Major Aircraft Accident B-47E (SN 52-386) 1955-05-01 US Air Force; Marilyn Monroe

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Coverage of an AF major pointing out, during a safety lecture, the causes of a B-47E crash on takeoff, with inserts of the original footage and still shots of the accident. Ends with a safety reminder from Marilyn Monroe.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-47_Stratojet

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Boeing B-47 Stratojet (company Model 450) is a retired American long-range, six-engined, turbojet-powered strategic bomber designed to fly at high subsonic speed and at high altitude to avoid enemy interceptor aircraft. The B-47's primary mission was as a nuclear bomber capable of striking the Soviet Union. With its engines carried in nacelles under the swept wing, the B-47 was a major innovation in post-World War II combat jet design, and contributed to the development of modern jet airliners.

The B-47 entered service with the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) in 1951. It never saw combat as a bomber, but was a mainstay of SAC's bomber strength during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and remained in use as a bomber until 1965. It was also adapted to a number of other missions, including photographic reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and weather reconnaissance, remaining in service as a reconnaissance aircraft until 1969 and as a testbed until 1977...

The B-47 arose from an informal 1943 requirement for a jet-powered reconnaissance bomber, drawn up by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) to prompt manufacturers to start research into jet bombers. Boeing was among several companies that responded to this request; its initial design, the Model 424, was basically a scaled-down version of the piston-engined B-29 Superfortress equipped with four jet engines.

In 1944, this initial concept evolved into a formal request-for-proposal to design a new bomber with a maximum speed of 550 mph (890 km/h), a cruise speed of 450 mph (720 km/h), a range of 3,500 mi (5,600 km), and a service ceiling of 45,000 ft (13,700 m).[4] In December 1944, North American Aviation, the Convair Corp., Boeing and the Glenn Martin Company submitted proposals for the new long-range jet bomber. Wind tunnel testing had shown that the drag from the engine installation of the Model 424 was too high, so Boeing's entry was a revised design, the Model 432, with the four engines buried in the forward fuselage.

The USAAF awarded study contracts to all four companies, requiring that North American and Convair concentrate on four-engined designs (to become B-45 and XB-46), while Boeing and Martin were to build six-engined aircraft (the B-47 and XB-48). The powerplant was to be General Electric's new TG-180 turbojet engine.

Swept wings

In May 1945, the von Kármán mission of the Army Air Forces inspected the secret German aeronautics laboratory near Braunschweig. von Kármán's team included the chief of the technical staff at Boeing, George S. Schairer. He had heard about the controversial swept-wing theory of R. T. Jones at Langley, but seeing models of swept-wing aircraft and extensive supersonic wind-tunnel data generated by the Germans, the concept was decisively confirmed. He wired his home office: "Stop the bomber design", and changed the design of the B-47 wing.

Analysis work by Boeing engineer Vic Ganzer suggested an optimum sweepback angle of about 35 degrees. Boeing's aeronautical engineers modified their Model 432 design to include swept wings and tail, resulting in the "Model 448", which was presented to the USAAF in September 1945...