Oct 062010
An old magazine photo of the Convair XB-46. A truly beautiful aircraft, and had the Boeing B-47 not come along, it almost certainly would have spent several years swarming the airways, scaring the pants off the Russkies and looking good doing it.
6 Responses to “Convair XB-46 in glorious ExtraColor”
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The Seattle Museum of Flight got three or four of the guys who developed the B-47 to talk to a packed auditorium. They were amazing.
Always like the engine pod design on the XB-46.
Those long wings should have given it a high ceiling also.
A lot more attractive aircraft than the XB-48, though neither in my opinion was as good looking as the B-47; now _that_ was a great looking plane.
John wrote:
“The Seattle Museum of Flight got three or four of the guys who developed the B-47 to talk to a packed auditorium. They were amazing”
I hope there’s a transcript online. These things will fade away and be lost forever as life moves on.
Plans from the days when models were built at home out of solid wood:
http://smm.solidmodelmemories.net/Gallery/displayimage.php?album=97&pid=662#top_display_media
Anigrand Craftworks makes a 1/72 scale model of it:
http://www.anigrand.com/AA2046_XB-46.htm
If nothing else, you can’t fault Convair on streamlining the fuselage; it looks like a pencil.
Back around 1989, I spent around an hour talking to a former B-47 navigator; he was annoyed that the late version he flew on didn’t have the nose windows on the port side, as everyone got a great view except him. 🙂
Here’s an odd recon one with a nose radome:
http://www.raf-upper-heyford.org/Articles/B-47_HO_5-13-67.jpg
Be fun to know what that was used for.
>I hope there’s a transcript online. These things will fade away and be lost forever as life moves on.
It was videotaped. I’m afraid I can’t find it online.
But it was amazing. They made the claim to be the first people who used a computer in aero engineering. It seems some guy from Payroll strolled in one day and explained that they had this new toy …