Lots of B-17 questions lately so I figured I may as well jump onthe band wagon.
Don’t rememebr exactly what show I was watching… “Nuclear Paradise” or “Atomic Paradise” or something like that. Had to do with the nuke testing at Bikini. Anyway… there was one shot in a film of the Castle Bravo test with a B-17 in it. It looked like it was OD but had a yellow tail and about the outer 1/3 of the wings where yellow. Looking for any info on this bird.
Four drone B-17s, painted yellow over NMF, and 5 drone-control B-17s were assigned to Operation Crossroads in 1946. There’s some info on those in Detail & Scale’s “B-17 Flying Fortress”, “More Derivatives Part 3” (by Alwyn Loyd). Hope this helps.
Gives me a start. Thansk very much.
The book “Final Cut: The Post-War B-17 Flying Fortress: The Survivors” by Scott A. Thompson might be helpful too. One thing I discovered when I bought the book back in 1990 is that the Collings Foundation Nine-O-Nine B-17 is a survivor of nuclear testing in Nevada. There is a short article about Operation Crossroads. On Page 12 and 13 of the book there are photographs of the B-17s. They are black and white photos. The B-17s appear to have stripes on the fuselages in addition to the paint on the wings and tail. “The B-17 Flying Fortress Story” by Roger Freeman and David Osborne lists an abbreviated operational history of each of the 12,731 B-17s which flew. The book which was first published in 1998 tells what happened to each one such as crashed, MIA, scrapped, reclaimed, written off, etc.