XB-42 Design

Here's a little article from Douglas on the design of the XB-42 and a short article on the crash of the airplane.

This is excellent
Any chance you have these in high resolution? Beer is on me, of course

I always thought it was an interesting design, thanks for posting!

Sorry, no better resolution. What you see is all I got.

There was a Wings/Airpower article many years ago that covered it pretty well, if with less technical details. Note the reference to the B-29 at the end of the article. The Douglas idea was doing the same mission as the B-29 with a much smaller airplane with far fewer aircrew.

It certainly seemed like a promising airplane, a similar concept to the DH.98 Mosquito, fairly small and very fast.

The reference to the DC-8 is amusing. They were planning an airliner version with that designation. The DC-4 was in production. the DC-5 in prototype, and the DC-6 coming along, with the DC-7 I assume on the drawing board. DC-8 was the next available designation.

I assume the DC-8 Mixmaster was going to be a DC-3 replacement based on the size.

I recall reading that the twin bubble canopies were heartily disliked by the crew because the arrangement prevented face to face communication. Looking at your "wingman" through two bubble canopies and talking over the intercom simply was not as good as putting your heads together and saying "What do we do now?" in person. As a consequence, most of the most urgent problems were handled with the pilots talking to each other down below the canopies. They later adopted a canopy more like a Mosquito - or A-3 Skywarrior. .

We would have had a number of high performance airliners in the late 40's. In addition to the DC-6 and Constellation, the DC-8 Mixmaster and the Republic Rainbow.

Ahh... the Republic Rainbow, another stunningly beautiful aircraft.

Indeed it was!

Here's a little more on the XB-42

I've always been a mild fan of the B-42, which I think would have been a great plane to have had in, say, 1944. It was, alas, really too late.

The double-bubble (bug-eye) cockpit arrangement was fashionable, having been used on at least one other US aircraft, e.g., the first few C-74 aircraft.