"Tarver Engineering" wrote in message
...

"Paul Austin" wrote in message
...

"Gord Beaman" wrote
Scott Ferrin wrote:


They built a model to go with it that weekend too. Hardly a
napkin
and I doubt many (any actually) manufactures use napkin
drawings
for
their presentation to the brass.

That's really quite a silly suggestion Scott...of course they
don't, doesn't preclude the initial idea being roughed out by a
hand drawn sketch does it?

Scott's refering to the original pitch that sold the B-52 to the
Air
Force. According to Gunston, a team of Boeing engineers initially
pitched a turboprop B-52. When it became plain that the Air Force
thought a developed B-36 was preferable, the USAF types handed
Boeing
a draft set of requirements for a jet bomber, the Boeing guys
retired
to a hotel in Dayton and over a long weekend, developed the
concept of
the BUFF from scratch,

Where else do you suppose new airplanes come from besides "from
scratch"?

There is nothing different about the B-52.

Those kinds of proposals are much more often done by a cast of dozens
back at the plant with all the resources the company can bring to
bear, rather than in a hotel room. That's the remarkable thing about
the history of the B-52. Every great invention starts out as a vision
distilled by one or a few people, as often as not through informal
discussions that ghasp may involve beer lubricants.

The B-52 isn't the only airplane that was radically different from
what the customer originally had in mind. The A4D was even more wildly
different from what the procuring agency (NAVAIR in this case) though
they would be buying. Ed Heinemann didn't do the conceptual design in
a hotel room though. He used every resource that Douglas could muster,
back at the plant before he went to Washington to pitch it.