Boeing B-47 Stratojet Strategic Bomber | Rare Original Documentary | Upscaled Footage
A rare Boeing B-47 Stratojet documentary and upscaled footage detailing the B-47 program.
The Boeing B-47 Stratojet (Boeing company designation Model 450) is a retired American long-range, six-engined, turbojet-powered strategic bomber designed to fly at high subsonic speed and at high altitude to avoid enemy interceptor aircraft. The primary mission of the B-47 was as a nuclear bomber capable of striking targets within the Soviet Union.
Development of the B-47 can be traced back to a requirement expressed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in 1943 for a reconnaissance bomber that harnessed newly developed jet propulsion. Another key innovation adopted during the development process was the swept wing, drawing upon captured German research. With its engines carried in nacelles underneath the wing, the B-47 represented a major innovation in post-World War II combat jet design, and contributed to the development of modern jet airliners. Suitably impressed, in April 1946, the USAAF ordered two prototypes, designated "XB-47"; on 17 December 1947, the first prototype performed its maiden flight. Facing off competition such as the North American XB-45, Convair XB-46 and Martin XB-48, a formal contract for 10 B-47A bombers was signed on 3 September 1948. This would be soon followed by much larger contracts.
During 1951, the B-47 entered operational service with the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC), becoming a mainstay of its bomber strength by the late 1950s. Over 2,000 were manufactured to meet the Air Force's demands, driven by the tensions of the Cold War. The B-47 was in service as a strategic bomber until 1965, at which point it had largely been supplanted by more capable aircraft, such as the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. The B-47 was also adapted to perform a number of other roles and functions, including photographic reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and weather reconnaissance. While never seeing combat as a bomber, reconnaissance RB-47s would occasionally come under fire near or within Soviet air space. The type remained in service as a reconnaissance aircraft until 1969. A few served as flying testbeds up until 1977.
The B-47 arose from an informal 1943 requirement for a jet-powered reconnaissance bomber, drawn up by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) to prompt manufacturers to start research into jet bombers. Boeing was among several companies to respond to the request; one of its designs, the Model 424, was basically a scaled-down version of the piston-engined B-29 Superfortress equipped with four jet engines. In 1944, this initial concept evolved into a formal request-for-proposal to design a new bomber with a maximum speed of 550 mph (480 kn; 890 km/h), a cruise speed of 450 mph (390 kn; 720 km/h), a range of 3,500 mi (3,000 nmi; 5,600 km), and a service ceiling of 45,000 ft (13,700 m).
In December 1944, North American Aviation, Convair, Boeing, and the Glenn Martin Company submitted proposals for the new long-range jet bomber. Wind tunnel testing had shown that the drag from the engine installation of the Model 424 was too high, so Boeing's entry was a revised design, the Model 432, with the four engines buried in the forward fuselage.
In May 1945, the von Kármán mission of the Army Air Forces inspected the secret German aeronautics laboratory near Braunschweig.
General characteristics
Crew: 3
Length: 107 ft 1 in (32.64 m)
Wingspan: 116 ft 0 in (35.36 m)
Height: 28 ft 0 in (8.53 m)
Wing area: 1,428 sq ft (132.7 m2)
Aspect ratio: 9.42
Airfoil: NACA 64A(.225)12 mod (BAC145)
Empty weight: 80,000 lb (36,287 kg)
Gross weight: 133,030 lb (60,341 kg)
Max takeoff weight: 221,000 lb (100,244 kg)
Zero-lift drag coefficient: 0.0148 (estimated)
zero-lift drag coefficient area: 21.13 ft2 (1.96 m2)
Powerplant: 6 × General Electric J47-GE-25 turbojet engines, 7,200 lbf (32 kN) thrust each
Performance
Maximum speed: 607 mph (977 km/h, 527 kn)
Cruise speed: 557 mph (896 km/h, 484 kn)
Combat range: 2,013 mi (3,240 km, 1,749 nmi) with 20,000 lb (9,100 kg) bombload
Ferry range: 4,647 mi (7,479 km, 4,038 nmi) with underwing tanks
Service ceiling: 40,500 ft (12,300 m)
Rate of climb: 4,660 ft/min (23.7 m/s)
Wing loading: 93.16 lb/sq ft (454.8 kg/m2)
Thrust/weight: 0.22
Armament
Guns: 2 × 20 mm (0.787 in) M24A1 autocannon in a remote-controlled tail turret with
Bombs: 25,000 lb (11,340 kg) of ordnance, including:
2 × Mk15 nuclear bombs (3.8 megaton yield each), or
4 × B28 nuclear bombs (1.1-1.45 megaton yield each), or
1 × B41 nuclear bomb (25 megaton yield), or
1 × B53 nuclear bomb (9 megaton yield), or
28 × 500 lb (227 kg) conventional bombs
#b47 #stratojet #aircraft
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It has always amazed me how modern looking the plane was for a 1947 design..
