Imagine what would seem like an endless stream of them passing over at just 2,500 ft on one of the low level night missions. What a nightmare it would have been being on the receiving end of that, wondering which one was going to come along with the bomb that had your name written on it. It definitely had to have a psychological effect on people.

It was either Doc or FiFi

I had stopped at a rest stop along I-29 and heard a strange airplane noise. I looked up to see B-29 FiFi just taking off from the nearby airport. I found out later that it was featured at an airshow in Bismark ND.

I live in north Texas and have seen all sorts of neat aircraft fly by (I'm close to the old USAF Perrin Airfield). As a young child, I recall practicing soccer out in Denison at PAFB and one day an f-15 had been out there doing god knows what, he stalled right above our practice field and hit his afterburners to recover. You could feel the heat from the engines about 500ft away. Between the temperature and audio change, I didn't even look down from watching the jets burners opening up. Other than that, I watched a Chinook lift a military crate over my house, and then about 2 years later, I saw 30 Blackhawk Heli's fly over in formations of 6. Also got to see chinooks leaving Nevada international. At Lackland & Kitsap I saw all sorts of aircraft as well.

​@@brandonpeterman9964 All those planes and only 2 left.

thanks for answering my question, God Bless

Thank you for that. I knew the engines were prone to fire but never knew why. Outside of Vancouver BC there's a charter company that still uses radial engine de Havilland Beavers. I've never seen a radial engine up close, a machinist friend of mine said they're a work of art you have to touch just once in your life.

yes, there was one at my aviation mechanic school, i still remember it fondly and it was a very useful training aid. We tore apart and rebuilt a smaller W-670 radial to learn on. Can you imagine the grins on our faces as we fired it up for the first time with a big dummy prop on the front. ha I miss the simpler times.

@@felixculpa6240 The A&P school I went to also had a cutaway of a Wright R-3350 that came from a Lockheed Super Constellation. It had power recovery turbines on it that were commonly refered to as turbo compounds. Our school use to have a Beech 18. We got to tear apart a Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Jr. engine, rebuild it and ran it on the test stand. Love working on round engines ever since. A aircraft broker friend of mine owned a Republic P-47D-25-RE Thunderbolt WWII fighter. I really enjoyed maintaining its Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine providing 2,300 horsepower. It was always a thrill firing up this beast, taxiing it to the runup area and perform mag checks. Taxiing it back to the hanger, shutting down the engine and smelling the last puff of burnt oil was something you never forget. Those were fun times.

The Wright R-3350 was a dreadful design, with multiple major (fatal) failure points, especially at the times when full power was required. I won't even try to list them here - they're well documented. Ego was a contributing factor - many of the problems could have been reduced, but some in Wright's management would not admit they'd fouled up. It is, sad to say, an excuse that's common to all too many major engineering failures. I had the misfortune while in engineering school of having to "dissect" the R-3350's failure points. The list came to something like 270 typed pages, single-spaced, one flaw per line. My supervising prof had among other things been a senior engineer at Pratt & Whitney, "suggested" I look harder. Another 50-odd pages. Many were documented in Wright's own design history, even in initial testing. Pre-production would have been the logical time for corresponding "fixes." The excuse "it was wartime" doesn't stand up to even Wright's own scrutiny at the time. The R-3360 caused the death of many aircrew.

I met him too. Had him sign my copy of his book. Very humble and nice man when I met him

I served alongside his son onboard USS O’Brien DD-975, homeport San Diego California. I lost track of him when I got pulled off and sent to Pensacola Florida for EW School. I wish I knew where he is now.

@@williampaz2092 Sadly. Mr. Robert Morgan died May 15th, 2004. He was 85, he was born in Asheville, North Carolina. That's where I was born. I'n also good friends with Hershel "Scotty" Morgan. He served 7 years, 10 months and 24 days in the Hanoi Hilton, POW camp. He's the second longest POW still living.

Always disgusted me how proud people can be of interacting with such scum.

