Convair B-36 Peacemaker proto type mock up and more...

[GWS]

 Reading all these posts on the B-36 brings back a childhood memory from sometime around 1959-1961. I was somewhere around 8-10 years old  and spent part of that summer at my grandparents farm in northwestern Indiana, just 1 mile from the Illinois state line. We used to walk  thru the corn/bean fields looking for Indian arrowheads/tools, my grandpa had a large collection he had found on the farm over many years.  So one day I'm walking thru a freshly plowed/disced  field  and hear the sound of aircraft somewhere close above me. I say aircraft because when I looked up I expected to see 2 or more planes by the sound, yet there was only 1 gigantic plane almost overhead! It was a B-36 at relatively low altitude, guessing now about 2-4000 feet! Biggest damn plane I had ever seen in my life and it flew almost directly over me! It seemed to just hang in the air, and I watched it for what seemed  quite a long time. I'm sure now, some 60 years later that it wasn't near as long as I remember it, but I knew my aircraft even then as my Father was career Air Force and I had many models of various planes used at the time(but not a B-36!).  Where my grandparents lived was about 50-60 miles from Chanute AFB at Rantoul Ill.  Over the years we had found chafe that had been  dropped from what I suppose were  practice missions  and seeing many different types of military aircraft fly over was not at all unusual.  I never got to go to Chanute field until many years later, long after the mighty B-36 was obsolete.  The plane I saw that day so many years ago was the only B-36 I have ever seen.  Thanks for all your great posts!

 

                                                                                                                                                                 Steve