An inside look at the cockpit of a B-36

I remember when the B-36 was introduced in the late 40's and was part of SAC into the late 50's when it was retired from service and replaced with the B-52. The best movie featuring the B-36 was "Strategic Air Command" with Jimmy Stewart/June Allison. Every airplane buff should see it! The movie had some of the best flying cinematography in film history courtesy of Paul Mantz. Stewart was a Brigadier General in the USAF Reserve and had actual flight time as aircraft commander in the B-36. The 6 P&W R-4360 engines were 3200 HP, 28 cylinder maintenance nightmares and were the largest reciprocating airplane engines built. Turbojet engines were just becoming the norm in the early 50's.

Good thing all that complicated stuff is behind the pilots!

It reminds me of the scene from "Airplane" where Ted Striker looks around a never ending collage of gauges and dials.

I totally agree with Walt's comments on "Strategic Air Command". I can't count the number of times I've watched (and listened) to that B-36 flying over the ball park in the opening scene. The purr of those P&W's is like no other in aviation. And the scene where the Peacemaker is flying in and out of the clouds on their "one takeoff and landing" training mission (with that background music) is like he said, "some of the best flying cinematography in film history". Think I'll dig out that DVD and watch it one more time !!

Examination of the image shows that the gauges for the jet engines are on the pilot's panel, not the flight engineer's and the jet engine power levers are above the pilot's seats.

Geat siteseeing

incredible thank you

Awesome... Thanks for sharing.

I used to have to read and record data from Air Force Bomber & Cargo instrument panels, but this one would have given me a headache.

Would not have wanted to be the flight engr who kept up with this one.

Thanks for the memories.

Looks just like the C-150 that I soloed in.......lol

Where do you put the iPad mount?!

Pretty amazing that 4 guys can fly 6 engines & all of that action going on with minimal technology! Fore Flight would have helped!!!

Neat

Bad link.

Wow, you can transfer the auto-pilot to the bombadier?!?

The flight engineer controlled the airspeed. The navigator controlled the heading The pilots tried to hold th altitude steady! ;-)

Big question is how did they get into the cockpit?

got to climb through the B36 at Castle AFB while they were restoring... unbelievable complexity... now all that stuff is done by computers...

No place for cup holders in the Cold War.

If that forward arrow indicates the actual direction, then I don't think any "air-sickness" bag ever made could handle the output of the slueing.

My dad once told me (while we where looking at the monster at Castle) he used to hear and see Peacemakers fly out of San Diego area and they sounded like large 337 Skymasters.

I lived in Albuquerque after the war, B-36's were at Kirkland AF Base. The early versions didn't have the jet engines...they appeared to just hang in the air and drone slowly by.

I liked the steam gauges but that's a little much.

Nice job Thank You

With all those manual guages, wonder what the ratio of wiring weight to airframe weight was.

Wikipedia has a photo of a design concept for a tracked landing gear (yep, like a tank) that was apparently under consideration after the tricycle landing wheels proved so huge as to be impractical. Someone intelligent in the Air Force killed the idea in favor of the now common four-wheeled bogeys (trucks). Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B-36_tracked_gear_edit.jpg

Here is a photo from the Castle Air Museum website of their B-36. This is a really big aircraft. The large bomb thingy next to it is a Mark 17 Hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear device) casing, 25 feet long, five foot diameter and weighed 42,000 pounds; yield 10-15 megatons. Total B-36 load capacity is shown at 86,000 pounds; B-17 bomb capacity was 4,800 pounds. http://www.castleairmuseum.org/convairrb36h

Fabulous

Walt is correct- "Strategic Air Command" with jimmy stewart is a must see if you like warplanes. The take- off scene out of Carswell AFB is incredibly beautiful. You must see it- the scene itself is on you tube, however the video quality is poorer than the movie. I knew it was coming as a kid on the ground in Fresno because my windows would start rattling before you saw it. Watch the take off scene if youve never seen it
!

The you tube B-36 take off I said you must see( from the Strategic Air Command Movie) is labeled "Six turning Four Burning" on you tube. Film quality was excellent, you tube vid is much poorer but stilll watchable.

A friend of mine went to school in Point Loma across San Diego Bay from the Convair B-36 rework facility. He told me that every time one took off his teacher would just close her mouth and look bored for a couple of minutes until it got quiet enough for her to continue.

It probably was not quite as bad for them as for the unfortunate Russians who have to put up with the even louder Tu-95 which is still in operation today.

Those of you that go way back will also remember the XC-99; it was a B-36 cargo clone. I saw it at Kelley Field SAT in the early '50s. Elegant and huge.....an earth shaking monster!

Looks simple enough.

When I was a kid, we lived several miles east of Carswell AFB, Ft Worth, TX. When a B-36 flew over the house, the windows would rattle. Great memory.

I'd love to sit there and watch one of these cockpits in action.

Question for those who might know: The throttle levers at the flight engineer's station... Are they the same as what the pilots have? Or do the FE levers have a wider range with the pilots' levers operating in a narrower window to serve the more immediate purpose of controlling speed? I know that a lot of those old piston monsters were incredibly complex and that they usually ran right at their limit, so did the FE have to "protect" them from the pilots?

I remember being told that the B-36 was capable of flying non-stop from US bases to Russia and return without refueling.

I remember being told that the B-36 carried enough fuel to fly from US bases to Russia and return without refueling.

I went through my high school years on Ramey AFB, Puerto Rico in the early 1950s. SAC took over the base with B-50s, then brought in the B-36s. My high school graduation speech (1955) was on how complex the B-36 was. 336 Spark Plugs firing, etc.

Many times a B-36 returning from a long mission would have several of the reciprocating engines feathered. There was a note on the bulletin board at base ops that running with more then three engines out on one side was not approved.

The training school (MTD) for all B-36 systems was just across the street from my house and many of the system panel were not locked up at night. The J-47 and R-4360 cutaway engines were there to poke at.

Clint,
Menlo Park, CA