Another interesting fact about the use of JATO by the B-47. Boeing and the Air Force knew the airplane was going be sluggish on takeoff due to limited thrust from its engines. The six engines had sufficient thrust to drive the low-drag airplane to high speeds, but they knew it would have trouble accelerating for takeoff. They did consider adding two more engines to provide needed takeoff thrust, but once airborne the extra weight of those engines and the additional fuel they used would reduce the jet’s range, which was already marginal. This is why JATO was the better solution for heavyweight takeoffs. Once the horse collar was jettisoned the airplane did not suffer a weight penalty, or an efficiency penalty by having more engines than necessary for inflight performance. JATO bottles went away for later airplanes as more powerful jet engines allowed for higher unassisted takeoff weights.
The second prototype was NOT PURCHASED for the museum at Edwards. It was, and remains property of the USAF. It is just on loan. The fundraising was to move it from here to Edwards. And good thing, too. It would have self-disassembled from corrosion due to weather and pigeon droppings, a common issue with all the Chanute aircraft before they mercifully pulled the plug on the museum. Heartbreaking, but inevitable..
A brilliant leap forward and a very handsome plane , but an absolute death trap , there is a movie out there about one whose crew abandoned one because of mechanical failure with one crew member left on board .
The increased drag required for descent was less due to the airfoil being clean than to the engines high idle power due to the primitive techno6og early jet engines.
Yes, it was one of the first to experience the fact that slippery jets made good gliders and require planning for descent. I looked it up and at cruise altitude the minimum rpm achievable on the engines was 90%, so they suggested lowering the landing gear or cutting a couple of engines to descend. The even bigger problem for the B-47 was that so little thrust was required at approach speed that the engines would be throttled back to an unresponsive rpm range. Use of a drogue cute on approach added drag to allow maintaining higher engine rpm.
B 47 was used by AVRO Canada as test bed for the new engine for CF 105 This engine was attached at the rear on right side
had a crash problem TELL theTRUTH
❤ Great plane and video!👍
3970 pounds of thrust.... thats what she said!
Back when engineers ran the company.
The McD-Douglas beancounters have infected the company badly.
It sure isn't the same company today.....Al Scott
The military and commercial divisions of Boeing are two totally different entities. Their military branch obviously doesn't have the same issues as the commercial side.
The funding today is vastly different. Given the nuclear threat operational machines were "must have" and the government would pay. As to the civil machine development at that time test data crossover between programs was not a problem.
Just bad to the bone 🍖 awesome machine ,the US military has always pushed the boundaries got to give them that.Britains descisions to join the european common market killed everything stone dead, yet a few years earlier in the 60s we pushed the boundaries beautiful jets and cars and the music was fab 😂.
Whittle!
Whittle, Hawker, Ricardo, RJ Michell, Wallis, DeHavilland to name a few.
@@davidelliott5843 Concorde in 69 which would have been in the planning years earlier with France as well.We came out ww2 broke lost the peace in many ways but we rebuilt ,come the 60s the UK was the place to be.I know we had many plane manufacturers and cars look at us now third rate in everything we do our towns and citys full of morons with no pride ,no balls who don't see themselves as British.Our industry is foreign taxi drivers and illegalls delivering for uber eats,deliveroo,just eat etc ,what a terrible decline every political party from Ted Heaths to Howard Wilsons responsible ,Enoch Powell told us our parents never listened tommy robinson now gets my full attention lol.
Before the EEC.. Read the UK National Archives (Catalogue ref: PREM 11/2945) found within the COLD WAR files as British defence policy 1960 paper. This extraction is of interest ~~But the general conclusion of the Report is clear enough. Briefly, it is that the material strength of the United Kingdom will decline over the next ten years, relative to that of the “giants”, the United States, the Soviet Union and (if it develops) the E.E.C. We have other intangible assets; our world-wide political experience and the native skill and ingenuity of the British people and their capacity to respond to a challenge.~~ The L.S.D. finances would simply not match defence expectations. You can find it by a web search perhaps using Google or other search programmes. Remember it is said that the G does not yield the same results as other web search programs do.
That last video was most certainly a propaganda film. The B-47 was a death trap that had a tendency to kill its pilots and crew. because of the poor level of Technology of the time, Pilots were forced to babysit the plane at all times, creating Pilot fatigue like no other aircraft could. and because of the design, and the style of landing gear, and the very easy way a pilot could lose control of the plane if the landing wasn't textbook every time, the pilot would lose control and crash. almost universally crashes were on landings. The Military back then would, instead of recognizing the aircraft as far too finicky, they would simply blame the Pilots for the crash, and do very little about it. When they finally switched over to the B-52, they had realized the design of the aircraft demanded far too much from its pilots. Very similarly demanding aircraft was the F-104 Starfighter. Sure, it was fast, but its speed and very small wings needed pilots capable of maintaining high levels of concentration for the duration of the flight, regardless of how long it might have been. There were so many crashes in the Starfighter too. Gladly the military finally demanded aircraft that were easy for the pilots to control and didn't need a lot babysitting.