The flight would be heavenly for sure. It would also be nice if Elon Musk made a substantial donation, in order for more B-29's or other WW2 aircraft to be restored to airworthiness.

Can't believe "Fifi" made a cameo appearance in Better Call Saul lol

I was wondering about the image too

Packed full of the highest tech in the world at the time, contrary to what some sources try to claim the defensive gun system on them was extremely effective, B29's actually had a kill to loss ratio against enemy fighter's of 11 to 1, that's higher than the P51's that was somewhere around 10.2 to 1. As with most aircraft that people want to discredit they'll take an early example of a developmental problem and blow it out of proportion trying to make it seem like it was an ongoing issue, and they'll take the fact that the defensive guns were left off of special purpose variant's like the Silverplate atomic bomb variant and the low level night bombing variant and try to imply that the system was a failure so they started making them without them, that's malarkey, leaving the defensive guns off them was about those planes flying in environments where defensive guns weren't needed so they were built without them to get more range, speed, increased bomb capacity and in the case of the Silverplate variant more altitude. Paul Tibbets said in an interview that the Silverplate variant loaded with the weight of a bomb and flying over 30,000 ft could out run and turn inside of P47's that he had mock dogfights with in the States, I'd have lost money on that bet.

I’ve been to the Museum several times and seeing Bockscar always causes a very hard to describe eerie sensation at the realization of witnessing a machine that released so much destructive power in one shot. I know that was a small bomb by modern standards and the number of civilians it killed was many fewer than the Tokyo fire bombings, but still…

Well 25 Missions...my Dad doubled that mark....... Dad in World War Two: penguinsix loves your comment Dec 15, 2021 US Navy Yard.. Washington DC tour. Able Windsor Since many of us here had parents who served in WW2, i will tell a little story...... My dad served on B-17s out of England early in WW2, before the 25 mission limit was imposed. He flew 52 missions. After return to the States, he spent his time training new crews. One day, he drew the worst Hanger Queen on the Base, He was the only one of the twelve aboard that day with combat experience. Everything went wrong, down to two engines plus bad control problems, he lead a mutiny... Six jumped with him, they all lived, Dad broke his ankle on landing. The Capitan, the command pilot, survived with bad burns ending his flight career.....the six who stayed all burned to death: he pushed hard to Court Martial dad. Thirty days later after dad led a breakout of the stockade with the other mutineers, the MP's arrested him in Baltimore, MD, at his uncle's house. He still had the cast on his left foot. When we tried to get Dad's service cover in the Eighties, DoD refused, period, total end of discussion, don't apply again . We had pictures of him in Army Air Force uniform in a Brit (London) South Seas club. Also insignias and other trinkets. His discharge Papers from Fort Meade Maryland. And another set of papers in a different name. We also had pictures of him in front of his 4th armored division tank with his ankle still in a cast. After the Battle of the Bulge. I was active in the GoP In Virginia, so on one election night, I asked my Congressman, M. Caldwell Butler, who was at the time on the Armed Services Committee to retrieve a copy of the Service Record. Several months later my representative who you may have seen on the Judicial Committee during the Nixon Administration Impeachment, -- Caldwell said he had been refused Access to the file, Quote" he did not have a high enough Security Clearance" to see the file, no doubt that tucked him off, rightly! About six months later, I got a phone call at work from Washington DC. A recently discharged veteran, a lawyer who had started on the Armed Services Committee Staff, said that he had copies of Two service records, his Clearance was high enough to see the file BUT he could not copy any of the files or send them to me; but he would talk and answer any questions about my dad's service. Two hours later, for the first time I had the full picture! When Pearl Harbor attack happened, my dad had gone to enlist but when he presented himself at the Courthouse, he was refused because they said that at sixteen he could not sign up and to go back and take care of the Farm for his widowed mother and three older sisters. After the new year dad and a friend created fake paperwork, Hitch-Hiked to Raleigh North Carolina, and signed up... very few at that point we're volunteering...easy get. He was picked out of Basic and sent to train as a Bomber Navigator, at this point the US Army did not think they would get enough College men to fill the crews so they were going to do the Brits way and raise up Warrent Officers, enlisted. Just before he was ready to graduate, they came through and gathered up crews to full fill the extra bombers going to Europe since they were not going to be sent to MacArthur. The files when combined made one complete record. After dad was picked up in Maryland he was sent to a tank course for Officers being transferred into armor from infrantry. He picked up a tank driver cert to add to his heavy equipment Papers picked up on return to the States. Next he was sent to France where he was a replacement tank driver in the 4th armored division, went on to the rescue of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Later he would be in one of the units that first over ran the westernmost Concentration Camp. That was the one that when Eisenhower first Saw it just two days after it was freed, he ordered all Allied Officers (field grade and above) to tour the camps; and afterwards the Germans in the surrounding areas were by his orders forced to march Through and see the Truth, in each camp freed. After the war, dad managed to be Posted to Paris for occupation duty but soon received new orders to return to the USA for the Planned of invasion of Japan. Oops. A week before he was to shipout to Norfolk the Emperor Surrendered. He stayed in France for Another year, as his service jacket under his real name did not have enough points to muster out. The Committee Lawyer said in his twenty plus year Army career he had never seen two files for the same person that joined so perfectly. How many and how high did this have to go to get him out of a Court-martial .... took many many stars on collars for that too happen, lol. Later that year at a campaign dinner, the Congressman came and set down, he wanted to know what was in the file, you see as a condition of getting the file open HE could not see any of it or ask the staff lawyer for a verbal briefing, I was very glad to tell him the WHOLE REST of the Story. In the late ninties after President Clinton declassified whole Plantations worth of World War Two records; I again tried the get a copy of both service files and was again refused; I still wonder under what Names and classification levels they are being held. My father past in 1963, he was very closed mouthed about his whole WW2.....? Adventures ? Thank s to ALL who have Served ........... EXCEPT for One Capitan! VIEW HEARTED COMMENT Dr

