Business: Winged Cigar

With the pleased air of one letting out a big secret, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp. last week let out one of the biggest in the aircraft business. Out of a hangar at Fort Worth, Tex., Consolidated rolled its new, unconventional, six-motored giant, the XB-36 bomber—world’s largest land plane. The development cost: approxi-‘ mately $20,000,000.

The new plane was a strange sight. Its 230-ft. wing (v. 141 feet for the 6-29) was set halfway back in the 163-ft., cigar-shaped fuselage. In the leading edge of the wing, where conventional planes have their propellers, XB-36 had only narrow, mouthlike air intakes for the six Pratt & Whitney 3,000-h.p. engines. They drive three-bladed propellers on the wing’s trailing edge.

Convair’s unconventional 160-ton monster will have a range of 10,000 miles and a speed of around 300 miles an hour. Test flights will start this summer. If the tests are successful, Convair will build another prototype. Then it will tool up to fill an Army order for a fleet of planes to cost hundreds of millions.

Convair has also started to build a military transport model of the plane, the C-99, expects it to carry 400 com. pletely equipped infantrymen. On the drawing boards is an even larger commercial version which is expected to haul up to 275 passengers. But Convair has no orders for the commercial transport (Model 37) as yet. Pan American Airways has plugged Convair’s Model 37 in ads for more than two years. But even Pan Am has placed no solid order for any.

Pan Am has agreed to buy such a plane, if it will meet performance specifications which. sound fantastic. To meet them, the plane would have to be powered with gas turbine engines with an equivalent of 5,000 h.p. each. Such engines are still in the drawing board stage.