The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend
sandboxx.us
sandboxx.us
The B-52 of today was iteratively designed over decades and the current H models are entirely different planes than earlier models (although structurally very close to the G model).
Another HN commenter mentioned GPS being designed over a holiday. But we spent years and years in the military debugging GPS and making it functional.
Claiming that something was designed in a day is good clickbait, but it completely discounts the years of blood, sweat, and tears it took to get to the product that people have in their head.
They have undergone significant upgrades over the years, on all systems, including the airframe itself, since then.
EDIT: Those upgrade programs, e.g. the F-15 is currently at "X", are complete development programs and involve a certain amount of certification and re-certification. That in the case of the B-52 those upgrades have been applied to existing, tremendously old, airframes, doesn't change that. It does make it quite impressive so, the B-52 turned out to be a very flexible and upgradeable design.
Most of the H models were manufactured in 1960 and 1961, but they have undergone significant airframe improvements, several engine improvements, and of course, avionics improvements.
It's still a B-52, but it's a "B-52H Block $whatever_design_block_they_are_on_these_days" model.
There is a thing called "type rating", that is qualification pilots need to have in order to fly a specific type of plane. For example, pilots need a type rating for the Boeing 737 in order to fly a Boeing 737.
Manufacturers try to do everything they can not to require another type rating when they make changes to an existing aircraft, because type ratings require expensive and time-consuming training that pilots and their companies would rather avoid, and it influences purchase decisions. One of the root causes of the B737-MAX crashes is that Boeing tweaked some settings in order to make the B737-MAX behave like the original B737 when it was, in fact, a different plane, and they did it wrong.
This is wildly wrong. The only thing you got right is that the MAX was designed to avoid needing a new type certification.
Boeing radically shifted the Cg to accommodate changing trends in the commercial airline industry which were resulting in Airbus's planes being more competitive. They shifted it well outside what would be considered prudent.
This required flight control software bandaids to keep the plane stable (or perhaps better put, from entering a flight envelope where loss of control would happen), but they then also cheaped out of providing redundancy for some critical sensors... AND cockpit annunciators to alert on failures of the sensors.
Boeing then passed off the Cg shift and additional systems as very minor changes in the filing for their airworthiness certifications, the FAA rubber-stamped everything because they didn't have the staff to review all these certificate filings so they largely trust manufacturers...
...and then making things even worse, Boeing did very little to disclose the additional stability system and sensors to the airline's chief pilots who develop the in-house training. To say they were furious to learn they hadn't been told of the new systems would be an understatement.
The MAX crashes would have been substantially less likely if the pilots had benefitted from their airline's chief pilots knowing of the safety systems and having training on how to handle failurs, as well as warning annunciators for sensor failures....but Boeing wanted to save a thousand bucks or so per plane - or more likely, wanted to avoid drawing attention to the situation and having people ask "why is a critical flight control system dependent upon a single sensor?", which is likely why they also did little to inform airlines of the new systems, train the chief pilots on it, etc.
And I am not saying that the software bandaid and the goal of avoiding a new type certification is a bad thing. In fact, it is done all the time with no ill effect.
What I am saying is that they did it wrong, and that's the real problem. Your explanation on what they did wrong is, I think, entirely correct.
My hypothesis is that if they didn't care about keeping the same type rating, they probably could have skipped the bandaid and trained pilots to just keep out of that dangerous configuration, just like pilots are trained to recognize, avoid and recover from stalls. It didn't look like an unmanageable problem for pilots, more like something they needed to be aware of and train for.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...
There's a plan to replace all the engines with a modern turbofan (RR F130).
But I'll note the F130 is a medium bypass business jet engine producing 'only' around 75kN. 8 of those is about 600kN, which could be achieved with two of those newest generation civilian high bypass turbofans used e.g. in the B787 or A350. I suspect the motivation was to choose a new engine that is as similar to the existing one in order to minimize work needed to install them on the plane. There being AFAIU less than 100 B52's in service, I guess minimizing engineering cost has better payoff than minimizing fuel consumption with a high bypass engine.
Is the airframe at risk in doubling the thrust at full throttle?
