Flying the British Overseas Airways Corporation’s Boeing Stratocruisers was an experience like no other in the commercial aviation world. For one of BOAC’s distinguished captains, writing in Aeroplane during 1991, the recollections flowed thick and fast
The Boeing Model 377 Stratocruiser was a unique and peculiar aircraft. Essentially, the ‘Strat’, as everyone who flew the aircraft invariably called it, was a B-29 bomber which had been hastily converted by Boeing into a civil airliner by replacing the fuselage with a ‘double-bubble’ cabin capable of seating 40-60 passengers on the top deck. Down below in the lower lobe there was a bar reached by a spiral staircase. The wings and the Pratt & Whitney ‘corncob’ R-4360 engines were originally those of certain late B-29s, later redesignated as the B-50.
‘Origin
