The most expensive American weapons program of World War II was not the Manhattan Project at $1.9 billion. It was the $3 billion Boeing B-29 Superfortress, roughly $54 billion today, the machine built to drop the bomb. This episode tells the biography of an aircraft ordered by the hundreds before its prototype had flown, built in four factories in Washington, Kansas, Georgia, and Nebraska, whose engines were practically guaranteed to catch fire on takeoff, and which reshaped global warfare anyway.

From the 1940 specification demanding 20,000 pounds of bombs over 2,667 miles at 400 mph, through the February 1943 crash that killed test pilot Edmund T. Allen and his crew in a Seattle meatpacking plant, and the 'Battle of Kansas' where mechanics modified 150 aircraft outdoors in winter snow in five weeks, the story follows the B-29 to the Maria ...