Jan 312018
 

Recently sold on ebay was an apparently old display model. It came without markings, stand or engine nacelles, which were obviously formerly pinned to the rear fuselage in the usual bizjet position. So just what it is is unknown, but it looks too good to be Just Some Guys kitbash. But what it *is* is a headscratcher. It’s clearly a B-1 bomber forward fuselage grafted to a bizjet fuselage, but for what purpose I can’t guess. It doesn’t make sense to use a supersonic bombers cockpit as the cockpit of a small corporate jet, even as a way to utilize existing manufacturing infrastructure. Might it have been meant as a training plane, to teach future B-1 pilots the fine art of flying a Bone? A flying laboratory for the B-1 cockpit to make sure it was set up right?

Or did someone down at the model shop just get a little likkered up?

It appears t be a B-1A cockpit, dating it to the mid/late 70’s.

 Posted by at 11:21 pm

  4 Responses to “A B-1 bizjet???”

  1. Possibly a proposal for testing radars and/or crew weapon systems training?

  2. Hi, is there any email that i can contact you?

  3. It’s extremely unlikely that funding would ever have been available for a type of aircraft that only existed to test some aspect of the B-1 cockpit configuration or systems, or to provide training that could have been done in a simulator. That means it’s extremely unlikely that any company would have seriously proposed it. I think this is most likely the result of a model maker taking an unused (or no longer required) model of the B-1 cockpit section and attaching it to a bizjet fuselage for personal amusement, to make something that looked cool but was never intended to represent a real aircraft.

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