I want to thank Dana Reid for her wonderful letter that extols the many reasons why the Seattle Museum of Flight should have a space shuttle when their useful life has ended. Dana’s letter provides an outline for a write-in campaign to NASA via the museum to convince NASA as to why our museum should have a shuttle. I too would like to have a Shuttle here and hope very much that she succeeds.

Some of the strong competition includes: the Los Angeles area, each shuttle was born in a factory in Downey, Calif., where I was associated with its development; Cape Canaveral, Fla. area, each shuttle was launched from here, and some landed here; Houston, Texas area, each shuttle was controlled from NASA’s Mission Control here; Lancaster, Calif., some Shuttles landed at nearby Edwards Air Force Base, and later were flown piggyback aboard a NASA 747 back to Cape Canaveral.

My own pick for a new museum display is Boeing’s second prototype XB-47 Stratojet bomber, tail No. 46-066, the last airplane built in old Plant 1, which along with the first (scrapped/lost), developed and established the basic configuration for large, high speed turbojet airplanes — swept back wings and tail surfaces with under wing pylon mounted engines. Its essential design elements (developed in-house without any outsourcing), now over 63 years old, thrust Boeing and the Puget Sound region literally into the aviation pot of gold in the sky, and are now the accepted standard used worldwide. The newest airplanes designed and built by Boeing, Airbus, and those from manufacturers in Brazil, Russia, Canada, Japan and China adhere to that standard.

B-47s, 2,042, were built, the most of any large jet bomber, which have been followed by the mind-numbing figure of over 15,000 Boeing built jet bombers, tankers and airliners, worth hundreds of billions. To those figures must be added additional thousands of U.S. and foreign production aircraft (over 7,000 from Airbus alone) that trail in the Stratojet’s jet wash. Some 30,000 airplanes worth around a trillion dollars have been built.

I am life long aviation fan and former aerospace worker; with the express purpose of seeing the XB-47, my wife and I visited the Chanute Air Museum in Rantoul (about a 100 miles south of Chicago) in October 2008, and met the fine folks who maintain a world class museum. We were treated to a personal tour of the Stratojet, and found it outdoors, intact, and well cared for, but the mostly volunteer staff lacks funds for the proper care of their charge.

As a member of the Seattle Museum of Flight I suggest that a swap be made for Chanute’s XB-47 with Seattle’s WB-47E – the grand idea being to bring XB-47 home to where it was born, to refurbish it to near its 1948 appearance (when it first flew) and place it indoors, as a monument to the creative people in the Puget Sound. The XB-47 is arguably Boeing’s most significant airplane and a national treasure, and it should be preserved as soon as possible.

Anthony E. Pomata

Maple Valley