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isnt going sonwell for your russian friends in ukraine, am i right i didnt expect the "special military operation " is a codeword for suicide 😂

I don’t believe it ever will ! They removed all the internal components long ago !

One of the special features of the Silverplate variant was that it used the bomb shackles that the special Lancaster variant had that dropped the Tall Boy and other massive bombs, Tibbets picked them because he knew they were something that already worked for oversized bombs instead of having to screw around developing something new.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Sort of. All B-29s had injection carbs, which are throttle body fuel injection. The Silverplates had direct injection.

No they weren't, Tibbets ordered the planes he got just as the direct injection engine's were starting to be delivered to the assembly plants, by the time the war was over they were all being produced with direct injection. Most of the stories about engine fires in B29's are myths for two reasons, the first is the B29 prototype that crashed into the meat packing plant in Seattle, even today some sources erroneously blame the engine itself and claim it burst into flames while the plane was flying along, this has led to many people believing that they were prone to doing that but they never were, although the Truman Committee blamed the engine I'm a report they made afterwards claiming that the engine burst into flames all on it's own it didn't, another investigation afterwards found that a faulty fuel filler cap had leaked fuel all over the engine that of course caught on fire, any engine from that era that had things like mechanical breaker points in their magneto's that spark everytime they open and hot exhaust manifolds with ducts going to a turbo is going to catch on fire if you soak it with gasoline. When the engine fires that really happened occurred was on take off and what they were is called an induction fire which is actually inside the engine, inside the intake manifold to be specific, the problem was the R3350 engine had a poorly designed supercharger that was designed by Wright themselves instead of General Electric who designed the superchargers on almost every other US aircraft engine, having GE design it was proposed by the Army when the specifications for the R3350 engine were laid down but Wright insisted on designing it themselves, when the engine was up on RPM's and running at a normal power setting it did fine but at an idle the supercharger pooled fuel in a poorly designed elbow in it causing fuel to be distributed unevenly to the cylinders which had some running lean, when a pilot in a B29 that'd been sitting on a runway on a hot Pacific waiting to take off that had hot engine's as a result would open the throttles too quickly for take off a lean cylinder could backfire into the intake manifold, needless to say the intake manifold of a supercharged engine that has positive pressure air in it with fuel mixed in is the last place you want to introduce a flame to, it's important to understand that induction fires aren't unique to the R3350 engine, any of the supercharged WW2 aircraft engine's (well, not the German direct injection engine's) could have an induction fire if run incorrectly, it's just that the R3350 engine's were more prone to them because of their supercharger design, matter of fact right here on CZcams there's a WW2 B17 training film where the instructor (whose name was Arthur Kennedy and became a Hollywood actor of note after the war starring in movies such as Lawrence of Arabia and the Jimmy Stewart classic Bend of The River) warns the trainee while he's running up the engine before take off and doing magneto checks and cycling the turbo's that running the throttles incorrectly during those checks could cause an induction fire. During take off in a B29 it was the duty of the waist gunners to look through their plexiglass bubbles at the engine nacelles during take off, on each one was a panel that if that engine had an induction fire would start to turn colors from the the induction fire burning a hole through a thin area of the intake manifold close to that panel, after turning colors the fire would burn through the panel itself, if a gunner warned the pilot of a panel turning colors there was a good chance they weren't so far down the runway that he could get it stopped and they could all get out and run. By having direct injection into the cylinders you not only have a more even mixture to each cylinder virtually eliminating back fires into the intake manifold but even if it does happen there's no fuel in the manifold to ignite in the first place. There was two types of direct injection developed for it, the first one was basically just a modified Bendix-Stromberg injection carburetor that instead of having the single injector inside of it's throat it had multiple lines that left it and went to each cylinder, it didn't work well however and as far as I know never went beyond testing, the one that became the standard used on them was developed by Bosch (yes they had an American division before the war that became independent of Bosch Germany, at least after the war broke out) which was what eliminated the induction fire issues with the R3350 engine. One other problem that like others wasn't the engine's fault but contributed to it's reputation is the cylinder head temperature guages supplied to all the assembly plants weren't properly calibrated by the manufacturer, it was a company like so many that found itself making something during the war it'd never made before that, it wasn't discovered until much later that they were indicating temperatures up to 100° f cooler than the cylinder heads actually were, so if one read 300° the cylinder head could actually have been 400°, during normal flight if the flight engineers were opening the cowl flaps at what they thought was 300° it was already too late, not only would the cylinder head be too hot to start cooling at that temperature engine damage was already occurring, after discovering the problem and getting the supplier straightened out on calibrating the guages engine life started jumping dramatically between rebuilds. The problems with the B29 itself and it's R3350 engine weren't bad designs for the most part, the problems all stemmed from an airplane that was a technological leap that should have had a 5 year development program that was compressed down to 3 years, the first production B29's were actually rolling off the assembly lines when revised prints and design changes were showing up at the assembly plants, the president of Boeing actually had a heart attack and died in the middle of everything going wrong with trying to get the first one out the door, but at the end of the day they finally got everything sorted out and the last few months they were being delivered as fine as any other aircraft of the day, and it smashed, burned and choked Japan to death at the end of the war, it's the weapon that put the final nail in Japan's coffin, even without the atomic bomb B29's had mined Japan's harbors so thoroughly that the last months of the war shipping in and out of Japan, an island totally reliant on materials being shipped in and out, was reduced to 2 to 3% of what it'd been at it's height, not only did the B29 scorch their cities it choked the entire island to the verge of death, the atomic bombs saved lives because without them and without Japan surrendering because of the bombs millions would have died of starvation within the next 6 months from B29's mining their harbors, and that's all because of the only bomber in the world with the range to strike Japan from the bases we had at the time.

Whilst a nice historical overview, what you said doesn't contradict what I wrote. Injection carbs are basically mechanical TBI. I don't disagree with the rest of what you wrote and completed agree that any suggestions that the B29 was a "failure" are idiocy at best. The B29 was the best bomber of the war, bar none.

@@mattgbarr I wasn't addressing you, I was addressing the OP. And I know exactly how the Bendix-Stromberg injection carburetor worked, if you read my post I said that the first direct injection system they tried on the R3350 engine was a Bendix-Stromberg injection carburetor but instead of it having the single injector nozzle in the carburetors venturi they ran lines from it to every cylinder.

All good, a simple misunderstanding there. It's always good to talk to actually intelligent, knowledgeable people like yourself. No hard feelings at all.

Thank you for the kind words! I will continue to do my best to put out as quality content as possible!

Thanks! much appreciated!

Thanks for the comment and support !

🎉 new vid. Missed your insight