Retirement in Sunny Arizona

 

On this date in 1954, the Strategic Air Command retired its last B-29 Superfortress to the aircraft storage facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Tucson, Arizona. The B-29  was the most technologically advanced bomber produced during World War II. The Superfortress was manufactured by Boeing at Seattle and Renton, Washington, and Wichita, Kansas by the Glenn L. Martin Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and by Bell Aircraft Corporation, Marietta, Georgia. After a rough teething period, the rapid war effort helped make the aircraft an eventual success. Though modest improvements were made, the Superfortress was underpowered, something its successor, the ten-engined Convair B-36, was not. Even in the late stages of the war, the Enola Gay had to be specially enhanced to be able to lift the first atomic bomb. Of the 3,990 built,  only two B-29s remain airworthy, with the remaining twenty-four displayed at various museums in America, with two displayed in the UK, and South Korea.

Landing Anything Anywhere

 

On this day in 1956, while carrying the U.S. Navy’s Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket, problems developed aboard both the research rocketplane and the “mothership.” The modified Boeing B-29-95-BW Superfortress had a runaway propeller on the Number 4 engine, outboard on the right wing. The propeller broke apart, slicing through the Number 3 engine, the fuselage, and striking the Number 2 engine.

Research test pilot John “Jack” MacKay, in the cockpit of the Skyrocket, had called “No drop!” because of problems with the rocketplane, but he was jettisoned so that the mothership could maintain flight and make an emergency landing. McKay dumped the Skyrocket’s propellants and glided to the lake bed. The Superfortress pilots, Stanley Butchart and Neil Armstrong landed the plane safely on the lake bed at Edwards AFB. Even more monumental, Armstrong would safely land on the Moon thirteen years later.

Operation Meetinghouse

 

On this date in 1945, the XXI Bomber Command, Twentieth Air Force, began launching 325 Boeing B-29 Superfortress from airfields on Guam and Saipan on a two-night incendiary bombing of Tokyo, the capital city of the Empire of Japan and the most populous city on Earth. Under Major General Curtis LeMay's command, the Superfortresses would bomb at low altitude at night. As the construction of Japanese cities made them vulnerable to fires, the bombers would carry incendiary bombs rather than high explosives. Operation Meetinghouse was the single deadliest and most destructive air attack in history. 279 airplanes reached Tokyo. 12 were shot down and 42 damaged with 96 crewmen either killed or missing in action.