1234S-013.jpg
[…] B-51: 2 aircraft, projects Add comments May 302011 A second piece of art depicting a seaplane variant of the Martin B-51. This time the fuselage mold line was little […]