The XB-70 (2019)
codex99.com
codex99.com
It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy.
I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked on or even seen in person, and it holds a certain "alternate reality" mystique for me.
As someone that has managed engineering teams for large projects, I 100% agree. One of the issues with computers IMO is that it has made bad engineering easier. Back when you had to check everything with a slide-rule, you had a real appreciation for the skill and engineering prowess and experience to make things absolutely dead simple.
No longer can software engineers arbitrarily add bloat and just get away with it.
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/new-benchmark-shows...
Of course, we can always choose to solve the least complex problem.
The engineer-type brain is very much prone to "... in order to prove we can," as opposed to "Because we should. Or because this is useful. Or because this even does the job claimed."
Across a range of fields. A/B testing "engagement hacks" falls into this category, as far as I'm concerned. It was certainly successful at the stated goals.
That's what worries me about a lot of the shiny, super high tech, super expensive weapons systems of the US. These are fine against an overmatched enemy when you can fly back to a safe place for doing the necessary maintenance. This may change when there is a war against a capable enemy that can strike closer to home. The US has always had the advantage that the homeland was safe but that may change in the future. And once you lose a B-2 bomber it's very hard to replace.
One of the long standing problems with US defense procurement is that they build a batch of something, then cut off all orders and dismantle the production line in order to free up funds to develop a successor model. This is tremendously risky because it leaves a gap of many years when it's impossible to replace attrition losses. If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21.
Assuming the US would actually need B21 capability in a war with China. Those will be probably blown up from the sky very fast. Besides I doubt wars with China and / or Russia will be limited to conventional means. Will probably escalate to nuclear very fast and then everybody is royally fucked.
I think any war with Russia would be, well is, economic and cyber and proxy wars.
Current POTUS is an egomaniacal moron. Things could very easily get out of his control, especially as he dismantles the US government and sources of influence throughout the world.
Don't you think it looks more attractive than going up in flames?
Just like he surrendered Ukraine to Russia. An amazing deal for everyone involved, except Ukraine.
Why do you say that? I'd think B21 is better (stealthier) than B2. I think there is a story about a B2 dropping a dud on NK undetected granted NK vs. China
Ironically the B-21 is probably safest in the air. The greatest kinetic threat is on the ground because forward air bases generally lack hardened aircraft shelters or effective missile defense. This is another reason why maintaining deterrence against China will require a major increase in defense spending or realignment of priorities.
The whole point of procuring a platform like the B-21 is to never have to use it. The strategic calculus is that just having it gives the US a range of conventional options short of global thermonuclear war, and thus forces adversaries to be more cautious.
One or two grenade-strength shrapnel devices are enough to make a $700m dollar special project useless.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:72.1/cente...
You could try a surprise drone attack from a container ship. Looks like the closest ship is about 125 miles away, that might be pushing the range a bit.
They'd likely take off from the US, fly wherever they need to go for their mission without landing, and then fly all the way back to the US. Same as the B-2.
Similarly it's unlikely a drone strike is an issue due to distance.
Not a "missle base", but: "The B-52...is one of two currently at RAF Fairford in England as part of a routine Bomber Task Force (BTF) deployment." [0]
Also, more pertinent to location in scope, US has been increasing forward-based capabilities in south pacific, for example [1].
[0] https://www.twz.com/air/b-52-flies-close-to-border-of-russia...
[1] https://www.twz.com/air/massive-wwii-b-29-bomber-base-fully-...
The B-52, etc.. is just different. It's not as high value of an asset as the B-2 or the B-21 will be and gets treated differently.
https://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2...
Current plans are to purchase a relatively large number of B-21's. Some losses are expected and accepted.
B-52s were able to pivot to new roles so have stayed around.
I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". Who would have guessed..
That guy may have been me. I was pretty bummed, but quickly learned about its awesomeness (avionics-wise, anyway).
"SRAM Howell" ring a bell?
I had a really tough time resisting the urge to tell them the "cargo" came out the bottom.
ICBMs also render other kinds of bombers obsolete and yet b52 and tu-95 are still around.
The B-52 survived by becoming a low altitude bomber and an excellent, cheap nuclear-capable cruise missile delivery platform that was comparatively cheap to operate at the same level of effectiveness as the B1-B and B-2A for similar roles.
Russia more or less mirrored this with the Tu-95.
The B52 role was to have wings (and nuclear bombs) in the air constantly over the arctic to act as a deterrent. The only way that idea could attempt to survive out of the 50's is if they (or one of them) were < hour from a target at all times. They're huge, they flew slow, and their flight path didn't change much. The whole multi-decade mission was a huge waste of money; a stage drama.