Also looking at other posts in this discussion, it seems the 4-engine option (4x 150kN class size engines to provide about same overall thrust) was discarded because the asymmetrical thrust in case an engine gives out at a critical moment (takeoff, say) would mean that the plane would need a bigger tail in order to have enough rudder authority. Which in turn would mean that the airframe would need strengthening to take the added weight and stress from that bigger rudder. Etc. etc. leading to the cost of the engine replacement program spiraling out of control. So in that sense as close to a 1:1 as possible is the right decision.
Also this family of engines (F130/BR700) has insane reliability - something like one unplanned engine removal per 100,000 hours. Some have reached 1 million hours
The trick is to design something solid enough to be a good base for incremental improvements over time.
Though that's probably because it's design is basically "big, boxy, utilitarian sky truck," which is so flexible you can always find something to use it for. Everything else seems to make tradeoffs for some flashy capability, which don't age as well.
But, while stealth is really useful, it does require some trade-offs. Since B-52 is only useful in cases where stealth isn't required, and it seems to still be in use, I guess if the B-52 were hypothetically retired there'd be room for a non-stealth replacement. Unless the techniques they developed to come up with the F-22 and F-35 opened up a possibility of a zero-compromise stealth design (I'm skeptical, but I don't know anything about plane development).
The plane was only ever produced for a decade and the H model was last produced in 1963.
Obviously it has been retrofitted with new engines, avionics, armaments, etc, but it's not a fundamentally different plane.
/s
Huh? Despite 'opposition'? Can you elaborate?
(also make sure not to miss /s in my previous comment)
From what I've read, the decisions to make Buran look externally like STS orbiter was a political one, and the engineers at MiG OKB weren't happy about it - they have been working on a bunch of space planes for some time, including the infamous suborbital fighter. However the similarity was found to have political benefits in the weird opposite of kremlinology and the decision stood.
Not having USAF's annoying requirements though, they were able to design a better system anyway. (Pre-USAF involvement STS was also better, but congress cost cutting made a necessity of begging DoD for funds)
I just don't understand how it could look any way different (at least significantly), this is a classical case of the function dictating the form.
US' STS shape was ultimately dictated by its cross range requirements combined with cargo capacity. Explicit case of function leading to specific form.
Buran didn't require the same huge cargo capacity in the orbiter, because Soviets had already tested and verified self-assembly of space station in orbit from multiple launched modules (technology that they would later employ in ISS). For huge capacity it had Energia, which once proven could be also launched on Polar orbits (the specific requirements from USAF for STS involved heavy cargo on polar orbits from Vandenberg).
This meant that Buran orbiter had wider design space to explore, and previous experiments in crewed reusable spacecraft were centered around lifting body shape, to extent much higher than STS was. However, the command to make it look like US STS came pretty early in the project, in addition to general lack of documents, so we don't really know how they would go.
> the command to make it look like US STS came pretty early in the projec
I never heard anything about that, AFAIR.
Any ideas where to look abou that?
> 27. Alternative projects considered at the stages of the preliminary design and preliminary design: attempts to create OK "Buran" on the basis of OK "Spiral" - what was proposed (options and technical solutions) and what was accepted, what was not accepted, how and why.
> Orbital vehicle "Buran" in landing configuration
> Answer: We (NPO Molniya) worked on an alternative variant in a guise that mimics that of the Spiral orbital plane, but General Designer Glushko considered that by that time there were few materials that would confirm and guarantee success at a time when Shuttle flights proved that the Shuttle-like configuration works successfully and there is less risk when choosing a configuration, therefore, despite the larger useful volume of the Spiral configuration, it was decided to carry out the Buran in a configuration similar to the Shuttle configuration. Although the absence of sustainer engines on the Buran noticeably changed the centering, the position of the wings, the configuration of the influx, and a number of other differences.
> 28. Was the copying of "Space Shuttle" in a larger or smaller volume during the creation of Buran deliberate or were there "directive instructions"?
> Answer: Copying, as indicated in the previous answer, was, of course, completely conscious and justified in the process of those design developments that were carried out and during which, as already indicated above, many changes were made to both the configuration and the design. The main political requirement was to ensure that the dimensions of the payload compartment were the same as the payload compartment of the Shuttle.
https://www-buran-ru.translate.goog/htm/archivl.htm?_x_tr_sc...
