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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm indicates 79 fatal 737 incidents with about a quarter billion flights under their belt.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-52-safety.htm indicates 76 B-52s destroyed in accidents across 7.5 million flight hours.

They're not perfectly comparable sets of numbers, but the B-52s look substantially riskier on a per-hour basis.

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Thank you for this!

76 machines destroyed, carrying (obstensibly) nukes.. from 7.5mm flight miles == .00001% risk of failure.

Did I do the math correctly?

With ZERO nuke detonations...

And a flight carcass of nearly 70 years old now???

All aviation is pretty damned safe.

> With ZERO nuke detonations...

Chalk this up to the design of the weapons themselves, not the B-52s. It's actually quite difficult to have an accidental nuclear detonation.

> And a flight carcass of nearly 70 years old now???

Today's B-52s are largely Ships of Theseus. Not much in them is going to be original any more.

A handy website [1] notes at least a couple of B-52 nuclear incidents. In 1961, a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons broke up in mid-air over North Carolina; the bombs did not detonate [2]. In 1966, a B-52 crashed due to a mid-air collision with a refueling tanker over Spain. In this case, the non-nuclear explosives in two of the nuclear weapons detonated, scattering radioactive material [3].

So I would not say "zero nuke detonations". And your .00001% failure rate (I didn't check your math) is not meaningful unless compared to the failure rate of other aircraft. The B-52 is impressive, but not flawless.

[1] http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows_static.sht...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

Most people would not refer to the incident at Palomares as a "nuke detonation," since there was no nuclear detonation. No fissile reaction etc, just conventional explosives that are part of the weapons trigger. To call it a "nuke detonation" is disingenuous.

B52s were used for conventional bombing plenty often during their service lifetime.

And they came damn close to accidentally detonating on American soil on occasion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash#La...

It is almost impossible to get a nuke to accidentally detonate. Has nothing to do with the B52. Let alone 1 in 76, we’re talking 1 in millions.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but shifting the goalposts from airframe incidents to ordinance safety really doesn't suit this discussion.

The B-52 is an interesting case of a set of exceptionally long-service individual airframes, with current planned utilisation of aircraft built in the 1960s continuing through the 2050s. The original design being from the 1950s.

That said, B-52s likely have a lighter overall duty-cycle, are subject to risks not typical of most (though not all) airliners (hostile enemy fire), and yes, face consequences of incidents beyond the scope of commercial aviation, though my understanding is that live nuclear weapons haven't been carried as a routine practice since the 1968 Thule Air Base incident and the immediate discontinuation of Operation Chrome Dome:

https://military.wikia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_cra...

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