Tag: General Dynamics

The B-36 Bomber, Fort Worth, Amon Carter, and more

This could be a long blog read or a short one.  It’s your call.  I have two YouTube videos today that are pretty amazing, in my opinion.  One is short and one is long.

By way of background, my first job as an engineer was on the F-16 program at General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas.   The reason I guess that’s significant is a few years ago I came across this video, Six Turning Four Burning, and as I watched it, I recognized the General Dynamics plant where I worked in the background.  The video is an excerpt from Strategic Air Command, a 1950s movie starring Jimmy Stewart.  It features the Convair B-36 bomber, an airplane with six radial piston engines and four jet engines (hence the six turning, four burning title).  I think you’ll enjoy it.

Yesterday, I was channel surfing on Netflix and I found a documentary about the B-36.  That had my attention, because when I worked at General Dynamics 40 years ago, there were still guys there who had worked on the B-36 engineering development program.  They spoke about the B-36 in reverential tones, and to them, it was perhaps mankind’s greatest accomplishment.

Everything about the B-36 was Texas sized.  It had a wingspan larger than a 747.  The tail was so tall they had to raise the aircraft nose 18 feet to get the tail to clear the Convair plant exit as these giants came off the assembly line.   I don’t know what impressed me more…the aircraft itself, or the way those oldtimers talked about it.

The last B-36 built at the Convair plant in Fort Worth, Texas. The nose had to be raised to allow the tail to clear the huge doors at the end of the mile-long indoor assembly line.  I worked in that plant on the F-16.

The B-36 documentary I found on Netflix is also on YouTube.  This video is about an hour long, but it’s a good one, and if you like the kinds of things you see here on the ExhaustNotes blog I think you’ll enjoy it.  I sure did.

Even though I lived in Fort Worth and spent a ton of time on the Carswell AFB runway working F-16 issues, I had no idea how prominently Fort Worth and a man named Amon Carter figured into the B-36 story.  The B-36 movie above educated me on that topic.  When I lived in Fort Worth, I visited the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which has perhaps the world’s greatest collection of Frederic Remington paintings and sculptures.  One that really spoke to me was Remington’s Old Stagecoach of the Plains.  It was a huge painting, so realistic I could almost see the stagecoach moving and hear it creaking and rattling.  It was awesome.

Frederic Remington’s Old Stagecoach of the Plains, on display in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

If you are ever in the Fort Worth area, I think the Amon Carter museum on Camp Bowie Boulevard is a “must see” destination.

Want some cool B-36 stuff?  How about the Hayne’s owner’s workshop B-36 manual?  Or maybe a mahogany B-36 model?

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Six Turning and Four Burning

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.