Bomber Plane

Bomber Plane

The first use of aircraft as a method for dropping bombs on an enemy was the largely unsuccessful use of aircraft by Germany in World War I. The appearance of these behemoths over Britain was intimidating, but the giant airships were highly susceptible to attack by nimble fighter planes, and although they did do some damage they had little effect on the outcome of the war.

Following World War I, it was already obvious that airplanes, well-established as fighting machines, couldalso be use to transport bombs. All that was needed was sturdier planes with more powerful engines. Bombs are deliberately designed to be heavy, to give them greater ability to punch through defensive armor possessed by and enemy, and planes would need to have respectable payload capacity to be effective as bombers.

Spurred by the tireless efforts of World War I aviation hero Billy Mitchell, the Boeing aircraft corporation developed the immortal B-17 "Flying Fortress," first put into commission in 1935. The redoubtable B-17s participated in early attacks against Germany in 1941, and continued to perform missions throughout the war. Far from the flimsy plane devised less than 40 year previously by Orville and Wilbur Wright, the B-17 richly deserved its nickname. It was capable of flying far past the range of escorting fighter planes, and so was on its own as it flew over German airspace and into hordes of waiting German fighters. Capable of absorbing an enormous amount of damage, the four-engine, ten-man B-17s delivered load after load of bombs on German industrial and military targets, often with frightful losses to the B-17 squadrons, but equally often with devastating effect against the enemy.

While the B-17 carried out their missions typically during the day, the British Royal Air Force executed night attacks against Germany employing the new, massive, four-engine Avro Lancaster. Mercilessly the night attacks came against Germany, with major industrial centers such as Hamburg and Dresden being almost literally razed to the ground.

Over the course of World War II, many different bomber types appeared, including the B-24 Liberator, the B-25 Mitchell, and, toward the latter part of the war, the huge Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Able to carry up to eight tons of bombs, the B-29s saw action primarily over Japan and Asia. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the newly-invented atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, Nagasaki was obliterated under an immense mushroom cloud as well, and Japan immediately surrendered.

The advent of the jet engine following World War II pushed all previous bombers into obsolescence, and the countries embroiled in the cold war developed a suite of new planes. The United States's B-52 Statofortress was powered by eight engines and could fly halfway around the world without refuelling, while Great Britain and the Soviet Union also added long-range bombers to their fleets. All these jet-powered bombers were capable of delivering nuclear bombs against targets, creating an uneasy balance of power in which the great distances separating the involved nations were no longer a cushion against attack. A large variety of shorter-range bomber were developed as well, seeing actions in numerous regional conflicts in east Asia and the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s. Particular concern developed in 1970 when the Soviet Union was found to have developed a long-range bomber, capable of flying more than twice the speed of sound, known as the "Backfire." Soviet protestations that their creation was a purely "defensive" bomber produced grim smiles in other countries. This gave the Soviets a clear advantage in bomber technolgoy, and the analogous United States aircraft was the B-1B, a subsonic bomber developed during the 1980s.

One difficulty with the early jet-powered bombers was that they returned a positively enormous radar signal. This led to long and expensive attempts to devise low-radar-return bombers. In the United States, the culmination of these efforts is the B-2 Stealth bomber, costing about two billion dollars each, but virtually invisible to radar. As of the late 1990s, the B-2 remains the most advanced bomber plane ever designed.