Word: superfortresses
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...morning sun was lacquering the China sky a brilliant red when the B-29 Superfortress Monsoon roared down the long runway. It seemed she would never get off. When the heavy-laden monster finally rose, the crew opened the hatch, only to see the ground still hugging them. Said a crewman, closing the hatch: "Maybe if we don't look it'll go away...
Henry Agard Wallace, who warmed up to his Chinese visit (TIME, July 3) by playing three fast games of volleyball with Superfortress airmen, and incidentally gave some pointers to teammate Captain Henry ("Hank") Greenberg, peacetime baseball star, later gave some pointers on the American way of living: "Some American has said that the Americans are fighting for the right to throw pop bottles at the umpire in Brooklyn. That's one way of looking at it. We're fighting for our way of life. That doesn't mean we are trying to make the rest...
Since the B-29 had been "compromised" (i.e., one or more of them had fallen into enemy hands), the Army could reveal further details of the Superfortress' intricate construction. One of these details was the "pressurized" cabin...
News writers, aviation experts and other insiders had become well acquainted in recent months with the Army's big new B-29 bomber, but to the public at large the Superfortress was a nebulous thing of mystery and hope. What the people waited for was the B-29's baptism in combat. That came last week, with a dramatic raid on Japan's steel industry (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). Then the War Department allowed Boeing to tell nearly everything about its current prize package...
Tail-Up and Level. The wingspread is 141 ft. 2 in., the fuselage length 98 ft., and the single tail fin (which has a strong family resemblance to the B-17's familiar tail fin) is 27 ft. high. The Superfortress departs' from previous Fortress custom in having tricycle landing gear -three sets of twin wheels-so that its fuselage, like that of the tricycle-geared Liberator, is tail-up and level on the ground...