I guess I was wrong on that part. Interesting that Spiral had greater capacity, I thought the opposite based in some of the sketches - possibly I mixed up sketches of another MiG space plane.
Wish someone manages to one day do a definitive history translated into English
Classic Soviet risk-averse behavior. See also: copying every single detail from the B-29 because they knew it worked and it would be their heads (perhaps literally) if the Tu-4 didn't. They did the same thing with Joe-1, their first atomic bomb test. Do what you know works so you can go home at the end of the day. Innovation is a luxury.
This is what happens when employees fear management. Lessons to be learned.
You just listed the things what management decided to do, so risk aversion was on management side, not employees.
Just like the idea to copy S/360.
Also, as it became apparent in the meantime, even the Americans didn’t get it right when it came to the reasons behind building the shuttle system. As far as I understood there were other, less expensive ways, that they could have taken in order to “improve” their space program.
Among various tracks that combined together, there was
1. Super Heavy Launcher - a long term dream since the failure of N1, realised in Energia
2. Reusable crewed orbiter - Buran orbiter
3. Mir-2, the successor to Mir space station - was supposed to use (1) for construction and (2) for crew
4. Fully reusable launch vehicle - was proposed continuation of Energia project
5. various missions requiring super heavy launchers (either Energia, or prospective Vulkan which added extra energia core stage on top) - including mars missions that were on slow boil since end of moon program
6. Soviet Space Forces - anti-SDI systems, orbital warfare unmanned cruisers (Polyot) etc. - dependant on (1).
7. Reduction of space construction and launch costs - nuclear-powered orbital tug launched by Energia which would be responsible for moving objects from low LEO to target orbit, including GEO
1,2,4, and 7 were all included directly in the scope of Buran, with Polyot (6) being in progress as well (the other Energia launch was launch of Polyot test unit).
Note that Buran orbiter, the one part that resembled Shuttle, is independent of other tasks though considered beneficial for the space station goals - if the orbiter project failed, it would still provide data for Reusable Energia variant, and Energia would still mean a working 100t-to-LEO system they could use for whatever - unlike Shuttle which was one specific vehicle. This also meant that Buran's orbiter had much lower cargo capacity - because it didn't need to have higher one as space station modules and the like could just use Energia.
Isn't Buran's appearance driven by similar requirements vs. aesthetics? What else would it have looked like — if you want lots of crossrange capability, you're not going to get something that looked like Faget's designs, would you?
They have also flirted with the idea of just putting two jet engines into orbiter for extra cross range, which was probably not an option on STS given the huge dead weight of engines
Catering to NRO and USAF wartime requirements doomed the STS to cost overruns. Sticking with Faget's designs and the NASA requirements may have salvaged the program's cost goals, but I'm no expert.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42517/rolls-royce-will...
edit: I believe this is the original video where I saw the above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02_geGISTLg
But here we're talking about unplanned sudden thrust asymmetry, causing a massive yaw force at a critical phase of flight, takeoff, where you're engines are likely to be near their full power and you're close to/on the ground.
If you go from 8 engines to 4, loosing one engine goes from causing 25% thrust loss on the wing to 50%.
>…I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake.”
>(I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.)
>This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough.
>“Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.”
>This shut him up.
Steve Jobs created the iPod in just one day
It's like saying "Traveling to The Moon is easy. You simply need enough thrust to overcome Earth's gravity well. Simple!"
The secret to mankind achieving unpowered flight is for someone to throw themselves at the ground and simply miss..
Dimensions of the first iPod: 4.02 in x 2.43 in x 0.78 in = 7.62 in³. That’s less than half the volume.
(Weight-wise, the difference is smaller (10.2 vs 6.5 oz)
It looks so quintessentially late 90's, yet hideous at the same time.
The Archos was way larger and heavier than the iPod, and the build quality was abysmal. Mine essentially fell apart despite seeing only desktop use. Battery life was inferior as well. Headphone output was also much louder and cleaner on the iPod.
