Woo Hoo !
Posted on 04/13/2024 7:47:38 AM PDT by george76
The US Air Force has 140 of its biggest warplanes – its heavy bombers – in active service: 76 Boeing B-52Hs, 44 Boeing B-1Bs and 20 B-2 stealth bombers built by Northrop Grumman.
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Any other air force might content itself with 140 bombers and redistribute the lost bomber’s operating budget. But the US Air Force is counting on the B-1 to play a lead role in a possible air war over the Taiwan Strait. It’s such a high priority that the service is spending millions of dollars recovering, from long-term storage, a surplus B-1 nicknamed “Lancelot” that’s been sitting in desert storage, aka “the Boneyard”, for three years.
This is an operation the Air Force has done just three times in recent decades. Besides the B-1, the service returned to flying status two stored B-52s – one in 2020 and another in 2015 – in order to replace bombers that it lost to accidents.
Recovering from storage a machine as complex as a bomber is hard, expensive and time-consuming work. It can take hundreds of people working thousands of hours over a span of years and at a cost of millions of dollars.
That the Air Force is willing to make the investment speaks to the importance of the big, lumbering warplanes as the service positions itself to, among other contingencies, defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion fleet.
The four-engine, supersonic, swing-wing B-1 – crewed by four people and capable of carrying 37 tons of bombs and missiles over intercontinental distances – is the Air Force’s main anti-ship platform. It can carry 24 of the service’s best cruise missiles, including its Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, or LRASMs.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Very interesting.
Get close, launch your cruise missiles, and haul ass.
The B-1B did a lot of the heavy lifting in the early days in Afghanistan. The Air Force figured out pretty early that lots of F-15E sorties could be handled by one loitering B-1B
A major dog-wagging incident is scheduled for late summer. Stand by.
Pre election war prep..
October surprise.
Gotta love how the “look how dumb this is” slant is about age.
F#$% You!
Age has nothing to do with merit.
Going to start a war at our expense?
“The missiles are flying, hallelujah! hallelujah!”
I spotted one flying over the Denver are a few weeks ago. Never saw one in the air before.
Lancelot LOL! Well researched article. /S
“Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”
~ Maj. ‘King’ Kong
Make 100 multi billion dollar airplanes with no operating budget so they get mothballed. Now we pay 5x what it would have cost to keep them in service just to have them in service cheaper than designing and building new multi billion dollar aircraft.
Biden’s America.
from long-term storage, a surplus B-1 nicknamed “Lancelot” that’s been sitting in desert storage, aka “the Boneyard”, for three years.
A hundred dollars in gold. HA!
I have seen plenty of them, but that because the boys from Dyess AFB do quite a bit of flying out this way.
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