Bombs Awry

B&W Photographs; This is a trade sized paperback book. The book is in Very Good condition and was issued without a dust jacket. The book and its contents are in generally clean, bright condition. The book covers have some toning to the spine and spine joints. There are several spots of discoloration and ground-in dirt to the covers. The text pages are mostly clean and bright. The foredge of the text block has some ground-in finger dirt. "The B-36 was one big airplane. The wings spanned 230 feet, and the interior of the wing was high enough for a man to walk through the root. Then, if he liked, he could crawl through to the outboard engines. This enormous empty space was frequently used to store all the exotic things that the crews brought home with them on long overseas flights. The flooring of the interior of the wings was made of a waffled magnesium, bonded to the outer skin of the wing. These waffles were often found to be cracked and the bonds separated, which posed a potentially serious structural problem. This led to an investigation. After one overseas flight an engineer was shocked to see the unloading of cases of booze, motorcycles, and furniture from the aircraft. Further investigation showed that this was more or less common practice. One official report read: "32 cases of Scotch bounced on the flooring for 31 hours, leading to material failure." The nasty habit was stopped immediately. My source is Grover Ted Tate, who served on the B-36 for several years. I can't resist citing him directly: "It was a good thing that they didn't see the MG automobile that I unloaded from my particular aircraft or they might have really been upset!" ( Grover Ted Tate: Bombs Awry) " (from Aerofiles - on the lighter side).…