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Probably the best effort ever made by an American aviation company to replicate a really ugly Tupolev aircraft. more on that later.
Yesterday we were discussing the KC-97 model. I looked at a good site, the IMDB one for aircraft in movies. Was reminded that there is a Tornado in one scene of Strategic Air Command..
And there you have one up top on this page. Valom's kit.
WOOF!
Modeling is an excuse to buy books.
So thats the aircraft in the Valom kit, interesting looking aircraft for sure. I have the valom kit, certainly looks better than the Mach 2 kit.
I am a Norfolk man and i glory in being so
On the bench: Airfix 1/72nd Harrier GR.3/Fujimi 1/72nd Ju 87D-3
Love the B-45! That was a star bomber when I was a kid. Saw it featured at several airshows. Loved the looks!
Don Stauffer in Minnesota
Don Stauffer Love the B-45! That was a star bomber when I was a kid. Saw it featured at several airshows. Loved the looks!
Sound like a North American guy.
Thoughts/comments:
It was a time of aircraft evolution. Our aircraft evolved as fast as we could convert the captured documents from German to English!!! That said, both the U.S. and the Germans owe the jet engine to Frank Whittle who is British. Think of the P-1011, or as we in the U.S. know it the Bell X-5. Swing wing or "variable geometry" wings. The B-45 was a stepping stone in jet bomber evolution. Seeing it in the air was a wonderment (sic). In terms of kits it is an orphan. Think about it. Only recently has the "flying wing" come to fruition from the concept in the 1940s. My kingdome for a good B-45 and Bell X-5 kits in 1/48th scale. (I can't see well enough for 1/72nd scale any more.) Cheers
I think US work in jet engines has been underreported. The folks at GE had been sending proposals to the AAF development guys for years trying to get funding for a prototype. The problem was that the technology for jet engines at that time did not permit long range fighters (the early jet engines were very fuel hungry), and US tactics called for very long range fighters. The rapid development of British and German jets led the US to fund our own development. Within a few months of the contract for the clone of the Whittle engine, the US also funded three companies for the development of indigenous turbine engines, and this resulted in a couple of very good engines.
My Dad's older brother was a USAF bomber pilot for thirty years. He flew B-24's, B-29's, B-36's, B-45's, B-47's as well as Canberas. The B-45 was the Air Force's first jet bomber. Col. Maurice L. Johnson flew them up and down the USSR's european border with nukes onboard "just to keep the russkies honest". His words, not mine. It is truly remarkable to look at the evolution of the airborne bomber since WW2.
The B-45 is actually an evolution of the WW2 German Arado Ar-234. Tupolev's probably is as well. A lot of our early jet stuff resembled German aircraft. Afterall a lot of their engineers came to work for us! My Dad flew F-86's in Korea, our USAF's first swept wing fighter. I learned a lot about the history of the United States Air Force growing up on air bases.
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