Honors to your uncle, a great Ameri-CAN. Korea was my Dad's 2nd of the three wars he served in 1st Cav (WWII/Pacific, Vietnam, his 1st & final wars). His older brother, my uncle Max and my Aunt Gloria were flight certification pilots for North American Aviation, Long Beach, WWII & did not enter combat but got his chance when he trained SAAF pilots on the alpha F-86 Sabre, became a South African subject & joined the Korean War under UN colors, finally joining a war with Dad. They never saw each other but each knew where the other was. Uncle Max didn't get to fly as a fighter in the F-86 he trained others in at Nellis but was assigned to B-29 escort in the F-80 then F-84. Honors to all ours of Korea, forgotten no more...

@scottyb68 - That would make him 13 years old in 1945.

Honestly what part of WW2 isn't awful

it is still like this today there are a lot of "mom and pop" factories right next to residential areas. I walk by two factories on my way to work one right next to a preschool the other right across from a junior high school.

Decentralizing manufacturing turned out to be the double edged sword. The strategy made taking out production more difficult, but it made the allied forces (well, really the US) feel there was license to fire bomb indiscriminately. That second sword edge caught Japan on the back swing. Japan under estimated the willingness and capacity for carrying out a prolonged and wide ranging incendiary bombing campaign. The leveling of Tokyo may have been more pivotal in the war outcome than the nuclear strikes.

@wtmayhew Without sounding critical of the war effort (my parents were liberated in 45). In Europe there was past knowledge and up to date aerial reconnaissance of war industry locations. Did the US just figure out that since almost all Japanese industry had been bombed this production had to be coming from somewhere and the logical conclusion was a massive cottage industry of small scale industrial production? Yes that's really oversimplifying things. In England some thought Arthur Harris was a psychopath after Dresden. I thought it was a sanctuary city of refugees with very little real war industry. Some aircrews openly voiced the same opinion. Not for me to say.

