The Wichita Vortex: Cold War Bombers Over the Plains

After the Second World War ended, Wichita could have exhaled. The B-twenty-nine production line had closed. The city had built a large share of the most sophisticated bombers in American history. It might reasonably have pivoted to peacetime manufacturing and let the military chapter close.

It did not pivot. Boeing stayed. And then the Cold War arrived, and Boeing's Wichita plant found itself at the center of the next generation of American airpower.

The B-twenty-nine gave way to the B-forty-seven Stratojet, a swept-wing jet bomber that flew higher and faster than anything that had come before it. And then came the plane that became the defining symbol of American strategic air power: the B-fifty-two Stratofortress. Boeing designed it and contracted its production in part through the Wichita facilities, where the expertise built during the B-twenty-nine years proved essential to the new aircraft's manufacture.

The B-fifty-two entered service in nineteen fifty-five and remains in active service with the United States Air Force today, more than seventy years later. Few weapon systems in American history have had a longer continuous service life. The airframes being flown now were built in the early nineteen sixties. Pilots are flying aircraft older than their grandparents. And many of those original aircraft were built by workers in Wichita who had already built the planes that ended one world war and were now building the planes meant to deter another.

Boeing eventually ended its Wichita operations in two thousand fourteen after many decades. But the aerospace ecosystem it helped build, the engineering schools, the suppliers, the contractor networks, the culture of precision manufacturing, continues. Wichita is still known as the Air Capital of the World.