Is it time to stop flying the old ones? The B-17 Nine-0-Nine Crashes
I've been in quite a few B-17s and ridden on one. If you go back and look through the posts here you'll find photographs of them.
Two of those B-17s were the Nine 0 Nine and the Liberty Belle.
The Nine 0 Nine.
I'm generally not inclined to tell people what to do with their own property. That's not something that squares with my own world view, nor with what we might generally call "American Values", although increasingly there are plenty of Americans who are ready to tell other Americans exactly what they can and cannot do with all sorts of things. And I'm not of the view that merely because something is old, it shouldn't be used. I use plenty of old things myself, including driving on occasion an old truck that probably some feel shouldn't be driven due to its age.
Nine O Nine.
B-17s weren't made to fly for 70 years.
Indeed, nothing made in the 30s or 40s that flew or rolled was. Simply nothing was expected to last that long.
Trains didn't last for eighty years. Wagons certainly didn't. Automobiles, when they first came out, tended to be used up very quickly, in spite of their vast expense. And airplanes cycled through generations incredibly quickly.
View from the now gone Liberty Belle.
The heavy aircraft that came into military service with the US largely made it through World War Two. None the less, there's no doubt that aircraft like the B-17 and the B-18 were obsolescent by the time World War Two started, already primitive in comparison to aircraft like the B-24. They were kept in production not because they were first rate modern aircraft at that time, but because it was necessary. Save for odd uses, as soon as the war was over, they were phased out of service. For that matter, the aircraft that made them obsolescent were already obsolescent themselves. In terms of heavy bombers, which were really something that only the United States and the United Kingdom fielded, the world had gone from the aircraft of the mid 1930s, to the those of the late 30s and early 40s, to the B-29, which made them all obsolete. And the B-29 would only remain a first rate bomber until the late 1940s when jet powered bombers made their appearance. The B-36 had its first flight in 1946. The B-47 in 1947. The B-52 in 1952.
The B-52 is still in Air Force use, and will be for the foreseeable future. It will be, most likely, the first military aircraft to see 100 years of continual use. But it was built in a completely different era. Vastly more expensive than the B-17, which entered service less than 20 years prior to the B-52, it was designed to be flown by men who would have college educations and who were already use to a technical world. The B-17 was designed to be flown by farm boys who were used to tractors and made the Model A.
There's no earthly way that the designers and builders of the B-17 imagined them flying for 70 to 80 years. Chances are, they didn't see them flying for more than ten. During World War Two, those savvy to aircraft development didn't see a future for aircraft like the B-17 beyond the end of the war and, had they been quietly asked, would have already regarded it as obsolete. It only had to offer its crew a chance of living through their tour.
And the fact that it did offer such a chance is why there remain any around today. They were rugged.
But they weren't built to fly forever. And the flying ones will not. The time has come to let them rest, while there are still any left that are capable of flight.
That is sad. The fact that they still fly from town to town allows people to see them who would otherwise never get the chance. But the end conclusion to continuing to allow them to fly seems evident.
To add to this sad tale, I've also been in an HE-111 that crashed later. And I've viewed a P-51 which did.
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