Literally everything about the iPod was better than literally everything about the Archos.
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/01/13/first-ipod-went-f...
The claim that it was designed in a weekend is like those “overnight success” stories that ignore the decade of work that someone put in to get to that point.
This entire comment chain is bewildering, we're attacking strawmen. Did anyone read this article and leave assuming no further work was done after approval? Was this HN comment chain enlightening to anyone? Who are we writing this for?
For my aerospace engineering undergrad we also had to create a conceptual design for a new aircraft. And of course, as university projects go, we basically did it in five days. But I won't tell you how many iterations we would've had to go through until we had an optimum configuration ready to be sent to detail design
The headline makes it look like their design was a definite one. Then you actually read the article and it says it took another four years before the first one would fly. Which is actually to me the more impressive part of the story, considering the amount of time it takes aircraft manufacturers to go from concept to production these days (e.g. the A380 was first conceptualised in the 1980s and its first flight was in 2005)
The problem people have is that designed is a very flexible word that can mean a great many different things, and because of that it's being used here in a way that means something akin to conceptualized, but also used in the title in this way specifically because it will suggest to people that all the design work was finalized in that period.
That's click-baity in that it plays with people expectations, and not in a way they generally enjoy, so they're annoyed. If you don't like click-bait, the appropriate thing to do is to complain or abstain, otherwise you're just reinforcing their decision to communicate in that way.
Also, Nazi Germany had a few designs that took way shorter than that to go from idea to first flight. An extreme example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162#Prototypes:
“The He 162 V1 first prototype flew within an astoundingly short period of time: the design was chosen on 25 September 1944 and first flew on 6 December, less than 90 days later”
They did have to cut ‘some’ corners to get there, though. That Wikipedia page mentions that it used a highly acidic glue that would disintegrate the wooden parts it was intended to be fastening, that that caused problems on the first flight and a deadly crash on the second, but that it wasn’t considered important enough to hold up the production schedule for even a day.
Ask yourself, how long does this normally take to go from A to B?
One day you've got top engineers with a contemporary concept, but the military says nah we've got to have something way better.
So they really go to work on it until they can confidently deliver a 33-page futuristic well-engineered proposal with a prototype scale model and then the military says yes right away.
What's normal here, weeks, months, even years?
That's what's impressive in 48 hours, nobody could expect a complete set of blueprints, they had to first determine if prints would even be realistically possible.
You know their slide rules were flying like few could do.
With engineers like this why would you use anyone else?
For example, let's look at the concept/design of a helicopter:
DL1 (idea phase): a flying machine that can go straight up and hover
DL2 (concept with basic working principle): a vehicle with a rotor which acts like wings moving in a circle to move air down and by reaction push the vehicle up
DL3 (concept with important details attached): as DL2 but with a tail rotor to allow for axial control and differential tilting of the airfoils to allow forward thrust
DL4 (concept with specifications that drive requirements for other specs): as DL3 with rotor lengths of 3.3 m and a NACA 0018 cross section made of 6061-T6 aluminum
DL5 (concept with full specs): as DL4 but also etc.
Is anyone aware of better nomenclature like this for the concept/design phase? It would help for more important things than this discussion alone. Like when discussing which is more important, idea or execution: so which level idea are we talking about? Also, the root cause of a lot of software problems is in the spec. It would be nice to be able to go back and say, "this spec is only spec level 3, can I please have a spec level 5"?
This discussion is happening because "they designed it over a weekend" is really vague. It would be nice to have a quick way to make it not-vague.
The fact that the B-52 production was not just similar to the prototype, but similar to a complete mockup is a testament to the accuracy of their initial vision. The fact that the US continues to use that design after so many decades is even more amazing.
Both about the YF-23 design being better, and about why the B-52 design is so good.
F-22 won the competition on two and a half points.
First and foremost, the YF-23 was going to be built in 10-11 states while the YF-22 was going to be built in almost 30 states, so something like 40 senators had their state's financial interests at stake with the jobs this would bring in (though nobody involved would ever openly admit this was one of the big reasons). Of course, spreading stuff out increases all kinds of costs and with so many small places, once the main run of planes was done, all these sub-contractors moved on too. As a result, the US can't get all the F-22 parts they need and the F-22 is going to be scrapped way before what would otherwise be necessary.
