In the fall of 1934, the US Army Air Corps, precursor to the US Air Force, asked airplane manufacturers to build prototypes for a multi-engine coastal defense plane. One catch: there was no money from the government to build it.

Boeing essentially “bet the company” and spent all available cash to design and build what they called the Model 299. It was a big, shiny, aluminum, four-engine bomber designed to be equipped with an array of defensive machine guns.

The new bomber was a big hit with the public and the reporters who came to see its rollout. Compared with other planes in production in 1935, the Model 299 was huge: 75 feet long, with a 100-foot wing span. The first flight lasted 90 minutes, and thousands of people around Western Washington caught a glimpse of the 299 and/or heard the distinctive sounds of its four engines. Model 299 came to be known by its more famous nickname with help from one of those local journalists who came to the rollout.

It had four different machine gun positions to defend it, and Boeing proposed that it could go out into the ocean and find enemy ships and it would protect America from invasion.” At seeing the airplane, Richard Smith with The Seattle Times exclaimed it was a ‘Flying Fortress.’” That name stuck and Boeing quickly adopted it and trademarked it.

Then, on the morning of October 30, 1935, a crew of five got aboard the Model 299 for a second test flight. however, the crew forgot to disengage the airplane’s “gust lock,” a device that held the bomber’s movable control surfaces in place while the aircraft was parked on the ground. Having taken off, the aircraft entered a steep climb, stalled, nosed over and crashed.

By default, Boeing lost the competition, and the Douglas Aircraft Company won. The Army Air Corps placed a big order for the Douglas bomber, which became known as the B-18 Bolo. Nevertheless, Boeing’s plane flew faster, higher, could carry more, and could go farther than the Douglas airplane so the the Army ordered 13 Flying Fortresses, and the relatively small contract literally saved Boeing from bankruptcy.

Then, as the World War II neared, the B-17 ultimately beat out the Douglas Bolo and became one of the workhorses of the strategic bombing campaign in Europe.