These last two are models of the construction out of birch plywood. The skin is about an eighth of an inch thick, made of 9 plies of very thin birch layers. The wing span is 20 feet longer than a football field. It is made of 95% wood. A man can walk upright in the wings, and thus service the engines while the plane was flying.
4 comments:
Way cool!
I've heard of the Spruce Goose... but I don't think I knew that it actually flew. Now I'm about to ask a dumb question: Were all planes made of wood at this point? For some reason I thought by then everything was made of aluminum.
Thanks, Crash.
You're right, Lisa. That and titanium and other metals. When he proposed building this huge transport in 1942, the government told him he couldn't have any metal because of the war effort. So he stubbornly went ahead and built it out of wood, mostly birch, some spruce and other light strong woods. The reason the G wouldn't go along with his plan is because they said he couldn't build a plane that large.
We went there. They have a plane that crossed the English Channel (where I'm from) - did it again recently
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