Second, is that the F-22 had vectored thrusters, so was theoretically more maneuverable. This is somewhat debated because making a YF-23 variant with vectored thrusters was possible and even without it was more than capable of turning a pilot's brains to mush (by far the biggest limiting factor for any manned fighter). Ironically, the big selling point of the F-35 is to be so stealthy that you can kill targets before they can see you due to stealth without the need to dogfight which was the exact YF-23 strategy too (and of course, vectored thrust seems to be a needless and cost-adding addition to the F-22 as the strategy for them is also to engage at ranges where maneuvering isn't a critical task). In every other category of consideration, the YF-23 was far ahead of requirements while the YF-22 was barely satisfactory.
The half point is the stated delivery concerns. The Air Force claimed they were worried that the planes wouldn't be delivered because the B-2 was already behind schedule. As EVERY plane is ALWAYS delivered behind schedule, this is very dumb reasoning. While the YF-23 team had worked for years to make a ready-to-ship plane in the YF-23, the YF-22 was a cobbled-together mess to the point that the entire airframe was redesigned multiple times. As a result of this and that spread-out construction crew, the F-22 was way behind schedule and way overbudget.
Northrop Grumman allegedly asked about using YF-23 designs in a bid for the next-gen Japanese fighter project, so maybe there's hope for it yet (I'd note that the profile of the Russian SU-57 has a strikingly similar look).
EDIT: As to the B-52, the real issue is that making a new plane would give marginal benefits to the airframe while the retraining and costs would be large (not to mention the usual teething problems of a new design). This is similar to how they tried so many times to replace the m4. Better systems exist, but they weren't worth the upgrade (lots of people suspect that their new rifle will be too heavy for most soldiers too).
The most profitable upgrades to the B-52 are the internals and electronics and this has been done several times.
The second best upgrade is more modern and efficient engines, but this has been a very slow to happen. They've announced plans to do this, but I suspect it will be longer than they think. They are claiming reduced maintenance time and a 30% increase in efficiency. Not a bad upgrade, but also not that huge when you consider that's basically 0.5% for each year since it was first designed.
The YF-23 team had to turn in their specs in the competition and you wonder if the referee was partial to the YF-22 team and gave them opposition research. That was the feeling I got from interviews & documentary.
Maneuverability in a stealth plane is not of much use. Just like the F-35, the goal of the YF-23 was to use its vastly superior stealth capabilities take out the enemies before a dogfight happened. Given that drones can take G's that will turn a human's brain to mush, this is a much more sensible strategy in modern combat and renders the F-22 vectored thrusters as mostly an expensive and useless feature that sacrifices the much more important stealth of the YF-23's hidden engines.
I believe the claims of being worried about timetables were just making up excuses to choose a worse plane. The F-22 was 100% redesigned anyway (making a "competition" nothing but a formality). It was delivered years late and WAY over budget.
Unexpected. The Lockheed YF-23[1] looks like it would fall apart if you breathed on it wrong, while the Northrop YF-23 is such a slick design it looks like it's moving while standing still.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/YF-22.jp...
[2] http://www.diseno-art.com/images_10/Northrop-YF-23-8.jpg
How much does it take to have a life-changing insight? or the moment of solving a challenge to resolve a theorem demonstration? An instant or your whole life up to that point?
GPS/Navstar also wasn't the first system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Pred...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#History
It also glorifies an attitude that the greenfield design process is where the wizardry happens, and that forgetting about or dropping products after this stage is acceptable. Only failed products don't need to be maintained and refined.
Not even that is true. Here's the timeline from the article.
> In July of 1948, Boeing received a contract from the still-new U.S. Air Force to design and build a new heavy bomber.
...
> So when Boeing’s three-man presentation team arrived at Wright Field Air Force Base on October 21, 1948
...
> Warden suggested to the Boeing team that they do away with their design and come back to him with a new one that included turbojet engines ... unbeknownst to Warden at the time, Schairer happened to be carrying some work he’d already done on the possibility of a jet-powered bomber in his briefcase, giving him just enough of a foundation to think a redesign might be possible
...
