Beautiful aircraft.
Truly beautiful plane. I built a scale model when I was a young lad.
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 .
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
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 saw lots of them at the SAC base in Little Rock. I worked on the KC-135.
The only surviving aircraft was on static display outside the main entrance gate to Air Force Plant #4 in Fort Worth, Texas. I passed it every morning on my way to work as a young engineer for General Dynamics (formerly Convair and now Lockheed Martin). One of the older enginners told me the rest were cut up as part of a treaty with the soviets.
Brig Gen James Stewart claimed that he joined the Mach-2 club in a B-58.
http://www.avgeekery.com/jimmy-stewart-joined-the-mach-2-club-in-a-b-58-hustler/
General Jimmy Stewart walks you through the B-58 Hustler’s virtues and reviews the many records she claimed in this memorable film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYvsjGroa78
Got a plastic model of one for Christmas years ago. Remember the sonic booms they used to create flying out of our nearby air base
When they learned to downsize the bomb the plane became obsolete. A real beauty though.
It even had an inertial navigation system. Strikingly complex aircraft accomplished with strikingly primitive technology.