![]() Those 21 aircraft started with a black project in 1979 culminating in the last aircraft built in 1997, making for an almost 2 decade period for design and construction.Ĭurrently, the pentagon is developing the F-35 Lightning II at a combined development and manufacturing cost for 2,443 aircraft at around… wait for it… $1 Trillion dollars to $1.45 Trillion. Total cost of the B-2 program through 2004 was approximately $45 Billion for… 21 aircraft. What? The total combined development and manufacturing cost, inflation adjusted for the B-29 program with full production of 3,970 aircraft through 1946 in 2014 dollars was approximately $5 Billion. Push that around in your head and then consider that the cost of a single B-2 Spirit bomber today is around $800,000,000 or roughly 100 times what an inflation adjusted B-29 would cost. In 1944, each B-29 cost $639,188 or $ 8,656,022 in 2014 dollars… Read through that last sentence again and think about that for a moment. However, the things that really got me thinking were the costs of the aircraft and how the production and delivery of military aircraft has changed from 1944 to 2014. There were production problems, mostly with the engines in early aircraft but if you look at the timeline, but no matter how you look at it, this is an amazing feat. This sounds quite a bit like how aircraft are built today, right? Well, for the next three years, the B-29 went into full production with almost 4,000 produced. Note that this was a “superbomber” the absolute cutting edge, most technologically advanced aircraft of its time with a full pressurized, shirt sleeve environment that was manufactured at four main-assembly plants with a supply line of literally thousands of sub-contractors to supply the components. In 1941, the US Army Air Corps submitted an order for 14 test aircraft and 250 production aircraft and a year later the first flight of the prototype occurred. In 1940, the design of the B-29 was submitted by Boeing and later that year, they had a static, non-flying airframe. Seeing FiFi up close got me thinking about the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress which was an interesting story… in 1939, the US Army Air Corps submitted a formal specification or set of requirements to be met for the aircraft. She is an amazing aircraft and I feel truly privileged to have seen her up close and in the air, flying around the valley with 72 cylinders making a glorious sound. ![]() The world’s only flying B-29, FiFi was in Salt Lake City last weekend out at the airport and I took the opportunity to go down and visit her. ![]()
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