>The next morning, which happened to be a Friday, the Boeing team returned with their newly jet-powered B-52 design, only to find that Warden remained unimpressed.
...
> The two soon joined Schairer, Wells, Carlsen, and Blumenthal in the increasingly cramped hotel room, pouring over sketches and quickly-scribbled mathematical computations. Computers wouldn’t become a common facet of aviation design for decades to come. It was up to these six men and their witts to design an entirely new bomber… and they had just 48 hours to do it.
..
> By Sunday, the team had compiled a full proposal that they turned over to a local stenographer to type up a clean copy. By Monday morning, they arrived back in Warden’s office with not only a fully-realized 33-page B-52 proposal but a silver, hand-crafted, 14-inch model of the bomber itself. Warden immediately took to the weekend design.
So, July -> October 26th (Monday morning)
4 Months isn't bad at all but it's not quite the 4 days suggested in the headline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Des...
> On Thursday, 21 October 1948, Boeing engineers George S. Schairer, Art Carlsen, and Vaughn Blumenthal presented the design of a four-engine turboprop bomber to the chief of bomber development, Colonel Pete Warden. Warden was disappointed by the projected aircraft and asked if the Boeing team could come up with a proposal for a four-engine turbojet bomber [...] By late Friday night, they had laid out what was essentially a new airplane.
> [...] On Monday, Schairer presented Colonel Warden with a neatly bound 33-page proposal and a 14-inch (36 cm) scale model. The aircraft was projected to exceed all design specifications.
> [...] During ground testing on 29 November 1951, the XB-52's pneumatic system failed during a full-pressure test; the resulting explosion severely damaged the trailing edge of the wing, necessitating considerable repairs. [...] The XB-52 followed on 2 October 1952. The thorough development, including 670 days in the wind tunnel and 130 days of aerodynamic and aeroelastic testing, paid off with smooth flight testing. Encouraged, the USAF increased its order to 282 B-52s.
The article briefly mentions that Bob Withington, one of the members of this ad-hoc proposal-redesign team, played a role in the swept-wing design of the B-47, but is otherwise silent on its significance.
Both the B-36 and the B-47 were difficult aircraft to fly and maintain. The B-36, with all those piston engines, was a headache. Too much powerplant to maintain, and underpowered by jet standards. The B-47 needed a rocket assisted takeoff booster to get off the ground with a reasonable amount of runway, and operated too close to the "coffin corner", with cruising speed and altitude too close to stall. Over 2000 were built, over 200 crashed, and none remain flyable. With the B-52, the USAF got an intercontinental bomber that flew well, could be maintained, and had enough power to get itself off the ground without rocket boosters.
Its successors were less useful in actual conflicts. Too short ranged, too expensive, less bomb load, etc.
Boeing did a very good job. I don't think there have been (or will be) another aircraft that lasted this long in service. There are prettier aircraft (in my opinion), but "pretty" doesn't get the job done. The Big Ugly Fat Fella will be around for quite some time.
And the C-130 is right around the same age, not to mention still (I believe) being manufactured.
Relating his time in the aircraft in VN, he said there was little to compare with skimming the rice paddies with the doors removed, periodically going up a bit to clear water buffalo, carrying a load of beer for the guys in a firebase. He mostly flew medevac slicks in combat. Gotta save those boys.
Surely was not overnight but a cumulative effort of many engineers of many disciplines over many decades.
Most notably the airframe framework which makes its longevity more than possible.
Will not stoop to a simplistic clickbait.
I theorize it’s because implementation is a lot more work, and usually lacks a singular hero figure. We make exceptions when there is; see Woz.
There are many Woz-like but unheralded program managers that have leverage the vaunted B-52 airframe into something beyond its original purpose.
It is about Woz and a garage business that got its unique notoriety.
Supremely entertaining and just totally wild. It is written by the engineer that led F-117 Nighhawk program, "What do you mean it appears the size of a bee on the radar?"
As they say, if it doesn't make you question the metrology, it isn't a breakthrough. They thought the radar was faulty.