@@dicksonfranssen Thanks for the reply. I believe with respect to attacking Tokyo, it was a combination of a terror campaign and what was believed to be easy, probably both implicitly and explicitly inhumane. I have less information of what may have been going on secretly in Dresden, but on the surface it has the appearance of primarily being a terror campaign. I personally don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on whether those attacks were justifiable.

They're so expensive now! It's ridiculous!

@@michaelhorn8962 I remember an expensive model would be over 20 bucks and that would be crazy.!

...especially at the O Club. Watch the film An Officer And a Gentleman, and you'll get an idea about how being a flyer attracts women. They throw themselves at ya.

Thank you for your service and your Fathers service.🇺🇸

I believe the B-29 was in fact always intended for the Pacific theatre. It was the B-36 which was intended to bomb Germany from across the Atlantic if Britain was knocked out of the war. The B-36 program got less emphasis when it became clear that Britain was not going to fall, but the B-29 remained a top priority.

You are sure pretty hateful.

We are ‘fallen souls’ and far from “perfect.” Man’s inhumanity against man has existed since Cain and Able . . . . . . .

@i.r.wayright1457 - after the deliberate savagery which the Japanese inflicted on troops and civilians alike, they didn't deserve humanity - just genocide.

I agree. The shift from the attempt at high altitude bombing to low altitude incendiary was a math-driven horror. The B-29 couldn’t reliably hit targets from on high as dreamt. It was an effort like what we see as analytics today. The “Whiz Kids” did the calculus: we’d lose more planes and crew, cause incredible collateral damage, but more efficiently destroy targets in the drive to end the war quickly without a ground invasion of Japan. “The Fog of War” is really interesting, watching McNamara explain and grapple with the morality of these decisions. While he justifies it in words, you can see the guilt and doubt in his face looking back as a mature man. The math and decisions were correct. The outcome was what was predicted. But ethics were not a factor in that for either Japan or American airmen (other than as pure assets). It was literal “bang for the buck.” The deaths and suffering caused by this strategy was undoubtedly higher than “the bomb.” They didn’t explode miles of a city. They burnt the entire thing alive. Maybe ending the war with this and the atomic attacks prevented a worse scenario of invasion against a zealous opponent. The island hopping ground tactics in a densely populated area would undoubtedly be awful for both sides. It’s a speculative history we’ll never know.

No spell check, mike

I’d like to see the stats proving your bull$hit. The Japanese Air Force did not have the numbers or service ceiling to support your claim.

Of the 3,970 built, 26 survive in complete form today, 24 of which reside in the United States, and two of which are airworthy. Airworthiness list.

“hole crew”? Really?

A major part of the problem was that the B-29 was rushed into production without a development phase to iron out the bugs. The testing phase was the early missions. The tight engine cowlings contributed to the overheating problems.

