Six turnin’, four burnin’. Maybe…depending on whether the carburetor on the 28-cylinder Wasp Major engines had iced up or not. Without a doubt, the B-36 Peacemaker is a jaw-dropping sight in person. There is no other way to put it, it’s unbelievably huge, and that is coming from a guy who spent years working on airfields that had C-5 Galaxy and Antonov AN-124 traffic. When the wing has a measured chord that is big enough for crew to climb into rather comfortably to check on the engines, that’s huge. When the initial landing bogey consisted of a nine foot, two inch tall tire that put so much pressure on the ground that the plane was restricted to three location’s runways, that’s big. When routine maintenance involved changing 336 spark plugs, when needing a 100-gallon tank of lubricating oil per engine, and there was no hangar big enough to fit the bird, that’s beyond big, that was insane.

The Peacemaker was the darling of Strategic Air Command for years, simply because it had range, altitude, and could carry THE bomb. But when the Soviets introduced the Air Force to the MiG-15, each and every one of those positives were either nullified or became a problem, and by 1961, all but five museum aircraft had met their fate at AMARG at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. If you get a chance to see one of these massive monuments to early Cold War military momentum, check it out. One is at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio (where you can see the only remaining single-tire landing gear assembly left), one is at Pima Air and Space museum in Arizona, one is at Castle Air Museum in California, one is at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska, and if you have an “in”, the fifth one is in a private collection somewhere in Ohio, semi-reassembled from a scrapped plane on a farm.