Maybe, but we tend to forget that it marked a massive change in the laws of actual flying. The change from piston to jet and the loss of props made what had become an intuitive muscle memory capability quite a dangerous thing for a while during the transition phase. Treat your jet like your old piston plane and you get burned. Yes the technology was infant but I suspect it was the new flight techniques required that caused problems. It also saw routine flying moving more profoundly into coffin corner.
The propaganda is the constant ignorant badmouthing of revolutionary designs that pushed aircraft performance to new levels simply because these aircraft had to be handled differently than previous aircraft. The critics seem to think we should have kept flying biplanes. These jets were war planes that provided superior performance, not runabouts any dope could rent to fly to grandma's house. Pilots joined the air force to fly hot aircraft, not to dope around in docile airplanes that could fetch their slippers for them. I doubt there was a single pilot who joined the USAF that ever said please don't make me fly an F-104. They competed to fly that jet.
The real propaganda is the constant badmouthing aircraft get on KZhead simply because they had to be handled differently than previous aircraft. These were warplanes that stretched previous boundaries of performance to provide operational advantage in combat. Anybody who expected them to be docile and fetch their slippers for them was a fool who should not have joined the air force. People join the air force to fly hot aircraft like the F-104. I doubt there was ever a pilot who joined the air force saying please don't make me fly that dreaded windowmaker; they competed for the privilege of flying it.
And Boeing just killed the second whistleblower so watch what you say about them😂
@@a..c..2469 you don't know that but it is true that whistleblowers are retaliated against. Every time, loss of career and worse
German WW2 tech
Yeah, it looks just like that German . . . Sorry, I forgot which German airplane looks just like a B-47.
@@gort8203 I get your sarcasm….but well known that most of the postwar jet tech and aerodynamic research was taken from the Germans …the Germans had the only supersonic wind tunnel.
@@hertzair1186 The B-47 is not "German WWII tech". It did incorporable swept wings, as well as other innovations that were not German. Germany may have had the lead in swept wing research, but the theory was not theirs alone, and they never built an operational swept wing jet. Adolf Busemann introduced the concept of the swept wing and presented this in 1935 at the Fifth Volta Conference in Rome.[23] Sweep theory in general was a subject of development and investigation throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but the breakthrough mathematical definition of sweep theory is generally credited to NACA's Robert T. Jones in 1945. In January 1945, Jones developed a theory of the delta wing based on thin-airfoil theory. Others at Langley were sceptical until supersonic testing of models was done by Robert Gilruth and in April by Theodore von Karman. Jones's theory was not truly accepted until that summer when Von Karman's team of investigators found that German experts had been working on swept-wing designs for several years. Jones's thin-wing design ultimately proved superior to thick airfoils developed by Alexander Lippisch in Germany.[4][5] In May 1945, the von Kármán mission of the Army Air Forces inspected the secret German aeronautics laboratory near Braunschweig. Von Kármán's team included the chief of the technical staff at Boeing, George S. Schairer. He had heard about the controversial swept-wing theory of R. T. Jones at Langley, but seeing German models of swept-wing aircraft and extensive supersonic wind-tunnel data, the concept was decisively confirmed. He wired his home office: "Stop the bomber design" and changed the wing design.
The B-47 is not "German WWII tech". It did incorporate swept wings, as well as some other innovations that were not German. Germany may have had a lead in swept wing research, but the theory was not theirs alone, and they hadn't built an operational swept wing jet. Adolf Busemann introduced the concept of the swept wing and presented this in 1935 at the Fifth Volta Conference in Rome.[23] Sweep theory in general was a subject of development and investigation throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but the breakthrough mathematical definition of sweep theory is generally credited to NACA's Robert T. Jones in 1945. In January 1945, Jones developed a theory of the delta wing based on thin-airfoil theory. Others at Langley were skeptical until supersonic testing of models was done by Robert Gilruth and in April by Theodore von Karman. Jones's theory was not truly accepted until that summer when Von Karman's team of investigators found that German experts had been working on swept-wing designs for several years. Jones's thin-wing design ultimately proved superior to thick airfoils developed by Alexander Lippisch in Germany.[4][5] In May 1945, the von Kármán mission of the Army Air Forces inspected the secret German aeronautics laboratory near Braunschweig. Von Kármán's team included the chief of the technical staff at Boeing, George S. Schairer. He had heard about the controversial swept-wing theory of R. T. Jones at Langley, but seeing German models of swept-wing aircraft and extensive supersonic wind-tunnel data, the concept was decisively confirmed. He wired his home office: "Stop the bomber design" and changed the wing design.
I can see what caused all the global warming....
If global warming were true than Venice Italy would be underwater
Global warming = global tax
WTF HAPPENED TO BOEING ? THEY'VE FALLEN TO A WANNABE HAS BEEN COMPANY !