Boeing's B-47 Stratojet Review

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(More customer reviews)As a child, my family often drove through Plattsburgh and once stopped at the former SAC base. There sat "The Pride of the Adirondacks", a B-47 on permanent display at a quiet park by Lake Champlain. It was striking. Its sleek, graceful lines and shiney aluminum marked it as thoroughly modern. Decades after its last flight, it was still poised to take-off.
Lloyd's book underscores the immensely vital deterrent and other roles the plane filled during the tense, early days of the Cold War. But that part of the B-47 story (thankfully) does not dominate the book. The hero of the book is the B-47 itself. Lloyd's work traces the development of this revolutionary plane in brisk, compelling detail. The chapters establish its seminal, technological accomplishments. The accompanying pictures perfectly complement the text. Lloyd's picture compilation is absolutely second-to-none. Perhaps the best way to describe the book is "enjoyable biography" for it very much is a biography of a remarkable airplane.
A few extant B-47s dot the American landscape today. They sit. Like the "Pride of the Adirondacks", not one of them will ever fly again. But Lloyd's book lets them soar.

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The B-47 was the United States Air Force's first strategic jet bomber. When the US Army Air Forces issued a requirement for a jet bomber in 1944, four manufacturers presented proposals. It was Boeing's design for the B-47 that won for a number of reasons, but especially because it was capable of carrying the outsized nuclear weapons of the day. The B-47 became the cornerstone of America's nuclear deterrent force until the B-52 came into the inventory. At the peak of its career in 1956, 1,367 B-47s were in Strategic Air Command's (SAC) inventory of 1,650 bombers. The B-47 proved to be as fast as many of the jet fighters of the day, and its operational altitude was as high as 40,000 feet. The design for the B-47 was extremely successful, and was later adapted to the B-52 bomber and the KC-135 tanker, which later formed the basis for the Boeing 707. In fact, almost all jet-powered passenger airliners today can trace their design ancestry back to the B-47. This book covers the B-47's entire history in deep technical detail, with more than 400 photographs, many never before seen.

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