Hi all.
Having a hard time finding references on the Internet for the interior colors of the B-52D and the B-47. Anyone know what the colors were for cockpits, gear wells, and bomb bays on these aircraft?
Thanks!
IIRC, The interior colours for the BUFF varied by area. The cockpit was Zinc Chromate Green (as was most of the crew areas. The interior of the wheel wells were either natural aluminum or white (although I do remember one that was also zinced) The out rigger bays are zinced as are the interior of the flaps. The bomb bays of the ones I’ve had the chance to crawl around in were usually so dirty you couldn’t tell what colour they were, but if I had to guess I would say white. I’m not an expert on this but this is from my memories of doing the kit and crawling around inside of some restored birds and one that was pre-restoration.
In my experience (1953-54), the interior of B-47s was zinc chromate. This includes cockpit, gear wells and bomb bay. I never noticed the outriggers, and was never around the B-52.
HTH
Dick
Thanks!
I spent countless hours climbing all in over and around “my” RB-47E at Rebel Field back when the Confederate AF was in Harlingen TX, and I adopted the derilect B-47 back in the boneyard. I was born among the roar of these gorgeous monsters, my dad flew them, and I fought to keep the rapacious CAF robbers from stealing the sheet metal off the Stratojet and the other Cold War a/c rotting out back (you see, to the “historians” of the CAF, anything without a prop has no historic value and thus is good for nothing but robbing for parts).
To answer your question, most of the cockpit of the B-47 was black, with the exception of the floor and the outer part of the forward wheel well that you had to climb up after entering the hatch to get to the crew stations. The seats were black as well. Some B-47’s had 36321 Dark Gull Gray instead of the green in the cockpit, so you can’t go wrong with either, unless doing an really early one, in which the green is appropriate and no gray.
The interior of the bomb bay and wheel wells were chromate green and pretty much a dead-on match for Interior Green FS 34151. The outriggers’ well was natural metal as I recall, since they folded into the pods for the 2/3 and 4/5 engines. The gear legs were painted aluminum. The inside of the gear and bomb bay doors was also interior green. I saw no yellow chromate on this a/c at all, but there may have been some in areas that were not visible. My subsequent research has shown this description to be pretty representative of the type in general.
Now, will somebody, preferably not Trumpeter, PLEASE make me a 1/48 B-47 kit? How can an aircraft that was the backbone of our entire air force, with more than 1,500 examples of a six-engine jet BOMBER built in peacetime, be so ignored by kit makers? And, were it not for the Stratojet, which bridged the technological gap between the B-29 and the B-52 and everything that came after, we wouldn’t even have the Boeing 777, let alone the 747 and not a one KC-135/B707.
TOM
Sharkskin
I had much the same experience with a group that started a museum that I worked at as a full time mechanic - The Air Guard had a B-57A hanger queen that had been partially disassembled but they would furnish all the parts to put it completly back together. The cost to transfer the title from the Guard to the museum would have been $75 to cover the paperwork. The museum told them " No thanks, we aren’t interested in that type of aircraft". A year later the airport bought the airframe and burned it for fire fighting practice.
I remember that one of our “D” models had one of its main gear doors painted chromate yellow while the rest were chromate green. With all the BUFFs we had, I can’t be certain that there were some with white gear doors and wells but I have never seen anything but chromate. The “G” and “H” may have been different though.