Harold "Cal" Calvert (Wendell Corey) is sent on a course at Smoky Hill, Kansas, to learn to fly a new bomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

His instructor is his cousin, Major Tom West (Forrest Tucker), an officer who the other pilots think has shirked his duties by claiming engine trouble on the raid over the Ploesti oil fields.

[3] The film premiered at the Orpheum Theatre in Omaha on November 29, 1951 and grossed $17,000 in its opening week in a double bill with The Sea Hornet.

At best, reviewer Alun Evans considered it a "tame tribute to the B-29 bomber ... routine heroics against the Japanese ..."[5] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, "... this soggy saga of bomber airmen in World War II plows monotonously through every cliché of aerial war films before it hits the mud and then it bogs down in the bathos of mawkish heroics and tears.

"[6] On September 24, 1951, on a special Lux Radio Theatre broadcast honoring the 50th anniversary of motion pictures, the lead actors, Corey, Ralston and Tucker, recreated brief scenes from The Wild Blue Yonder.