[303rd-Talk] Fw: The origin of the B-17

[Forrest Barton]

> > (More about the B-17 can be found at:  http://tinyurl.com/2vm6p5)
> >
> > Interesting piece of aviation history.
> >
> > On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S.
> > Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers
> > vying to build it s next-generation long-range bomber. It wasn't
> > supposed to be much of a competition.  In early evaluations, the
> > Boeing Corporation's gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced
> > the designs of Martin and Douglas. Boeing's plane could carry five
> > times as many bombs as the Army had requested; it could fly faster
> > than previous bombers, and almost twice as far. A Seattle newspaperman
> > who had glimpsed the plane called it the "flying fortress," and the
> > name stuck. The flight "competition," according to the military
> > historian Phillip Meilinger, was regarded as a mere formality.  The
> > Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the aircraft.
> >
> > A small crowd of Army brass and manufacturing executives watched as
> > the Model 299 test plane taxied onto the runway.  It was sleek and
> > impressive, with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan and four engines
> > jutting out from the wings, rather than the usual two.  The plane
> > roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoo thly, and climbed sharply to
> > three hundred feet.  Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed
> > in a fiery explosion.  Two of the five crew members died, including
> > the pilot, Major Ployer P.  Hill.  (re.  Hill AFB, Ogden, UT)
> >
> > An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong.  The
> > crash had been due to "pilot error," the report said.  Substantially
> > more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required the pilot
> > to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new wing
> > flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control
> > at different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had
> > to be regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features.  While
> > doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism
> > on the elevator and rudder controls. The Boeing model was deemed, as a
> > newspaper put it, "too much airplane for one man to fly." The Army Air
> > Corps declared Douglas's smaller design the winner. Boeing nearly went
> > bankrupt. Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test
> > planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was
> > flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to
do.
> >
> > They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training.
> > But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than
> > Major Hill, who had been the U.S.  Army Air Corps' chief of flight
> > testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach:
> > they created a pilot's checklist, with step-by-step checks for
> > takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing.  Its mere existence indicated
> > how far aeronautics had advanced.  In the early years of flight,
> > getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it
> > was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have
> > occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage.
> >
> > But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of
> > any pilot, however expert.
> >
> > With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a
> > total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately
> > ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the
> > B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army
> > gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled
> > its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.
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