Yikes

Low Altitude Night Bombing Alleviated that problem

​@@robertcampopiano6001 That's exactly right, and it's a point lost on most people. Your average person has no comprehension of the amount of development time put into any aircraft between the time of the first flight of that model and when they start seeing service, instead they had crews in the B29's while major production changes were still occurring on the production lines, it's usually a year and a half to two years between when the first prototype flies to when aircraft start getting delivered and then crews start getting trained on them which usually takes 6 more months, and the B29 was the most advanced machine in the world, what would normally have been a 5 year timeline was compressed down to two, on top of that when Boeing lost it's chief test pilot when the B29 he was flying crashed into that meat packing plant they also lost their training program, he was the man who was task with creating their training program and what had been put together as of that point died with him, even the cause of that crash was incorrectly blamed on an engine fire at the time, a later investigation showed that a faulty fuel filler cap leaked gas all over an engine causing the gas to ignite. Enter Paul Tibbets, most people don't know that before he was put in charge of developing the special Silverplate atomic bomb mission B29's he was task with developing a training program for B29's, they already had people flying them without having been properly trained, that more than anything else caused a lot of the accidental deaths early on that erroneously get blamed on engine's and other things that while better versions of the B29 came along with improved engine's and cowlings the fact is a lot of the early accidents that got crews killed never would have happened if there'd have been time to develop a proper training program early on, Tibbets said the biggest problem with the plane was that the early pilots were trying to fly them like they were B17's and B24's, and by "fly them" that doesn't just mean handling the flight controls in flight but everything including managing the engine's, the first B29 he flew which was an early one he said there was nothing really wrong with it and that it flew beautifully, it did everything you'd expect it to do and didn't do anything you wouldn't expect it to do, but you just couldn't run it like the bombers the early pilots were used to flying. The early problems with them like engine fires are misunderstood by most people, they don't know the actual cause of the fires and they weren't even the kind of fires people think they were, they didn't just burst into flames flying along like I've seen most people believe from reading their comments, the big problem was what's called induction fires and they happened when the pilot would rev the engine's from an idle when they'd start their take off, and there was nothing wrong with the extinguisher systems because induction fires happen inside the engine's intake manifold, since the extinguisher systems sprayed the outside of an engine of course they couldn't put out an induction fire, and any supercharged aircraft engine could have an induction fire if handled incorrectly, the R3350's were more prone to them because of a poorly designed elbow in their centrifugal supercharger but had the early pilots been properly trained on how to manage the engine's the vast majority of them never would have happened, they just didn't understand that you couldn't run those engine's at take off on the hot Pacific islands the way they could a B17 engine taking off in England, something else that's misunderstood about the R3350 engine's is the use of magnesium in their construction, it's a myth that they had magnesium engine cases, they actually had forged steel case's, wartime engine's had 3 piece forged steel case's and post war engine's had 4 piece forged steel case's, what was made out of high content magnesium alloy was the aluminum that the supercharger impeller was made of, when the induction fire would spread upstream to the supercharger and it's impeller caught on fire that's where the problem with high magnesium aluminum alloy was, not with the engine cases. Other problems were incorrectly calibrated cylinder head temperature guages and as mentioned poor training on how to manage the engine's, if any aircraft, the B17 or any other bomber, had been pressed into service the way the B29 was they'd have had just as many dead crews from accidents as they did with the early B29's, even the early one's were good planes the crews just weren't properly trained on them, that was the single biggest issue with them, later versions had improvements made that made them more forgiving but the same is true with all the aircraft of WW2, they all had improvements that made them less prone to engine fires and blown engine's due to them being run improperly.

So what engine should Boeing have chosen for the aircraft when they designed it?.

According to NOAA the jet stream can reach speeds of over 279 miles per hour. 279 miles per hour is 450 kilometres per hour. That's where the mistake came from: unit conversion.

but you just fell for some comment bait......

More a change in strategy than avoiding jet streams as I see it. They were burning up engines trying to reach high-level bombing positions so the plans changed to lower altitudes for better accuracy and easier on the airframes and engines.

@@whalesong999 Let's not forget that the Norden Bombsight was more of a propaganda ploy than a useful gadget.

​@@vernonkuhns3561it was useful, though not as good as advertised for the missions over Europe. For bombing missions over Japan, no bomb site was needed for the firebombing missions at the end of the war. Just drop them on Tokyo, and watch it burn as you fly away

@@jeffronimo7122 Hmmm, so why were they flying at 6k feet genius?

There is another surviving and flying B-29, called "Doc" and I think I have heard of a possible third B-29 currently being restored to flight status.

@@dougscott8161 I'm glad to hear that, beautiful plains. The FiFi you can actually buy tickets to fly on

they'll never listen. Trickery or "encouragement" have sadly gone a lot farther to keep them busy.

Here’s what SHOULD hit you hard: “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873) You should be thankful for the Freedom that I and other men better than yourself have provided you through our military service. Some people do not deserve liberty. Certainly you do not.

​@@Frankie5Angels150An American talking about liberty is like a prostitute talking about love. The USA where fed poison as food and have to pay insurance for health care. USA the world's biggest third world country. It's about the Americans fought their Elites to become as good as the first world.