BBC article here.
...It was the most expensive and complex industrial project US industry had ever undertaken and would not be surpassed until the space programmes in the 1950s and 1960s... In today's money the aircraft, from design to completion, cost the equivalent of $55.6bn (£41.2bn).
...a new fire-control system calculated the gunners' aim using a radar that could account for both air temperature and bullet drop. It was the first time an aircraft had a gunsight that wasn't actually physically connected to the gun it is firing....
...The bombers had been built by hand because the factory was also making other aircraft on the assembly line, and the B-29s differed in hundreds of tiny details. No B-29 in those first batches weighed exactly the same, a worrying state for such a highly complicated aircraft. Only 20% of the "finished" aircraft could be flown out of the factory. Badly fitted windows and observation panels bled air or were distorted, and many electrical plugs in the plane's 16km (10 miles) of wiring didn't work properly... The work included fixing 568,000 electrical plugs and making dozens of changes to the aircraft's engines...
...One former flight engineer, Fred Carl Gardner [said] part of his job was to monitor the engine temperatures, scanning gauges with "red-lines" where the temperature became too hot. "On a hot day, I would watch those temperatures climb past the red-line to the very limit of the gauge," he wrote. "I had no idea how hot those cylinder heads got."
...It was the most expensive and complex industrial project US industry had ever undertaken and would not be surpassed until the space programmes in the 1950s and 1960s... In today's money the aircraft, from design to completion, cost the equivalent of $55.6bn (£41.2bn).
...a new fire-control system calculated the gunners' aim using a radar that could account for both air temperature and bullet drop. It was the first time an aircraft had a gunsight that wasn't actually physically connected to the gun it is firing....
...The bombers had been built by hand because the factory was also making other aircraft on the assembly line, and the B-29s differed in hundreds of tiny details. No B-29 in those first batches weighed exactly the same, a worrying state for such a highly complicated aircraft. Only 20% of the "finished" aircraft could be flown out of the factory. Badly fitted windows and observation panels bled air or were distorted, and many electrical plugs in the plane's 16km (10 miles) of wiring didn't work properly... The work included fixing 568,000 electrical plugs and making dozens of changes to the aircraft's engines...
...One former flight engineer, Fred Carl Gardner [said] part of his job was to monitor the engine temperatures, scanning gauges with "red-lines" where the temperature became too hot. "On a hot day, I would watch those temperatures climb past the red-line to the very limit of the gauge," he wrote. "I had no idea how hot those cylinder heads got."
