DerAdlerIstGelandet said:
Hell FBJ has built planes listen to him if you wont listen to me.
About 100 P-3s, 4 F-117s, 20 L-1011s and 3 B-2s...
Thanks Adler....
It was a fact that more B-24s were built. To say it was easier to build or designed for mass producibility is false. As already stated, factories were built around the bomber and an a huge manufacturing infrastructure was thrown at the program. Any American aircraft could of been subjected to the same numbers if they were given the chance under Charles Sorrenson. The B-24 was hastily designed as reflected in some of its featrures (ie. no MLG doors). Ruben Fleet pushed the design team to meet the original contract requirements. Had the B-24 been given more time during its design phase, it probably would of looked more like the XB-32.
"The "Liberator", as it became known, was conceived in haste and it showed it. That statement, however, in no way detracts from the remarkable job that Laddono and his crew of engineers did, given the deadline they labored under. Nevertheless, when Davis bitterly remarked later that with wing such as his, "leaving the main landing gear half exposed when retracted was almost sacrilegious," he had a point. Furthermore, the bomb bay doors which rolled up the sides of the fuselage, while easily facilitating bomb loading on the ground, were far from air tight when closed, and when aloft, the draft in the rear end of the aircraft was fierce. The various systems in the airplane also left a lot of room for improvement. Fuel gages looked like something from a basement furnace boiler; the fuel transfer system seemed to have been designed by Rube Goldberg. If you can imagine an engineer abroad the B-24 crawling down that narrow catwalk between the bomb bays to affix a "U" hose to an electrical pump to transfer fuel, you begin to get an idea.
The three best features of the B-24 were its wing, the reliable Pratt Whitney engines (R-1830s of 1200 hp) and its tricycle landing gear. The latter made the B-24 easy to land and since the wing was through flying once the aircraft touched down there was no tendency to bounce once the aircraft touched down. The rival B-17, on the other hand, with its so-called conventional gear and thick wing, would float if the airspeed on landing was the slightest bit too high, and most pilots "wheeled it in" - that is landed on the main gear and then lowered the tail wheel, in order not to bounce back into the air. Properly handled, though, the B-17 could make a very nice three point landing, and it was a forgiving aircraft."
http://members.aol.com/dheitm8612/requiem.htm