First Boeing B-17 Flight

July 28, 1935. 

David Dobbs at Wired Magazine asks if it was the toughest plane ever built.  I would have to go with yes:

The  ”All American,” of the 97th Bomber Group, made arguably the most astonishing return. (The 97th operated out of Tunisia; among the astounding photos at this memorial site is one of Winston Churchill visiting a morning briefing. There’s also one of a B-17 ditching in the Mediterranean — the type of situation to which Angus, my mother’s lover, few rescue missions to salvage.) The huge gash in the plane’s section rose from a collision with an enemy fighter, whose wing sliced almost clean through the fuselage:

The tail gunner was trapped at the rear of the plane because the floor connecting his section to the rest of the plane was gone. The plane, piloted by a Lieutenant Kendrick Bragg, flew 90 minutes back to base with the tail barely hanging on. By one account, it wagged like a dog’s tail, and the pilot, after dropping his bombs, made a U-turn 70 miles across so as not to stress the tail.  When the plane landed and came to a stop, the tail finally broke off.
As the Reddog site notes, the All American got home because the designers built some redundancy into it. It was a very tough plane:

The ONLY reason that machine broke apart on landing is that, notice, the rear landing wheel has been carried away, and all the weight is being put on the bottom of the rear gunner’s station. The machine is not designed to do this with such structural damage.

Imagine being the tail gunner and having to ride in there for an hour-and-a-half while the tail swayed back and forth, and then riding through that landing.  The Wired article features many more amazing pictures.  I can't even imagine what the guys in those planes saw as they slowly flew back and forth through flak and fighter raids, awaiting potential death for more than 8 hours, day after day.