Etymology of the "Flying Fortress" Nickname for the B-17

[Noha307]

Looks like it took them a while to let go of that battleship metaphor.

Apparently, it really took them a while. An article in the February 1970 issue of Air Force and Space Digest is titled "AC-119: The USAF's Flying Battleship".

[JohnB]

Just a clarification...
Air Force magazine was published by the Air Force Association, not the USAF, so don't read too much in that nickname.

[Noha307]

While reading the Wikipedia article about the T-35 tank today I noticed the claim that the tank was called a "land battleship". While this is nothing new - the term going back to the Landship Committee in 1915 and H.G. Wells short story The Land Ironclads before that - it was the realization that aircraft were not the only vehicles being compared to the massive airships of the time that was enlightening. (Coincidentally, The Land Ironclads was published in December 1903, which is of course the same month as the the Wright Brother's first flight.)

As a matter of fact, one could argue that H.G. Wells is partially responsible for the "Flying Fortress" nickname as well. His novel The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, elaborates on the concept of an aerial fleet described in his 1907 work The War in the Air. If the imagery in the 1936 movie adaptation is an accurate representation of Wells's thoughts, he had moved on from Zeppelins to large fixed wing aircraft:

(Source: Roger Russell)

While the use of Zeppelins in his 1907 novel may seem to have been an incorrect prediction, it does support theory that "Flying Fortress" was actually a comparison with the battleship. In the novel, the German airship fleet attacks the United States from across the Atlantic Ocean - just as battleships would have done. Therefore, the B-17 would have been the defense against this type of attack. (Also, keep in mind that airships were the original "Queen of the Skies" - a name which evokes both large size and the imagery of leader of a kingdom that often gains their position from martial means.)

As an aside, upon reflection, it is interesting that science fiction and popular culture have paralleled the change in military theory as to the predominant naval platform by shifting from showing large hypothetical flying machines as battleships to aircraft carriers. Modern depictions of such aircraft - such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Helicarrier, or Ace Combat 6's Aigaion - often show designs that are more focused on deploying smaller craft to fight their battles rather than doing so directly themselves.

EDIT (25-03-13): Just to add another example of the role of globe spanning dirigible fleets in the popular imagination of the time, Rudyard Kipling's novellas With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC feature not just such aerostats, but an entire world government upon them. In many ways, the "Aerial Board of Control" is the aviation counterpart to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in that the reader is brought along with a class of people that is aloof from the concerns of the land-based world due to their advanced technology, but still intervenes at will. For those interested in checking the stories out themselves, a digitized copy of With the Night Mail, along with other early examples of aviation science fiction, are summarized and linked to in a blog post by the Internet Archive.

Last edited by Noha307 on Thu Mar 13, 2025 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[Noha307]

Just a quick one from the 1942 edition of Aerosphere:

   VOUGHT-SIKORSKY
Model XPBS-1
"Flying Dreadnaught"

(Source: Glenn D. Angle, ed., Aerosphere 1942 (New York City: Aircraft Publications, 1942), A-146.)