Warbird Information Exchange

Following the end of the war, a surplus B-17G-105-VE serial number 44-85728 was purchased by Trans World Airlines for conversion as an executive transport. Following TWA's purchase of the surplus B-17G, it was ferried to Boeing's Seattle plant for the conversion work. All of the military equipment was removed and the fuselage was fitted with additional seating, and additional windows were cut into the sides of the fuselage. Since Boeing had by now used up all the letters of the alphabet for sub-variants of the Model 299 series, the company had to start through the alphabet all over again in designating later versions, and the conversion was assigned the company designation of Model 299AB.

The first civil registration assigned to the Model 299AB was NX-4600, but this was soon changed to NL-1B, the L being a new symbol introduced in the immediate postwar years to designate former military aircraft that had been converted to commercial uses. These sorts of conversions were given a limited type certificate of LTC-1, since they could not qualify for the standard licenses that purely commercial types were given. One restriction of the LTC-1 type certificate was that these conversions were not allowed to fly paying passengers.

TWA used the Model 299AB for survey and liaison work in setting up its routes in the Middle East. So far as I am aware, it never flew paying passengers. At the end of 1947, the machine was given to the Shah of Iran, and the Iranian registration was EP-HIM, where the HIM stood for "His Imperial Majesty". The Shah's B-17 was scrapped for spares at Creil, France in 1970.