The airliner pilot who gets to fly World War Two's biggest bomber

The Commemorative Air Force in the US flies the only two airworthy Boeing B-29s, the most expensive weapon of World War Two. One pilot tells BBC Future what it feels like to fly them.

They are two of the most celebrated aircraft still flying today. The two Boeing B-29s flown by the Commemorative Air Force (CAF) in the US are the last airworthy examples of nearly 4,000 built in the mid-1940s, the largest bomber in the world at that time and a design which pushed aviation technology to the limit.

The aircraft, nicked "Fifi" and "Doc" by the CAF, take part in airshows across the US during the summer, where aviation fans can pay to ride along in 30-minute-long demonstration flights.

The Boeing B-29 was the most advanced bomber in the world when it entered service in 1945: it was the first mass-produced aircraft to have pressurised compartments for the crew, and it could fly higher and further than any other aircraft thanks to its four enormous engines. These engines also helped it fly almost as fast as the fighter planes of the time. Designing and building it cost more than the atomic bombs that B-29s would eventually drop on Japan to end World War Two.

Bringing the B-29 into service was a colossal industrial project that at times overwhelmed Boeing. Its engines were powerful but temperamental, and keeping them in line required the full-time attention of a dedicated flight engineer, who kept a beady eye on engine temperatures to avoid the engines catching fire from overheating. Even getting a B-29 airborne for its mission over Japan required great effort in the humid air of tropical airfields. So, 80 years after the B-29 helped bring the world's most costly conflict to a close, what is it like to fly one now?

Randall Haskin, 52, is one of the lucky few who knows. When he isn't flying freight planes for one of the world's biggest delivery companies, he swaps an airliner's seat for the rather more intensive controls of "Fifi".

"Flying the Superfortress is like leadership by committee," says Haskin over Zoom from his home in Las Vegas. "I have a flight engineer who's responsible for essentially all manner of engine operation and management. In the world of professional flying, it's normal to have two pilots interacting with one another. But now to have a flight engineer who is the key component of all aspects of engine operation makes being the pilot in command a leadership exercise."

The flight engineer's job was vital in a B-29 because there was no way the pilot or co-pilot could monitor the engine readings at the same time as doing everything else needed to get the aircraft into the air. "Think about when you first learn to drive, and think about when how you drive now, you make inputs with your foot on the accelerator all the time, and you don't think about how much or how little you're pushing," Haskin says. "You're just simply looking at either the speedometer or you're looking at your relative motion with other cars, and you're making inputs, right? Normally, when you fly any other aircraft without a flight engineer, that's the same thing that happens."

For example, in other big World War Two bomber planes Haskin has flown, like the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, if the pilot wants to add more power then he simply moves the throttle levers for the engines.

Not so on the B-29. "Instead of me just simply saying, 'Okay, I'm going to give it a little bit less power, because I want to slow down'. Well, now I have to tell the flight engineer what power to set. And it's not just, 'Hey, I want a little bit less,'" says Haskin. The pilot has to tell the flight engineer exactly how much extra power according to the manifold pressure gauge, which measure the pressure of the air around a crucial part of the wing. Too much power – or too little – and it can end in disaster.

This means Haskin has to be aware of things he is not usually aware of in any other airplane he flies, he says. "We're talking about having to use parts of my pilot brain in real time while I'm trying to fly this 90,000lb (40 tonnes) beast around and take care of the airplane and do everything I need to get on the ground safely and not look like a big Bozo the Clown in front of all the people that are filming it for YouTube."

When it was built, the Boeing B-29 carried the biggest radial engines then in service to power its four massive propellers. The Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone was an 18-cylinder engine that weighed over a tonne and could create more than 20,000 horsepower of energy. Designed before World War Two, the R-3350 was still having teething problems when it was selected for the B-29 programme.

Despite all that power, Haskin describes the B-29 as feeling "incredibly underpowered". The plane struggles to get off the runway and climb at anything other than gentle pace for the first few minutes, and pilots always have to keep a potential engine failure at the back of their mind. Unlike many aircraft, Haskin says, the B-29 loses airspeed quickly, partly due to the enormous flaps on the wings which help slow it down. Bleeding speed quickly can mean trouble if an engine fails at the same time, however.

"If you are not prepared for the emergency at hand and [don't] have a plan and understand what the energy state of the airplane is, you're going to crash," says Haskin. "I don't want to say it's a substantial risk, because it's a rare thing. But when we practice, especially two-engine-out operations, man, it is a handful. The last time I practiced that, that really sucked."

The passengers Haskin is taking up for flights during the airshow season are probably too excited to worry about the possible risks. "Do you know the movie from the 1990s Driving Miss Daisy?" says Haskin. "That's what I say. We're out Driving Miss Daisy. We're just taking the old B-29 out for a nice Sunday drive just to show her off for the passengers. A nice quick run, 20 to 30 minutes. And then we usually do that two or three times a day out at our ride stops, take 10 passengers up with us at a time and let people walk around and see what it smells like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, all the living, breathing experiences."

Haskin is a US Air Force veteran who flew F-15 fighters in combat over Iraq in 2003, before taking a job as a pilot for a logistics company; his father flew in B-29s in the 1950s.

