Every once in a while a book shows up on the “available for review” list which grabs my interest. This book is one of those. I was able to convince Dave Morrissette to send it to me because I have a personal interest in the KC-97. It was a KC-97 which took me on my first military flight, from Peoria Air National Guard Base to Lackland Air Force Base to begin basic training. I’ve had a lot of rides in various aircraft types since then, but there’s only one first one.

Bill Yenne covers the entire life of the Boeing 367/377 series, from the first airliners to the C-97 to the KC-97, then back to the mature airliner and the mature KC-97, and the last of the series, the Guppies. He does a very good job of tracing the lineage of the series from the B-29 and the B-50. The 367 was the C/KC-97, the 377 was the airliner.

Chapters

1. The Project Begins
2. The Commercial Variant Takes the Lead
3. The Model 377 Stratocruiser in Service
4. The Model 367 C-97in Service
5. The KC-97 Aerial Tankers
6. The Stratocruiser Matures
7. The KC-97 Matures
8. Turboprop Power and Further Developments
9. The Stratocruiser’s Later Years
10. The Inimitable Gupppies

If you’re interested in airliners, this book has a wealth of information about the Stratocruiser commercial aircraft. Boeing had trouble getting the model 377 into the hands of the airlines because they had laid off most of their factory people who had built B-17s, B-29s and B-50s. But so had Douglas and Consolidated, so that total aircraft production for 1946 was about the same as one week’s production in 1944.

The Stratocruiser had one great selling point. It was big, and could fly from New York to London non-stop. BOAC made this a focus of their advertising. I’m not sure why, but the book refers to this crossing as a transpacific flight.

The C/KC-97 chapters are of great interest to the military aviation buff. There was a single YC-97 that participated in the Berlin Airlift. Once SAC got their KC-97s, General LeMay had them in exercises which showed the global reach of the B-47s and later B-52s by having them do super long flights, some of them around the world.

The appendices have a wealth of information such as the performance specifications of the 377 and C-97, along with line drawings, a listing of all of the airliners, and several tables following their careers with various airlines. One appendix lists all USAF units which flew 97s, and another has all of the Air Guard users.

There is also brief mention of the Israeli Air Force using C-97s. Could this be the basis for an interesting modeling project? Appendix 9 lists all 367s and 377s acquired by Israel.

Overall Evaluation

Highly recommended. There’s a lot of info in this book about an important aircraft, both as an airliner and as a military bird. While reading this book I decided it was time to build a KC-97, so I got the Minicraft kit out of the stash and I’m adding the Cobra Company KC-97L conversion. I’m going to do that plane that took me to the start of my military career.

Many thanks to Crecy Publishing and Specialty Press for providing this interesting book, and to IPMS/USA for allowing me to review it.