© 1997 Geoff Sobering, Non-commercial Use Allowed with Attribution, All Other Rights Reserved
The Boeing Model 367 was a "wide-body" transport derivitive of the B-29 created by grafting a larger diameter fuselage on top of the B-29 to create a "double-bubble". It's pretty silly looking, but became the standard form for Boeing transport and passenger planes until the 777. The inital XC-97 used the B-29 wings, engines, and basic structure. The YC-97s and service C-97s adopted the changes implemented in the B-50. More information on the 367/377 types can be found here.
The C-97 and it's commercial derivitive, the Model 377 Stratocruiser were not tremendous successes. However, the most important contribution of the type is probably best described in Peter Bowers book "Boeing Aircraft since 1916", p. 353:
While the C-97 series showed little change in outward appearence past the YC-97A version, Boeing developed many radically-improved versions on paper that incorporated advanced power plants and new wing and fuselage forms. No military support was obtained for these efforts, which finally culminated in the the Model 367-80...The 367-80, known as the "Dash-80", or more commonly the 707 prototype.
These photographs were taken on May 19, 1997 at the Florence Air and Missile Museum in Florence, SC.
A note about the photographs: clicking on the thumbnail picture will load an image approximately 500x300 pixels large (~60Kb). Under each thumbnail is the word "huge". Clicking there will load the original scanned image of about 1000x600 pixels (~100Kb).
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