So what do you do when a friend calls you and says he wants to give you a B52 bomber? writes Brian Byrne. One owner. High mileage with the Strategic Air Command from the mid-50s, followed by 200 combat bombing missions over Vietnam. Will deliver.
You think for a moment, recalls David Lee, then curator of the embryonic American Air Museum section of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford just outside Cambridge.
"Then I told him that we had 4,500 feet of runway at Duxford," David said at the UK launch of the new Chrysler 300C, held in that particular section yesterday. "And I asked him could he land it here?"
There was a longer silence at the American end of the transatlantic phone call. Then, "I'll get back to you."
Well, they did get back. And the fast forward to the end of that chapter was the arrival over Duxford of the B52 one Saturday morning in October of 1983, with the nearby M11 closed and a (just) favourable weather forecast.
"He did four trial runs, then came in and touched at the very start of the runway, and with the help of the brake 'chute he had come down to taxiing speed just at the end."
That B52 is now literally the centrepiece of a purpose built hangar at the Imperial War Museum, and looms massively against the many other planes and missiles which make up the very substantial collection of warplanes which range from a Mitchell bomber (above) through the B29 type that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the U2 type (below) from which Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in 1960, along with a copy of the Russian missile that actually shot him down (middle below), and a Lockheed SR71 'Blackbird' (bottom below) reconnaisance plane which could travel at more than three times the speed of sound.
And when you eat the launch dinner under the massive wing of the 8-engined B52, you marvel at the engineering ability that built these extraordinary machines, and the older but no less intriguing planes from WW2. You admire the bravery of the fighting men who flew them often to their own deaths, but you also feel strongly for those many many more who died underneath their massive destructive power, anonymous to those who pulled the levers to release their deadly loads.
The car? That's a tomorrow's story. No less a story of American engineering and innovation, but a vehicle that you can drive with a much easier conscience than in those magnificent but incredibly deadly flying machines.
