Posted on 02/20/2015 8:08:21 PM PST by lbryce
The saying goes that the mother of the last B52 pilot hasn’t been born yet...
In ‘72 I was home in upstate New York when about 8 of them flew westward towards Buffalo.
Back from Viet Nam, I suppose...
The real question is how many recoverable air frames are there in AZ?
Anybody?
According to the article, twelve. The rest were chopped up - wings, cockpit, and tail all separated from the fuselage.
A Thai friend of mine was working at U-Tapao as a bank teller in the 60s when a piece of a ‘52 came through the roof of the house she shared with some other women who worked there.
A nice officer of the USAF came knocking on her door, informed her he was going to fix the damage at US government expense, and asked for the piece of his plane back.
+1.
Thanks for sharing that.
In the 80’s I worked on building equipment for B-52 updates. Installing it was a nightmare as SAC had chopped cables, re-routed cables and not kept documentation we could find. So the tech would either hook up our equipment only to discover the cables were unused or that they had damage and had been repaired differently than the documentation stated. These planes must have a thousand pounds of dodgy cables in them. It’s a wonder they work.
The plane itself appears indestructible. I wish they’d modernized the engines as that would have saved a lot of money in the long run. Of course, the military doesn’t necessarily think beyond the current budget cycle. I blame Congress for that.
Was that the one that blew upon the runway? I was there at UT in 1969.
Heavy thunderstorm, lightning, kaBOOM! the blast wave blew the dust off the hootch screen walls all over me.
The sky turned red and I thought, “Man, what a lightning strike!”
Then I noticed everyone was running toward the flightline so I ran there also. There at the end of the runway was a B-52 laying there like a crippled moth on fire.
We were then evacuated from the area before we could grab our line passes to get to our planes. We didn’t know a bomb had been blown, and landed a few yards away from us.
The bombs we worked around in our B-52s did not look anything like that. They looked more like “Fat Boys”.
The BUFF and BONE will be with us for quite some time, but they will get some radical surgeries. The last B-52H was delivered to the 4136th Strategic Wing at Minot AFB on October 26, 1962. The 100th and final B-1B was delivered on 2 May 1988.
My very queer theater professor from college once told me that the phrase "Hi there!" is "gay code". A "feeler" greeting to sleuth out if the recipient is a fellow fruit.
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