Durendell the B-52Y

Durandell was the first of a new kind of weapon: the Intercontinental Jet Bomber, and her descendents would soon become a symbol of American Air Power as well as Nuclear Deterrence.

First Born sometime in early 1952, Durandell made her first flight on April 15th of that year, with veteran pilot Alvin M. Johnston, better known as "Tex", an early jet-age test pilot for Bell Aircraft and Boeing. Almost all of her early test flights went fairly well, until November 29th when a pneumatic valve failed, resulting in an explosion that severely damaged the trailing edge of one of her wings. Her response to this during repairs was something along this lines of "It's only a plate wound". Consequently, the damage report's entire text was jokingly replaced with those exact words, though it's unknown whether Monty Python's Flying Circus ever read it...

Anyways, back on topic. By October, Durandell's younger sister, Bellinda, made her first flight. Besides this, little information exists on what happened to the pair. In reality, the pair were auctioned off in 1954 to separate owners, and remained separate until late 2012, when Bellinda, whom had been in a European man's collection in France until her liberation, was part of the vanguard force attacking North America. She met up with her sister in Seattle, where Durandell was kept at a hangar on the Boeing plant's premises for promotional reasons, not unlike an F-104 that had been held on to by Lockheed-Martin. Currently, the sisters' primary roles are long-ranged reconnaissance, their more-streamlined airframes never having been fit to carry bombs like their production counterparts but still able to carry reconnaissance and ECM pods under their wings, and occasionally a light bomb load.