[niteowl77]

I talked with a former B-36 driver about 15 years ago, and he told me that the things had to be "flown well ahead of time" because the size and the available technology made the plane lag behind the control input to a considerable degree. He would crane his head around during a left turn and marvel at how far out the wingtip was from the cockpit compared to a B-29/B-50. He said it wasn't a bad aircraft, it was just too big and was obsolescent by the time it became operational.

My dad used to talk about how the B-36 was supposed to be able to use the runway at Kadena (Okinawa) even though the lighter B-29s had pounded the concrete badly enough that there were considerable bumps in it already. He came back stateside without actually seeing a Big Stick land there.

[Regulator]

“was obsolescent by the time it became operational”

But that didn’t stop Stuart Symington from shutting down the technically superior YB-49 program at Northrop to make sure the money went to his buddies at Convair.

Had he not done that, we would have had operational stealth bombers (a feature of the YB-49) in the 1950s, instead of the massive kludge that had to be parked at Davis-Monthan after not much more then a decade of use.

[GingisK]

I knew a fellow who “upped” twice in B17s in WWII as a tail gunner, then stayed in after the war. He eventually became a tail gunner in a B36. They flew inside the Grand Canyon a couple of times just to loosen their bowels.

[logi_cal869]

He said it wasn't a bad aircraft, it was just too big and was obsolescent by the time it became operational.

It was a bomb truck designed in wartime designed to drop maximum tonnage at maximum radius in the extreme that Hitler achieved his early wartime goals.

Obviously, Hitler swallowed the blue pill and the plane was never needed, but was deployed nonetheless and served an effective propaganda role until the B52 flew in 1952 when, ironically, the Soviets deployed their first bomber capable of reaching the US (TU-195) with 'the bomb'.