“The B-29 is the most advanced propeller-driven airplane in the world in 1945, it encompasses all of those innovations,” says Kinney. These innovations that would lead to the dawn of a new era of civil aviation.
The B-29 was used as the foundation for the 377 Stratocruiser, Boeing’s first large airliner with a pressurised cabin. It was able to carry 100 passengers and hints at the larger airliners that followed in the 1950s. “At the time, Pan American World Airways is staking its future, no longer on flying boats, but, tricycle-landing-gear, propeller-driven airliners,” says Kinney. He says one of their most famous posters at the time is of a Stratocruiser and the Eiffel Tower, showing that people can board an aircraft in the US and step off in Europe. “This idea of that becoming, you know, a global network of aviation routes, what international airlines are going to be. It starts with them.”
The B-29 has also had effects on the ground, too. “By virtue of the World War Two being a global war, that’s when you start having around the world paved runways, paved airfields.” The runways built for the B-29 are especially long, as the aircraft needed about 1.6km (one mile) to take off. These long runways would help lay the foundations of a global airport network for the civil aviation boom of the 1950s, says Kinney.
This aircraft hadn’t flown for at least 20 years, and it was very big to have to dismantle and then ship over – Hattie Hearn
Of the nearly 4,000 B-29s built in the 1940s, only 22 survive today, including two examples still flying at airshows in the US.