Building a bomber plane in just a day

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

They made C119s as well.

But not at the same time. The first C-119 didn't enter service until 1947 - two years after the B-24 ceased production.

And no, no-one that I'm aware of built a B-24 from start to finish in one hour. Or in twenty-four hours for that matter.

[TarJak]

Sorenson’s production goal at Willow Run was enormous, its achievement prodigious. His task was to increase production output from a craft production rate of a bomber every thirteen days to a mass production rate of a bomber an hour. And, in two days less than a year from ground breaking, he had produced the First Center Wing Section for the airplane in a still unfinished factory. By April 1944, he was producing four hundred and sixty-two bombers at the rate of one every 59.34 minutes.


The enormous accomplishment of Sorensen and the men and women from Willow Run can only be fully appreciated when one realizes that in 1941, before Ford entered the aircraft industry it required 201,826 man-hours to manufacture a single B-24 bomber. In March 1944, Sorensen’s Willow Run Procedures of mass production had reduced those man-hours to only 17,357.

Reading this from the Book Willow Run Colossus of Industry by Warren Benjamin Kidder, I'd say that even at the peak production rate they did not have 17,357 people working on each plane, the figure required to get a B24 built from start to finish. The production per hour has to have been based on completions per day not on start to finish each aircraft.