US BOMBER SPECIAL
Flown just over two years after the end of World War Two, the B-47 Stratojet embodied many firsts, both for Boeing and for the US Air Force. Large numbers were built, but its career as a bomber was relatively short, as Lindsay Peacock explains.
With its swept wings and podded engines, the successful Boeing 707 airliner owes a debt to another product of the Seattle design team, the Model 450, the company’s first jet-powered design, which served with the US Air Force for more than a decade as the B-47 Stratojet. In excess of 2,000 Stratojets were eventually produced – most were pure bombers, but the specialist RB-47E was tasked with photographic reconnaissance, while the RB-47H carried out often-hazardous missions aimed at gathering intelligence pertaining to enemy electronic equipment and orders of battle.
There were also the electronic countermeasures EB-47 variants which were designed to support the Stratojet bomber force.
The B-47’s gestation began long before the end of hostilities in World War Two and proved to be a lengthy and somewhat convoluted process, with Boeing conceiving a succession of designs, including the Models 424, 432 and 448, any one of which might have become the …
