Barksdale AFB has a great display of vintage airplanes lined up near the 8th Air Force Museum. (In the photo below the museum has the red roof.) All of the men enjoyed having an opportunity to see a B-24 again, and it made a great backdrop for photos. Comments ranged from "It’s so small!", to "It’s bigger than I remembered!" Everyone agreed that the tail seems to be huge.
One of the pictures in the previous group shows the bomb bay of a B-52. The crew told us that the B-52 can carry up to 32,000 pounds of bombs. In it’s day the the B-24 was one of the heaviest planes to ever get off of the ground, yet it carried a payload of just 5,000 pounds. B-24’s however were manufactured by the thousands. At it’s peak, in the summer of 1944, production reached the rate of a new B-24 every 59 minutes!
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