{"id":2653,"date":"2019-02-04T06:34:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T14:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=2653"},"modified":"2019-02-04T06:44:48","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T14:44:48","slug":"six-turning-and-four-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/04\/six-turning-and-four-burning\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Turning and Four Burning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to imagine: \u00a0 Six gigantic piston engines and four jet engines, all on the same airplane.\u00a0 That&#8217;s what was on the B-36, manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas.\u00a0 This video popped up in my YouTube feed a short while ago, and I thought I would include it here&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9FJVxtTNjJk\" width=\"716\" height=\"403\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0\u00a0 You can see the General Dynamics plant in some of the scenes. \u00a0 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).\u00a0 There&#8217;s been a lot of consolidation in the aerospace industry. \u00a0 Anyway, to get back to the story, that body of water you see in the video is Lake Worth (it&#8217;s at the west end of the Carswell runway).<\/p>\n<p>I worked at General Dynamics in the 1970s.\u00a0 GD shared the main runway with Carswell AFB.\u00a0\u00a0 I was on the F-16 engineering team, and those were great days.\u00a0 It was my first job after the Army, and those days at GD were heady times for me.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 You know, the engineers who had cut their teeth on the B-36 program. \u00a0 I used to love their stories about the B-36, which was designed and manufactured in that very same General Dynamics plant. \u00a0 I worked for a guy named Lou Rackley.\u00a0 Just like I was starting my engineering career on the F-16, Lou had started on the B-36. \u00a0 Those fellows talked about the B-36 program like it was the grandest thing there ever was.\u00a0 Maybe it was.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a sampling of what I learned from Lou about that magnificent old warbird. \u00a0 The B-36 had a wingspan greater than a Boeing 747.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 They had a few instances where folks were working in the wheel wells when the landing gear doors closed inadvertently, and that story didn&#8217;t end well.<\/p>\n<p>While I was at GD, the company restored a B-36 and displayed it near the main highway that led into the plant.\u00a0 It was quite an airplane, and I enjoyed seeing it when I rode my Harley and later, my Triumph to work each morning.\u00a0 Good times indeed.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to imagine: \u00a0 Six gigantic piston engines and four jet engines, all on the same airplane.\u00a0 That&#8217;s what was on the B-36, manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas.\u00a0 This video popped up in my YouTube feed a short while ago, and I thought I would include it here&#8230; When I first &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/04\/six-turning-and-four-burning\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Six Turning and Four Burning&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[235],"tags":[532,533,534],"class_list":["post-2653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon","tag-b-36","tag-convair","tag-general-dynamics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}