EDIT: After reading the article, what Boeing did back then was the same thing as Boom coming up with a rendering and a high level design concept over the weekend. Also, back then times, and technology, were different.
This in contrast to the F-35 project which apparently decided all the capabilities up front and then has went about designing an aircraft to somehow reach all those goals. Whether or not it will is a subject of ongoing debate. It also somehow has wound up making 3 different airframes.
A good example of this would be Soviet copies of the B-29 & the V-2. In both cases there was pressure to "build our own that is better". Apparently Stalin got involved in both cases and demanded that a way be found to produce a domestic copy first, then learn from that, & produce a domestic design next. Not sure how accurate that is, but it seems to have worked out. Soviet long range bombers & Soviet missile systems are certainly nothing to scoff at.
https://de.hoffmann-speedster.com/media/image/e0/14/3f/Ferdi...
Four years from concept to first flight for the B-52 is impressive. The "over one weekend" claim (which the body of the article refutes) is annoying.
That's… not what the second F stands for.
Reading it made me appreciate (again) the "old" way of knowledge sharing- books and publications. I'm amazed that it's so under-appreciated tool nowadays.
There is an obvious downside to how cheap it is nowadays to "publish" something, whether on social media, in a blog or in something resembling a book, we are now surrounded by low-quality content and it can be hard to tell the good from the bad.
Another benefit of books and magazines is that you have an instant idea of how relevant the information is, "Electronics Weekly 1970", possibly not the latest best advice on using microcontrollers!
In that sense B-52 is like the battleship designs of WW1 that fought in WW2 and onward. Not sticking around because they are so effective but instead sticking around because they are dead ends.
Granted, I probably need to design a catapult to get it up to speed without big battery drain…but there are really great innovations yet to even make it to prototype IMHO.
surely its more efficient and lower maintenance?
is it that it would alter the centre of drag/gravity/thrust too much and would require too much engineering?
>In 1996, Rolls-Royce and Boeing jointly proposed fitting each B-52 with four leased Rolls-Royce RB211-535 engines. This would have involved replacing the eight Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines (total thrust 136,000 lbf (600 kN)) with four RB211 engines (total thrust 148,000 lbf (660 kN)), which would increase range and reduce fuel consumption, at a cost of approximately US$2.56 billion for the whole fleet. However, a USAF analysis in 1997 concluded that Boeing's estimated savings of US$4.7 billion would not be realized and that re-engining would instead cost US$1.3 billion more than keeping the existing engines, citing significant up-front procurement and re-tooling expenditure.
And if the rudder were made large enough to maintain directional control, the loads in the aft fuselage would be large enough that the aft fuselage would need to be re-designed.
Is it really a better alternative to putting some bomb bay doors on a modern Boeing?
Without dismissing the entire field of aircraft design... the mind is definitely attracted to the concept of buzzsawing some doors onto the bottom of civilian airliner.
yes
I'm not sure how retrofitting bomb doors (plus any other military requirements) onto a modern wide-body Boeing would be any better than a major refit of an existing B-52. Heck, we can't even build new tankers for in-flight refueling without major fuckups and overruns. A bomber would be worse.
The speed/"B52 is actually structurally designed to take enemy fire" points someone mentioned were immensely informative.
I'd never, ever thought of those. But it makes sense. The B52 carries a lot of bombs and has the structural design and other attributes for being in a combat zone.
Designing a NEW B52 is prohibitive because in reality, in a war with Russia/China, the B52 is non-viable against modern AA.
But for carpet bombing Afghanistan, the B52 is perfect.
- Retraining the entire fleet of pilots for the new aircraft.
- Recertifying the entire set of currently available weapons that the B52 can drop.
- Integrating modern military radios/crypto/satcoms/datalinks/etc with the civilian Boeing system.
- Replacing all the spare parts/simulators/ground equipment/etc.
Now these are not unsolvable problems of course; all that gets done every time a new aircraft model is introduced. But there is just not really a need to replace the B52. The main downside is that it's a bit of a gas guzzler, but apart from that the USAF would gain very little in capabilities by replacing the B52 with a modern airplane. It would be very expensive for basically no gain.
