re: #270 Nerdy Fish

A lot of that lies with the fact that they were pushing the boundaries of what piston engines could do. The Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone was extremely complex, and was pushed into production to get the ungainly beasts into the air. After the war, its refined versions became reasonably reliable engines for large commercial airliners, before the advent of the Boeing and Douglas jet liners.

Extremely complex which meant cooling the monsters was a chore to begin with before counting in the tight spacing in the B-29’s cowling, which only became worse when they were operated at maximum load in the humid AF South Pacific summer months. Wright used magnesium to save weight in the design, but the trade-off was when the damned things caught fire (which they did a lot), they burned so hot that they melted through the wing spars in less than a minute.