Tour around the TEN engine Convair B-36 Peacemaker!

during world war ii there was a concern that germany were going to invade the united kingdom therefore the us needed an aircraft that could fly from the us over to europe drop their bombs and then return on the same tank of fuel he was going to be a proper intercontinental bomber and that aircraft behind me is the b-36 peacemaker and in this video i'm going to take you on a detailed tour of it important requirements for this aircraft was a long range so it had to carry a lot of fuel and high altitude flying which is why it had uniquely massive wings and interesting engine placement which we'll look at shortly it's not on this aircraft but directly in front were two 20 millimeter nose cannons this wasn't in the original design in fact there was also no bubble canopy as you can see with the prototype xb36 and it wasn't until the canon was installed that they had to raise the whole cockpit as you can see with this one here's a photo of a production b36 with the cannons installed this here is the forward escape hatch for the forward crew members although you'd need to feather engine number three as to avoid potentially hitting the spinning propeller on the ground they would access the cabin via stairs in the forward wheel well this blister back here was the port sighting station and while not fitted to this aircraft two remotely controlled retractable 20 mm cannon turrets would fold up out of here and this is what they look like this is obviously the forward landing gear and behind that is the radar antenna housing used for both navigation and radar guided bombing now let's look at the four bombays which are absolutely massive now check out my b17 and b29 videos for what at that time were large bombays and with the power of editing trickery i'm going to jump to dayton ohio and include footage of their b36 with the bombay doors open and speaking about the bombay they tested the idea of actually storing a parasite fighter aircraft in there and its role would be to protect the b-36 from enemy interceptors and here is that aircraft the mcdonald xf-85 goblin on display in dayton although its performance was inferior to any interceptor and the docking process was difficult and dangerous so they cancelled the whole program immediately on the left is the pressurized crew tunnel which was so long that they had a trolley installed and pulled themselves along a rope the yellow cylinders are all crew oxygen for potentially very long flights the b-36 was also used for research into nuclear aircraft propulsion in fact a heavily modified nb-36h was built and carried a single megawatt ton nuclear reactor in the bombay and an 11 tonne crew compartment protected by rubber and lead was installed up front moving forward is the extra fuel tank in the middle the nuclear reactor was not used to propel the aircraft and the research was mostly looking at potential harm to the crew and environment from the radiation but air force priorities were elsewhere and the program was cancelled and then we eventually reach another bomb cradle the bombays could carry up to 86 000 pounds or 39 tons which is incredible when the dry weight of a b-17 flying fortress was only 36 000 pounds or 16 tons and here's the bombs that it could carry this one is the mark 17 which was the first operational usaf thermonuclear weapon or a h-bomb with a h referring to hydrogen it weighed 41 400 pounds and pilots actually reported the plane suddenly rising several hundred feet immediately after the bomb was released due to the reduced weight in 1957 one of these was accidentally dropped over new mexico but thankfully the plutonium pits were not installed therefore it did not initiate a thermonuclear reaction as you can see these were absolutely massive so this little fella over here is a mark iv bomb designed to be a much smaller and lighter nuclear weapon it weighed only three thousand pounds and was retired in 1963. now we'll move on to the landing gear which is absolutely massive here's one of the two main landing gears which are set up in a tricycle layout and unlike many other aircraft of its era it folds up into the wing rather than the engine cowling and that's because the wing is just so big interestingly the prototype actually came with these huge single wheels which i've tried to film including myself to give you some proportions they were almost three meters tall and weighed at 600 kilograms each now i have no idea what i was thinking at the time nor why i had these facial expressions but here's a direct comparison between these tyres and the production four wheels set up which spread the weight over a larger area they're the biggest tyre ever fitted to an aircraft but because they put so much pressure into a small contact point with a tarmac this aircraft was limited to only three airports in the world otherwise it would destroy the runways in fact they're actually considered a tracked gear to spread the load but this idea was later canned moving on we'll check out the wing and engines the wing itself is massive in fact crew members could walk inside of it right out to the turbojets at the end during the flights this was designed before in-flight refuelling so the wing had to be able to store a huge amount of fuel an absolute priority with this aircraft was high altitude efficiency therefore having the engines behind the wing avoided having the proper turbulence interfering with the airflow over the wing the leading edge was also very thick as you can see so forward facing props would actually be pushing directly back into the thick leading edge thus reducing efficiency and because of the swept wing design the propellers would also become dangerously close to the wing tip itself and while it wouldn't touch again it would just disturb the airflow so all of these problems were resolved by installing the prop engines in a pusher configuration you can see these little squares in the props and these were there to catch some of the warmed exhaust air from the