Posted on 10/03/2025 5:46:44 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
When I stood under the bomb bay of a retired B-52 bomber at the U.S. Air Force Museum this summer, I quickly understood why some consider this bomber the best to fly. Longevity means you earn a place in the record books and get to claim that crown. You don’t keep an airplane flying for six decades by accident. The B-52H Stratofortress didn’t just outlast its stablemates; it became the most complete version of the BUFF idea—long legs, big payload, and the electronics to make both matter in the 21st century.
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When the newest and latest and greatest USAF bomber reaches retirement and the last one is flown to Davis-Monthan, the pilot will hitch a ride home on a B-52.
“”last one is flown to Davis-Monthan, the pilot will hitch a ride home on a B-52.””
That’s a super comment....The B-52 is still a magnificent aircraft....
Piloted by Major T.J. "King" Kong.
We have one here in the Air Force Armament museum on display.
People don’t realize just how BIG these aircraft are! And they were planned, designed, built and flown without a single computer, all on paper!...............
As I understand they take off with minimum fuel and fill their tanks while in the air as they cannot take off with a full load of bomb and fuel.
Awsome Aircraft !
Dropping bombs is no longer a thing. We have missiles and we have drones. Sometimes we have bombs that act like missiles. But in the future wars we will not drop a ton of bombs that just fall on a target. Think of today’s bombers as cargo planes or drone launch systems. They don’t have to be over the target. They just need to get in range for their cargo to deploy and navigate their way the final few miles. A B-1 or B-2 or B-52 is merely a launch system. And many bombers are themselves just drones.
I recently learned of a B-52 that was shot down over Hanoi in 1972. The mangled remains can be seen in Lake Hanoi. Sad so many crew and planes were lost in Vietnam.
https://vinpearl.com/en/b-52-lake-hanoi
Makor Kong's last ride:
lol.
The airframes, the lift capacity and the durability are a testament to the aerospace engineers of the 1940s and 1950s. What is even more amazing is how the next generation of engineers , responding to the challenge of SAM missiles and even more sophisticated weapons, upgraded these huge aircraft in ways perhaps never to be revealed to safely keep fighting effectively and complete their missions.
Such ingenuity and creativity is the true strength of a free people that celebrates merit.
That is incorrect. It can take off with a full fuel and bomb load.
That said, it will frequently take off on low fuel if the runway is short or to adjust for conditions on the ground advise for it. For example, depending on locale (say, some island base) fuel may be more readily available by air tanker, so in order to preserve fuel at the base, they minimize the fill up.
There were many godlike draftsmen back in the day. They performed compound trig on the drafting board. They used just a few books as bibles. Drafting Standards allowed a very minimum number of drawing corrections that saved thousands of dollars in change orders, mylar generation, and blueprint storage. Look at some of the old Popular Science and Popular Mechaics drawings that should hae been considered works of art. These were professionals!
They applied Smoley’s tables; parallel tables of logarithms and squares, diagrams for solving right triangles, angles and trigonometric functions corresponding to given levels, common logarithms of numbers, tables of logarithms and natural trigonometic functions and other tables. Every initial project would start out with Engineering Standards and a defined to-be-used hardware list.
One of the most stupid things I ever saw at Wright Patterson was doing away with the Engineering Standards group, which was just a few individuals for the whole base.
There was another concept that made perfect sense and was used to reduce mistakes and check each others work. Many of the large aerospace companies always used this approach. That was the concept of a draftsman, designer, and engineer on any project. Each checked the other.
Toward the end of my career I had managers that made such horrible decisions and they had no business deciding such. They actually overrode engineering decisions. One was the use of touchscreens on an airborne platform. You ever been on one of these big birds on the flightline in winter, coldest place you have ever been in your life!
The tail span is about the width of the wing span of a DC-3.
That’s what it looked like as I compared the two at the museum.
👍👍👍👍👍
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