Oof. Oh, woah. Hi, I'm Matthew Burchette, and this is Behind the Wings.
How do I get out of this stupid thing?
So, on today's episode of Behind the Wings, we're actually going to be talking about
our B-18 Bolo Bomber. Now the B-18 was America's first really modern, medium
bomber. And we're going to go out there and check it out.
Now, when you see it, you're probably going to be like "What? It's not that great."
Well, that's because we're in the restoration phases, and,
trust me, it looks better than it did a couple of years ago.
The other thing we're going to talk about is how rare this plane is.
There are only six of these guys left.
So let's quit talking and start looking.
Sorry, I get all goofy when I'm looking at planes.
Alright, so behind me is a B-18 Bolo Bomber. BAM! How cool is this thing.
It's got that kind of 1930s vibe to it. Well, duh, it's because it was developed in the
1930s by Douglas. Now, at the time, the mid 1930s, this thing rocked. It had three
machine guns, it could travel up to 164 miles an hour and
it could go, wait for it, 800 miles with a 4,000 pound bomb load. How cool is that.
Well, it might have been cool then, but, by 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland,
it was not cool. So the B-18 was relegated to its own little world of anti-submarine warfare.
So let's go check out the tail, 'cause I got to show you something back there.
What is this? Well, this is just, you know, taillights. But, what we were talking about
was a MAD boom, a Magnetic Anomaly Detector. And what that was was just a big boom,
kind of a Marlinspike looking thing, that came out of the tail of this plane. And what
it allowed it to do is to actually detect German U-boats under the water,
from their magnetic signature. Once they were found, then you could drop some
depth charges on, and then hopefully sink the U-boat. In fact, the B-18 Bolo was
actually credited with three German U-boat sinkings during the war.
That's pretty cool. Now, you know what else is cool? What Wings Over the Rockies is
doing to this particular plane. We're restoring it back to its former glory.
Let's start on the inside, and I'll show you what we're doing.
It just makes me all sad to see her like this.
Okay, I'm being a little maudlin, but it does make me a
little bit sad. But, you know what, she's had a great life. She has spent time at
almost every airbase across the United States during World War II, went to
Alaska where she flew cargo and even sprayed crops. The best yet, she flew guns,
or at least tried to, get guns to Cuba. In fact, the packages were marked for Fidel.
How cool is that? Well, she never made it, obviously, and we
ended up with her. And that's where the really cool stuff starts, because we are
going to try to bring her back to life. So let's go see some of the things that
we're actually doing to her to bring this old girl back to life.
Alright, got to get out of here.
Here we are in the top ventral turn of the B-18 Bolo. Now, you can see, to my left
is a replica 30 caliber machine gun. Now, compare that to the bigger and bolder
B-17, which had 13 machine guns at 50 caliber, not to mention the fact that a
B-17 could fly all the way to Berlin and back. This guy only had a range of about
800 miles. That means you'd get to Berlin and have to jump out, over the German
capital, that you just bombed, not a good idea. Anyway, we've seen about all we can
see in the inside. Let's go to the outside. We're going to talk to one of
our awesome volunteers Tom Thayer. He's been working on this plane for two years
to get her back to what she might have looked like, if she had been based at
Lowry. Let's go talk to him, because he's pretty cool.
So now we're on the top of the wing with this awesome guy Tom Thayer.
He's actually been up here for two years working on just the wings alone.
We basically haven't let him off, but that's okay, we won't go into that now.
Tom, thank you for being with us. Can you tell us a little bit of what you've been doing?
Sure. It's restoration work. We're removing
the paint, polishing the aluminum and rivets and everything on the surface to take it
back to what it looked like when it came out of the factory.
Awesome, and that's a lot of rivets, as you can see, and even more so I can see right down here.
Every time I'd walk by, you were pulling bolts out of this kind of seam right there.
What were those?
Those were the bolts that hold the wing on. There were about 400 of them and
each one needed to be cleaned, taken down and replaced.
Now, you tighten those all back up right?
Oh yeah.
Okay, good. You know, that's awesome.
I love seeing you guys work so hard on this plane, because she really is
gorgeous when you think about it. Thank you so much for your help on this video
series, and thank you even more so for helping us on the plane. You know, that
reminds me, there are only six of these old girls left. There are five in museums, and
one is in Hawaii. And now, with the production money that we've got, we're
going to go check that old girl out. So let's go see her in Hawaii. I can't wait!
We're in Hawaii! How awesome is this! Mahalo! Aloaha, everybody!
Why are we in Hawaii? Well, 'cause we can be. We got the money you know.
Well, okay, we're actually in Hawaii so we can look at a B-18.
Now, unfortunately that B-18 is - pow - right into the side of a mountain.
Luckily, everybody survived. This is 1941, but the Air Force never forgets where
they've left a plane. So, in the 1960s, they came to Hawaii,
they took out the top turret and the nose turret to help restore an their bomber at Dayton.
So let's go check out the B-18 here, so we can...
oh, I mean, let's go back to Denver.
Alright, so there you go, the B-18 Bolo in just ten short minutes.
I hope you guys had as much fun as I did crawling around that thing, because, come
on, who doesn't like crawling around planes? If you have questions or comments make sure to
put them in the comment section, and I will get back to you as soon as possible
with an answer. Now, next month, you're not going to want to miss this, we're doing
something a little bit different. We're actually looking at a traveling exhibit
that we have here called da Vinci's Machines, and it's going to be a
beautiful thing to a look at these of machine that the Mr. Leonardo da Vinci
made back in the Italian Renaissance. Okay, I'm sorry, that was horrible.
My apologies to our Italian viewers, because...
Anyway, you're not going to want to miss it.
We're actually going to have a fellow curator here, Mark Rogers. He's going to
take us through the exhibit and show us so many things that da Vinci built,
designed and we still use today. How cool is that?
So, stay tuned.