Convair Advanced Designs

Book excerpt: Consolidated Vultee, which later became Convair, built some of the world's best flying boats in the 1930s, and the world's best bombers during World War II. Convair's six-engine B-36 strategic bomber was credited with keeping the world safe during the early throes of the Cold War. But before all these great aircraft took to the skies, scores of ideas and concepts were proposed and analyzed by company management to determine if production would even be feasible. CONVAIR ADVANCED DESIGNS is a book that brings these futuristic, but stillborn, concepts to life for the very first time. This book features many never-before-seen company photographs, models, and drawings of such futuristic concepts as a folding-rotor anti-submarine patrol bomber and a giant seaplane passenger transport launched from a high-speed rail car! Readers will also be fascinated to see how certain seemingly unbelievable designs evolved into actual production airplanes years later, such as the giant Convair Tradewind turboprop seaplane transport.