The Boening Flying Fortress was nineteen feet high, seventy-five feet long and had two wings that were one hundred and three feet wingspan. Containing several machine guns and 4,800 pounds of a payload of bombs the B17 was the most important bomber plane in World War II and was born of a fiery catastrophe that revolutionized aviation.
In 1935 aircraft engineers were busy building the next generation of war airplanes. After months of testing the greatest one is set to make its debut on October 30. The U.S. Army Air Corp rolls out Boening's Flying Fortress, the most technically advanced aircraft ever built. A four-engine plane that can travel farther distances and carry much larger payloads. This plane will be a gamechanger.
Army test pilots Major Ployar Hill and Lieutenant Donald Putt and three other crew members aboard the plane for the test flight. It takes off but something goes wrong and it crashes to the ground killing Hill and crew member Les Howard and leaving Putt badly burned with a head injury. This was the finest plane ever built and was flown by the best pilots available. So what went wrong?
When Putt was able to talk he explained that Hill forgot to unlock the plane's "gust locks" which locked control surfaces in place and by the time they took off it was too late to fix it which messed up the altitude on the plane causing it to stall and crash. Normally there are only three or four items to check off before take off, but the B17 was a much more complicated plane and it required thirty-eight items to check off in a particular order which was too much for one man to remember.
The Army Air Corp solved this by coming up with a pre-flight checklist that the pilot goes over with the co-pilot. This now standard safety item is all due to the B17 Flying Fortress which incidentally we wouldn't have won World War II without. Now even aircraft as small as two-seaters use them all the way up to big airliners. They are an integral part of flying and we can't do without them.
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