The other answer would be that they would have to expend a huge engineering effort and am mount of money to end up with an aircraft that does what the b-52 already does.
But, I'd totally love to see a civilian aircraft retrofitted in some kind of post-apocalyptic movie.
As a lay person I imagine that the high wing of a B-52 vs the low wing of a modern Boeing might have something to do with center of gravity given the relative density and dynamic weight changes of bombs during a sortie vs stable passengers and luggage on a flight.
Since aircraft operate at much higher speeds than what we normal humans are accustomed to on a daily basis, there are significant concerns having to do with things like vibration [0] that may not be obvious.
That isn't to say that people aren't trying to reuse more commodity hardware over bespoke. For example, I understand that the P-8 Poseidon [1] is considered a successful program. It uses the 737 frame and does launch munitions, albeit not as many as a dedicated bomber aircraft.
Your idea of taking a sawsall to make a bomb bay door is not far off from the C-130 Harvest Hawk, which mounts bomb racks to existing cargo ramps.
0. The engineering required to fly fast (GVT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZGo-R2mtb8
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_P-8_Poseidon
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_KC-130#Harvest...
The B-52 can carry about 70,000 lbs of bombs. You can't just hang that amount of weight from the floor of a 777, you're going to have to redesign the entire aircraft to support the load. The B-52 also has a range that's absolutely insane. With a combat load it can fly 8,800 miles, beating a 777-200LR by a few hundred miles. If it's just flying from point A to point B with no bombs it can go more than 10,000 miles.
One could put an entire Cheyene Space Mountain complex into one BUFF.
then again, what do I know? Just that their carrying capacity is freaking awesome.
From what I've been told, the B52 has relatively low operating cost and can stay up in the air pretty much indefinitely by being refueled in air by KC-135s.
source: I was an air traffic controller in the US Air Force
Mid air refueling, electronic warfare & military technology integration, speed in combat zone, integrity while under enemy fire.
They are are very different points than I ever imagined you would have to consider for a bomber.
The B52s gigantic wings make a ton more sense now. They're incredibly large so they produce vastly more lift/other specifications than required in case holes are shot in the bomber.
Lesson I've learnt today is listen more to the experts.
(Steve Jobs on how ideas change when you actually do it)
Oof. Not a great call-out, as one of the stupidest operational plans and misuse of sophisticated platforms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II#Init...
In the initial phase and by design, the B-52s were sent over the same area for a third night in a row, in a manner that negated their strengths and exposed their weaknesses.
As a consequence, 7 planes were shot down by SAMs in a single night.
I was dumbfounded about the “misplanning” when other crew managed to return and decades later bitched about the planning.
then decades later, I read the Vietnam excepts, it was a gamble as these anti-aircraft missile launchers were mobile enough to try for a different flight path. But they didnt change the missile sites. Mentions were made that it would have had taken too long to pack-up/move/recalibrate. I would have faulted on-ground intelligence for that lack of insight.
at any rate, modern gaming (Monte Carlos?) theory says always to try different routes.
Impressive service life time, especially that since then nobody came up with something better then the B-52.
On the delivery large bomb payloads into dominated airspace the B-52 is unbeatable so far.
What has to happen in a human brain that you get so detached from the reality that you can talk so normally and in a chitty chat way about means of destruction
The development of the 747 is also pretty impressive.
It is so sad to see how far they have fallen.
The B52 Stratofortres was introduced in 1955 qty 744 The B-58 Hustler was introduced in 1960. (not to replace B52). qty 116 The FB-111A / F-111G was introduced in 1968 * qty 76 The B-1 Lancer was introduced in 1986 to replace the B-52. qty 104 The B-2 Spirit was introduced in 1997 to replace the B-52. qty 21 The B-21 Raider to be introduced in 2025 to place the B1 and B52. qty 6 +??
* The FB-111A was a strategic bomber version of the F-111 for the USAF Strategic Air Command. With Air Force's Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft program proceeding slowly, and concerns of fatigue failures in the B-52 fleet, the service needed an interim bomber quickly
(OK I can't find a source for this - beyond him saying he wrote the lyrics in 20 minutes- but I swear I read that some place)
Guess I’ll never read the story.