Beautiful aircraft.
Posted on 11/16/2017 6:03:25 AM PST by C19fan
On Nov. 11, 1956, the first B-58 Hustler took flight. It would never see combat. An exotic, beautiful bomber designed for high-speed nuclear strike missions, a changes in Soviet tactics and a development method which dramatically hiked costs conspired to doom the Hustler — intended as a replacement for the jet-powered B-47 Stratojet.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
Truly beautiful plane. I built a scale model when I was a young lad.
So did I. Around 1964.
Beautiful aircraft.
It's really not that hard to post an image...
One of the best models I ever built. Hopefully it’s in storage back in Georgia and I can clean it up and display it again someday.
There are good arguments that the three-man B-58, like the three-man earlier B-47, was bought as a “gee whiz” science project”, and that it was too short-range and too limited to be effective. The B-47 was bought in way too many number for its limited range and essentially one-way performance.
But, it was an effective, very high-speed aircraft, but absolutely needed an on-board flight computer to manage fuel weight and fuel distribution during flight. Its single fuel-tank-abomb needed improvements and changes if it were to be used conventionally.
Got phased out by McNamara under Johnson-Kennedy to pay for the Vietnam War. Where it could have been much more effective than the smaller supersonic jets that were used to drop dumb bombs randomly at low levels at invisible targets authorized from Washington using well-advertised identical route packages .
Useless. All it could do was deliver a nuke.
It was a beauty to behold. I was a “GI Brat” in the 60’s, living on Otis AFB, when during an airshow, a B-58 was on static display. Since my father worked in “Base Operations”, I was lucky to see this magnificent bird fire up its four J79 engines, and execute an “alert takeoff”, as it left the base that Sunday afternoon. The only comparison would be to go watch on YouTube, “AgentJayZ” afterburner tests and imagine four of them at once.
I recall this plane. My instructors talked about it when I was in Air Force ROTC for a year, before I switched over to the Army.
They said it flew like a brick. Extremely tricky to land. It had terrible flight characteristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-58_Hustler
Before we were transferred to France in 1964, we spent the summer at my grandparents near Cincy. Wright-Patt in Dayton was one of the main bases for these and I’ll always remember the sonic booms several times a day. That was also the plane that brought about the laws against the military aircraft exceeding the barrier over land.
That’s the Navy version.
Me too.
I was privileged to see the B-58 fly out of Bunker Hill AFB
in the very early 60’s. A strikingly beautiful air craft.
- Jim Robinson
I didn’t think it was much of a stretch...
I saw lots of them at the SAC base in Little Rock. I worked on the KC-135.
“Useless. All it could do was deliver a nuke.”
I heard it was phased out because we developed long range missiles that eliminated the need for it.
I also heard that it was known to be a risky plane but the need at the time outweighed the risk.
Truly beautiful plane. I built a scale model when I was a young lad.
My father worked on the analog computers for the tail guns for B-52’s so this stuff mattered in our household. I’m two years older than the B-58.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.