In general I agree with you about ignoring the inaccuracies and simplifications of TV and film productions and just enjoying the show, but still have reservations about historical events being depicted wrongly. They have a way of being lazily accepted as the truth in subsequent reports of those events, and pictures of actors take the place of the actual people involved. A trite example is the Home Guard/LDV - any media story about them will have pictures of the cast of Dad's Army. As enjoyable as that programme is, it is a caricature, not reality.

That does not seem like a lot of fire time!!!

I've done a bit of digging on line and I've found the following figures for the ammo carried on a B17-G:

305 rounds per gun (RPG) for each of the two single Cheek guns

365 RPG for each of the twin Chin Turret guns

600 RPG for each of the Waist guns

650 RPG for each of the twin Upper Turret guns

500 RPG for each of the twin Ball Turrets guns

565 RPG for each of the Twin Rear Turret (sic) guns

At approx 800 rounds per minute that's around 23 - 50 secs per gun. So, firing in short (aimed???) bursts was obviously the order of the day!!!

Finished the series & found it a little underwhelming. The end seemed rushed & almost like they were just ticking off a checklist of "Things you must feature in a WWII series".

I don't doubt the events, but the priorities seemed odd. The Spy, Tuskegee Airmen, the Eastern front, all just seemed rushed & underdone IMHO. Still, I'm glad the story got told.

B-17 crewmember says they flew at 160mph, so fighters had the ability to have considerable over take.

One of a few living 8th Air Force B-17 pilots
 

I had the privilege of meeting a WWII B-17 pilot yesterday who flew missions over Germany. Dick Nelms is 101 years old. Friendly, humble and lively. Same age as my father would have been. As I shook his hand, thanking him for what he did, I asked him how he was able to fly mission after mission, knowing what the last ones were like. He smiled and said, each one was like the other and he just kept going. Greatest generation? I truly believe it.

Perhaps the series didn’t have the literary or cinematic excellence some of us expected or hoped for.

I was hoping to be reminded how men in their teens and twenties courageously accomplished such a frightful task. Men like like you and me, not John Wayne or Gregory Peck or Tom Cruise.

As with reading the book, I was moved, my gratitude was renewed. So my humble expectations were met, and my hat is off to those who produced and acted in Masters of the Air.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....57a1774ffe.jpg
Given this photo of my grandfather with a couple of colleagues I'm not so sure that Dad's Army is a trite example of the home guard!

I do!

The problem with a series like `Masters if the Air` (and I have yet to see it so speaking in general terms) is that aerial warfare is relatively mundane and boring.
A ground campaign can focus on the soldiers, the combat becomes exciting but secondary. An aerial campaign is pretty much fly to target, bomb it, live or die, come home, rinse repeat.
A good example of this is `12 O'clock High` which is very clever to focus on the crews, on the people and the flying becomes secondary.
An aerial war film, series that focusses on the air war is doomed to fail.

What I found, was unlike Band of Brothers that followed easy company this had no continuity, Band of Brothers followed one unit and stuck with them, this didn’t, it chopped and changed all over the place without seeming to tie it all together in a coherent manner.
Bar that I did enjoy it, though it built up slowly then as said towards the end appeared to fly through the script ( pun intended ) leaving the story feeling unfinished.

..

Apparently the series was cut by 2 episodes due to COVID, which would go some way to explaining it.

My thoughts exactly. No 'white of the enemies' eyes'. I had the same feeling reading Stephen Ambrose' 'The Wild Blue'
​​​​​​​

It certainly seems that way....

American Top Gun fighter pilot academy set up by British (telegraph.co.uk)

Nutty,

I'd say the main issue with following one unit in this case was that one unit was effectively wiped out multiple times. To be fair, "The Pacific" had a similar feeling - even though the central character was largely the same the other characters rotated quickly making it hard to get the same feel as BoB. That, again, was iirc largely to do with the casualty rate.

Had a beer on Saturday with a civvie mate who grew up next to Burtonwood.
He loved the series

Oh the irony...attempting to call out Hollywood using an article filled with even more fantasies than the worst Hollywood script.

Accuracy and the DT are strangers to each other.

I have just finished watching the series and I haven’t changed my view on it. A ripping yarn about an American unit fighting in Europe. There is no point in getting sniffy about how the RAF was portrayed or how it was ignored in later episodes. Well done. I still think that Band of Brothers was a better show but I may go back now and binge this latest series to get a better idea of the show’s flow. And I'm looking forward to re-reading Mr Miller's book.

I am curious though; B-17Fs depicted throughput the series. Did 100BG not convert to G models?

They did convert to the G. Serial numbers here,

https://100thbg.com/b-17-serial-numbers/

I'd recommend this Chanel and there is a playlist dedicated to Masters of the Air:

Masters of the Air; WW2 US Bombers