Photo of the week
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This weekends photos.
Rollout of the first production Boeing B-50A 46-002,at the Boeing Seattle, Washington Plant.
Officially, there were no experimental or prototype B-50s. In actuality, 7 of the 79 B-50As produced by Boeing were allocated to testing. The first B-50A, Serial No. 46-002, initially flew on 25 June 1947, was accepted by the Air Force on 16 October and delivered on the 31st. The airplane was salvaged at Eglin AFB, Florida, on 12 July 1957, after being finally used to verify a stellar monitoring inertial bombing system. Little remains known of the first aircraft's use during the interim 10 years. It was flown a grand total of 769 hours, of which Boeing logged 324 hours and 13 minutes in 176 flights. The aircraft was also lent to the Bell Aircraft Corporation, which flew it 69 times for a total of 199 hours. The test aircraft then stayed with the A. C. Spark Plug Company of Detroit, Michigan, for almost 2 years, from 26 February 1954 to January 1956. During this time, more than 156 hours were accumulated in 43 flights. Air Force pilots flew the remaining 89 hours, and available reports revealed that Air Materiel Command (AMC) made 4 flights of about 6 hours at the Boeing plant before the aircraft's delivery in October 1947. The first B-50A accepted by the Air Force was reclassified as an EB-50A in March 1949, a classification assigned to any aircraft being modified for the electronic countermeasures role or other related purposes. The aircraft retained this classification until January 1956, when it became known as a JB-50A, indicating that the aircraft was then used for the testing of special instrumentation. -
This weekends extra.
A Lockheed PV-1 is given a final checkup at Vega Aircraft Corporation plant in Burbank, California.
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This midweeks photo.
CV-880, N801TW, cn 01 (Ship 1) was Convair's / General Dynamics flying test bed and demonstrator that first flew on January 27th 1959.
Only 65 Convair 880s were produced over the lifetime of the production run from 1959 to 1962, and General Dynamics eventually withdrew from the airliner market after considering the 880 project a failure.
