It’s hard to imagine: Six gigantic piston engines and four jet engines, all on the same airplane. That’s what was on the B-36, manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. This video popped up in my YouTube feed a short while ago, and I thought I would include it here…
When I first watched that video, I thought the background looked familiar. I quickly realized it was filmed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. You can see the General Dynamics plant in some of the scenes. The company was called Convair in those days, then it became General Dynamics, and still later it became Lockheed Martin (which is what it is today). There’s been a lot of consolidation in the aerospace industry. Anyway, to get back to the story, that body of water you see in the video is Lake Worth (it’s at the west end of the Carswell runway).
I worked at General Dynamics in the 1970s. GD shared the main runway with Carswell AFB. I was on the F-16 engineering team, and those were great days. It was my first job after the Army, and those days at GD were heady times for me. The F-16 was a grand engineering program, but one of the best parts about working at General Dynamics four decades ago was listening to the old timers. You know, the engineers who had cut their teeth on the B-36 program. I used to love their stories about the B-36, which was designed and manufactured in that very same General Dynamics plant. I worked for a guy named Lou Rackley. Just like I was starting my engineering career on the F-16, Lou had started on the B-36. Those fellows talked about the B-36 program like it was the grandest thing there ever was. Maybe it was.
Here’s a sampling of what I learned from Lou about that magnificent old warbird. The B-36 had a wingspan greater than a Boeing 747. The B-36 was so big it had to move down the assembly turned sideways, and our assembly line at GD/Fort Worth was the largest manufacturing facility in the non-Communist world. The B-36 tail was so tall they had to jack the nose 18 feet into the air to get the tail down far enough so the airplane would fit through the door at the end of the assembly plant. The B-36 fuselage was mostly bomb bays, and to get from the nose of the plane to the rear, you had to lay flat on your back on a rolling dolly and pull yourself along through a pressurized tube. Every once in a while someone would be in that tube, in flight, when a depressurization occurred, and that guy would be launched like a cannonball from one end of the airplane to the other. They had a few instances where folks were working in the wheel wells when the landing gear doors closed inadvertently, and that story didn’t end well.
While I was at GD, the company restored a B-36 and displayed it near the main highway that led into the plant. It was quite an airplane, and I enjoyed seeing it when I rode my Harley and later, my Triumph to work each morning. Good times indeed.
I spent 3 years in Fort Worth on the F-16 program before they transferred me to California, where my focus turned to munitions and tactical weapon systems for the next 20 years. I have a few grand stories of my own about the F-16 and the later munitions programs I worked on, but those are topics for another time.