Glenn L. Martin

Caldwell was a self-taught pilot who flew during World War I.

He became a pilot for West Indian Aerial Express after leaving the Glenn L. Martin company where he was a test pilot.

Caldwell at first refused the offer, stating that it was not his place to change the flight plan.

He was eventually convinced to make the flight and was offered between $175 and $200.

The B-26 was a Glenn L. Martin Company design out of Middle River, Maryland.

It came off the drawing board fast.

The Army Air Corps put out a specification in early nineteen thirty-nine for a high-speed medium bomber, and Glenn Martin's team submitted something aggressive, something optimized so heavily for speed and performance that it left almost nothing on the table for the pilot trying to learn to fly it.

The wing was short, extraordinarily short for the weight it was carrying.

The span came out to sixty-five feet, and a fully loaded airplane weighed in around thirty-five thousand pounds.

He was a scientist, engineer, worked closely with Dr. John von Neumann, who we know was deeply involved in these alien programs.

And her father was a high-level scientist and engineer first with Glenn L. Martin, which later became Martin Marietta, which merged with Lockheed Martin.

So he was involved with Glenn L. Martin Corporation from the late 40s into the 60s.

And one day he came from work just completely distraught, just mumbling over and over that everything is fake, nothing is real, history is a lie.

And finally, the story that Helga got, and Helga was a young woman at this time, a young girl, pretty much, a teenager.

The two friends decided they could build a better airplane.

That August, he started a course at Glenn L. Martin's flying school in Los Angeles.

Westervelt drew a seaplane, with help from the wind tunnel at MIT, and fewer than a dozen men built it on Lake Union.

They called it the B&W, for Boeing and Westervelt.

He knew what it would mean to be able to put bombers over Japan from 1,500 miles away at altitude.

The specific aircraft we are talking about, serial number 4486, came off the line at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Omaha, Nebraska, and was delivered to the Army Air Forces in May of 1945.

Months before that, Colonel Paul Tibbetts had been quietly assembling what would become the 509th Composite Group out at Wendover Army Airfield in the Utah salt flats, far from everything, far from curious eyes.

They flew and trained and flew some more, carrying shapes that looked like bombs but weren't until the shapes were second nature.