Consolidated B-32 Dominator
1942 bomber aircraft family; last Allied aircraft engaged in combat during World War II
The Consolidated B-32 Dominator (Consolidated Model 34) was an American heavy strategic bomber built for the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. A B-32 was involved in the last air combat engagement of the war, resulting in the war's last American air combat death. It was developed by Consolidated Aircraft in parallel with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as a fallback design should the B-29 prove unsuccessful. The B-32 reached units in the Pacific only in mid-May 1945, and subsequently saw only limited combat operations against Japanese targets before the end of the war on 2 September 1945. Most of the extant orders of the B-32 were canceled shortly thereafter and only 118 B-32 airframes of all types were built.
Design and development
The engineering development of the B-29 had been underway since mid-1938, when in June 1940, the United States Army Air Corps requested a similar design from the Consolidated Aircraft Company in case of development difficulties with the B-29.
The Model 33 on which Consolidated based its proposal was similar to the B-24 Liberator. Like the B-24, it was originally designed with a twin tail and a large Davis wing, but with a longer, rounder fuselage and a rounded nose. As can be seen in pictures, the B-32 also retained the B-24's tambour-panel "roller-type" bomb bay doors, which operated very much like the movable enclosure of a rolltop desk, retracted into the fuselage. These types of doors created a minimum of aerodynamic drag to keep speed high over the target area; they also allowed the bomb bays to be opened while on the ground, since its low ground clearance prevented the use of normal bomb bay doors. The powerplants were to be the same quartet of 18-cylinder, 2,200 horsepower (1,600 kW) Wright Duplex-Cyclones, as specified for B-29s.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1127567. The Library of Congress control number is sh85010700. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1938 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Consolidated B-32 Dominator” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.