Design

The P-52A Stratoairliner is a large jet passenger aircraft made in the mid 70s. It had a base from the B-52 design and had an upper deck, where it was fitted with a cabin, while the lower deck is fitted with a cargo bay. It had an engine design of 8 powerful bucket reverse thrust jet engines.

History

The Boeing P-52A first started off when airline orders needed a fast airliner with relatively large capacity mix of passenger and cargo, and was cheaper than the 747 combi variants. Boeing accepted this, and was designing the base off the B-52G bomber. For many years of development, the aircraft was now in mockup stage, and many airlines came to see it, many ordered the aircraft and there were many customers ordering for the 3 main variants, passenger, cargo, and combi in total, orders rounded up to 100.

When the first P-52A were flown in the skies, it had a few problems at first, the aircraft's wingspan is so big for a relatively big airport, and the fuel consumption is so massive, that the aircraft would only have roughly 6 hours to fly. it relatively costed Boeing millions of dollers to operate the aircraft, because of these sheer bad issues, Boeing tried to solve these problems, but it was already too late, most of the customers that ordered the aircraft, ended up canceling the aircraft and moving on to the Boeing 747. Only around 3 customers remained for the project in total.

Service

For the aircraft itself in passenger service, it is moderately a failure. even though there were majorly big flaws, the airlines still used the aircraft on short/medium haul. The profit from these aircraft were not so great, passengers complained of the loud noise due to the sheer noise of the engines at full throttle, passengers were required to cover their ears in order to not be deaf by the jet engines.

In the late 80s, the unreliable, and gas guzzling P-52A is retired, only a single aircraft of the P variant remains.