engines and these kept the propellers warm and helped avoid icing remember that this could climb up to 50 000 feet and unlike other high altitude aircraft like the sr-71 there was certainly no aerodynamic heating therefore the cold temperature was a major problem but having the 28 cylinder pratt whitney r 4360 radial engines backwards did lead to other problems the engine was designed to sit in front of the wing with the carburetor being kept warm by the air rushing past the engine and heating up but when it was sitting in the opposite direction the carburetor was now at the front of the engine so the intake air was cold and humid ice would eventually build up and obstruct the air intake which would gradually increase the richness of the air fuel mixture until the unburned fuel would make its way through to the exhaust and catch fire with the b-36d model two general electric j4719 turbo jets engines were added to each end of both wings and they were retrofitted to older models so it ended up having 10 engines leading to the slogan 6 turning and 4 burning although due to those engine fires engineers would joke that the slogan became two turning two burning two smoking two choking and two more unaccounted for these significantly improved takeoff performance as well as the quick dash over to the target but otherwise they were shut down during cruising to save fuel these louvers here closed the airflow off at the front as to reduce the drag when they weren't being used in total all 10 engines could provide up to 40 000 horsepower for brief periods of time here's a cutaway example of this engine in dayton you can see the inlet and then all these blades compressing the air followed by a chamber where the fuel is added and then ignited and expelled out the back of the engine via a spinning turbine this really is a simple design in contrast to the 28 cylinder engines that had many more moving parts which could possibly go wrong and often did and here we are at the very wing tip with a wingspan of 70 meters which was 230 feet it's wider than a boeing 747-8 or a c5 galaxy the b-36 was nicknamed the peacemaker which came from a company-wide naming competition the idea being that it made peace by being a deterrent to enemy military aggression but there were objections from religious groups who felt that they owned that term so officially it just became the b-36 on top and around this position were two more retractable remote control 20 millimeter cannons this circular hatch is the ventral entry hatch for the rear pressurized compartment and this here would have been the transparent bubble used as a sighting station in fact here's footage from dayton of what that would look like let's check out this towel and what's interesting is that they initially considered a twin towel design similar to the b24 as that design had a number of advantages remember that this was designed in the 1940s when buildings just weren't as massive as they are now so by using a twin and even triple tail you could design the same electrical control surface but without creating such a tall tail but in the end they went with a single large tail and saved 1.7 tons but needed extra large hangers right here at the back are more cannons which were remotely controlled above that is the ray dome and inside those were two radars that could detect enemy aircraft and guard the firing now everything in this aircraft is massive in fact the control surfaces such as the rudder and elevators etc have the same combined surface area as the b-24 liberator's entire wings but they did not have hydraulic support to move them in fact they worked by the pilot only moving smaller servo tabs which were like trim tabs in the opposite direction and then the air would move the whole control surface in the direction that they wanted it's really quite an ingenious design as it avoided the need for heavy hydraulic systems in front of you now would be the aft crew compartment which includes bunk beds a galley and access to the tail turret but it was connected to the forward compartment by the tunnel you saw from inside the bombays and if it didn't have nukes or goblins in the bombay it also carried ecm equipment which stands for electronic countermeasures these are probably some of the best defenses these bombers had and some of the equipment remains classified to this day but essentially it's designed to confuse enemy radars and missiles it can detect enemy radar waves and return a flood of waves to overwhelm their receivers or it can actually even send back incorrect information so the aircraft appears many miles away from where it actually is it had a crew of 15 consisting of a pilot co-pilot two navigators a bombardier flight engineer radio operator radar operator two ecm operators and five gunners this specific aircraft was a b36j and built as a featherweight as a role was now primarily reconnaissance cameras were installed in the bombay and in other locations and these flew over soviet territory taking photos to improve performance all the guns were removed except for the tail the blisters were replaced with flat windows and crew numbers were reduced the reduced weight allowed a service ceiling of 47 000 feet although there were many reports of these going well above 50 000 feet a total of 384 peacemakers were built between 1946 and 1954 but in the end they simply couldn't compete with the faster and also capable of in-flight refueling jet powered b-52 and b-47 that you see here and that will be in another video if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and comment below with your thoughts on the b36 and please check out my channel for many more similar videos thanks for watching

Channel: Paul Stewart

Views: 527,542

Keywords: b-36, b36, peacemaker, b-36 peacemaker, convair, convair b-36 peacemaker, bomber, airplane, aircraft, plane, planes, airplanes, vehicle, USAF, US air force, air force, cold war bomber, paul stewart, aviation, ww2 bomber

Id: bvM0usMCQkg

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022