He describes the CAF as "a flying museum to engage the public and tell the story of, you know, all of the greatest generation, people who designed and built and maintained and operated and all of these warbirds".

Haskin says he has been a World War Two aviation enthusiast ever since he first saw airplanes at air shows as a child. "And you know, both of the bombers that I fly right now, the B-24 and B-29, I have pictures of myself as a kid with both of these exact aircraft."

He started out in the CAF flying the Texan, a World War Two training plane that is a popular "warbird" at air shows around the world. It was while he was flying the Texan that he had a chance meeting with the operations manager that flies the much larger World War Two bombers. "He said, 'Hey, if you ever want to come out and you know, fly the bombers, let me know.' And I said, 'Yes, I would love to fly the bombers.' It took me about a half a second to say that."

Haskin's father, Bruce, was a flight engineer on the Superfortress in the 1950s. "I grew up with him telling me stories all about that," says Haskin. "I never really thought I would have the opportunity [to fly it]. Because at this time, this is prior to 2017, the Fifi was the only B-29 that was flyable. For 30 plus years, there was only one, and the CAF held it very, very close. They only let a very, very small group of people operate the airplane, and even then, only after a lot of experience."

Haskin graduated to the B-29 after flying the B-24 Liberator, the most-produced US bomber of the war but a plane he describes as "a fantastic airplane, but it's also a terrible airplane, worst, worst airplane I've ever flown in my entire life", he says, noting that the B-24 is slow to respond to pilot controls. Haskin spent two years flying as co-pilot and then pilot on the B-24 before he was allowed to move on to the B-29.  

His first flight on Fifi was as a passenger in-between airshows before the pandemicwas his co-pilot check ride, where he would familiarise himself with the aircraft's controls while another pilot flew the plane. "When I actually got on board for the first flight, it was overwhelming."

Unlike most bombers of the time, the B-29's pilots sat near the front of the aircraft. The aircraft's nose was glazed with a huge number of glass panels that gave it excellent visibility. The view from a B-29's cockpit will feel oddly familiar to Star Wars fans: it was a massive influence on the design of the flight deck of the Millennium Falcon.

Haskin describes flying the B-29 as like "running a concert orchestra". During wartime mission, B-29s would fly with a crew of 11, separated into two pressurised compartments connected by a tunnel over the leading bomb bay. On a CAF flight, the B-29 flies with a crew of six: pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, and three "scanner observers" who give the pilots feedback on parts of the airplane they can't see from the cockpit.

"This is a complicated airplane, right?" says Haskin. "Despite the fact that it was a massive technological advance, very little is automated about it. There's also the entire process of testing many different things, and flight control checks and the engine start procedure – they're big, complicated engines that are, quite frankly, easy to damage. So you have to treat them nice."

There is a wartime instructional film which shows the flight-check routine for a B-29 crew; this is very much a truncated version, and the film lasts more nearly 40 minutes. "I would usually plan 45 minutes in between, you know, butts in the seat, everybody strapped in, intercom on, ready to talk between then and when I can take off," says Haskin. The B-29's cockpit and flight engineer's station certainly looks like something from a different age, banks of switches and levers of bewildering complexity.

The crew also have help from the outside while all this is going on, says Haskin, including a "fire guard" who reports on each engine starting up and whether the plane's flight controls are moving as they should. "There's seven people who are all on this intercom circuit, on the headset, and we have a well-orchestrated set of things that we are saying to each other per the checklist… the correct verbiage and things like that are pretty easy to get tripped up on. If you go out with a good crew that has been flying together quite a bit, it sounds easy. I'm sure the first time that I sat in that seat – and as the co-pilot, I'm the guy who's running the checklist – I'm sure it was not quite as smooth as it is right now."

The B-29 was one of the first aircraft to have tricycle landing gear, with one wheel at the front and two sets under the fuselage. All airliners flying today have them, with one simple but dramatic improvement – the wheel at the front is steerable.

Not so on the B-29. Haskin says that when he's operating the B-29 on the ground, he's having to use the plane's rudder pedals to steer it: moving the throttle to give one side of the plane more engine power to help it turn.

"The guys that have a lot of time in the airplane, they can make it so that passengers don't even know that there is no nose wheel steering," says Haskin. "They're right on the centre line, and they're perfectly using the power and the pedals." But with a brand new co-pilot, like Haskin was on his first check ride, and things start "jerking to a stop, and it's all kind of all over the place, and it looks awkward", he says.

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Getting a B-29 into the air is a delicate affair for something that weighs upwards of 40 tonnes. Haskin explains that he has to power the aircraft down the runway at 80mph (130km/h) before he can use the plane's rudder to control the steering, but pilots won't usually try and take off until the plane is doing 125mph (200km/h).

"In between 80 and 125 if I have an engine failure, the best place for my wheels to be is on the ground," he says. "She wants to take off, you know, she wants to hunt for the sky, but I don't have enough power to accelerate into the area where I am safest. Where I want to be is above 190 miles an hour (306km/hr)."

Getting the B-29 into the air is still a thrill, Haskin says. "I will tell you that the view through the glass nose off the end of the runway when you are keeping the nose down and just accelerating out is pretty eye-popping. Sometimes I've literally tried to lift my legs up because the… terrain, the trees, it feels that close."

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