The Convair B-36 Peacemaker
The first thing you should know about the B-36 is that it was big. When I write about airplanes from World War 2, I often use words like 'colossal' and 'huge', but this is little misleading, since I usually mean "colossal - by the standards of the day." Really, even the largest aircraft of the period would be reckoned as medium-sized by today's standards; not so the B-36. It had a wingspan of 70m (230 ft), which is a bit bigger than the Boeing 747-8's, and was nearly the width of an American football field. It was 50 m (162 ft) long, about 15 stories high if it was tilted on its nose. It had a combat weight of 262,000 lbs (119,000 kg) and a max takeoff weight of 410,000 lbs (186,000 kg), which is all the more remarkable as it used piston engines, not turbines, to achieve flight. (It is in fact the largest piston powered/second largest prop-powered aircraft ever made, only beaten in the latter category by the Antonov An-22 turboprop.) Speak...