The B52 also became a heavy bomber in Vietnam, with incredibly heavy loses. The Air Force in general in Vietnam was a shit show -- observe the F4.
It's only when you have air superiority can you dredge up a B52 to deliver a payload.
These are not winning strategies in a war that would start today by an adversary like China. We're going to be caught with our pants down with B52s as the stains on our underwear.
Meanwhile: their entire imported food and oil supply has been easily blockaded by ancient, conventional systems.
Isn't there a truism that the F4 demonstrates that with big enough engines, you can get any lump of junk up into the air ?
The needs of Vietnam required different tactics, and the airmen paid in blood for the myopic vision of the leaders.
Even the airframes are mostly still alive 50+ years later, which is mind blowing on aircraft. They have made a new B52 since ‘62 but they keep on trucking.
It isn’t super fast (the B1 is that), or stealthy (B2 or B21), or sexy (B1), or nimble (any of the generations of fighter bombers that have come and gone). It doesn’t fly particularly low. Or particularly high.
But god damn can it carry and drop absolutely massive quantities of whatever type of ordnance you want, pretty much anywhere you want on the globe, and do it over and over and over and over again. 70,000 lbs worth
The 737 is still around for pretty much the same reasons.
Any alternative ends up being less effective at the same tasks, or more niche/expensive.
They’re basically the alligators or horseshoe crabs of the airplane world. Or the M2 heavy machine gun. Or the Cessna 182 or Robinson R22 of the GA world.
This has been proven utterly false since the 1960s, because a) you can't recall an ICBM after firing it, b) you can't retarget an ICBM after firing it, and c) there's no reliable way to tell nuke warheads from conventional ones, meaning every one you launch has to be assumed to have a nuclear payload, with all the world-ending consequences that entails.
The Air Force resurrected this zombie idea (conventional ICBMs) in the 2000s and called it Prompt Global Strike, only to can it for the obvious reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreshnik_(missile)#First_ope...
Unless your neighbor has effective air defenses and you want to make a political point...
Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
Those kind of system would be really „cheap“ to deploy, you overwhelm a lot of air defense systems with it and well it’s transportable outside of air defense range.
Which sounds good, but the B-52 planes used eight very old jet engines each that are complex to maintain.
Rolls Royce offered to replace these with four modern turbofan engines but were turned down.
They finally relented and there’s a new program that will run to the end of the 2030s(!) to replace the eight engines with… eight engines.
This doesn’t sound simple, or cheap.
I keep pointing out to people that if a real world war broke out, every country with a commercial wide body fleet will immediately convert them to bombers. Far cheaper, far simpler to maintain, and with much faster turnaround times / lower maintenance hours per flight hour.
https://www.twz.com/6825/engine-falls-off-b-52-during-a-trai...
And it's extremely difficult to convert civilian airliners into bombers. The pressure hulls aren't designed around bomb bays and they lack external hard points. Even though the P-8 is based on the 737 the design had to be extensively modified to accommodate weapons through a major program lasting years. The resulting aircraft are new production, not modifications of airliners.
Yes. We agree: the setup is not standard, not simple, and requires 2x the maintenance that 1/2 the engines would for decades and decades.
Older and established isn't necessarily "simpler" or "cheaper".
The average annual maintenance cost of a B-52 is $70 million.
The maintenance cost of a 747 or a similar sized plane is more like $4 million, and they operate far more hours than the B-52 fleet.
A commercial plane equivalent to a B-52 costs something like $200M to purchase new, which is just three years of maintenance for a B-52!
Sure, sure, the out-of-the-box default for a commercial wide-body airliner is not immediately usable as a strategic bomber, but it's not that hard to add a bomb bay, in-air fuel port, etc...
We are talking about a nuclear bomber. They put fucking nukes on these things. We have 70 years of operational history showing that the 8 engine arrangement works, and there is no good reason to make anything more than the most minimal changes. Go ahead and do that until you're blue in the face with some inconsequential junk SaaS product or phone app or whatever, but warplanes (and especially this one) are not the place to do it.
I'm just going to hope you're not actually serious about converting a commercial airliner to a bomber.
The payload is.
The good reason to make changes is the hard reality that your opponents won’t slow down to accomodate your old, inefficient, maintenance-heavy fleet of bombers.
Even during peacetime the B-52 fleet is burning money, money that DOGE assures the voting public cannot be wasted on frivolous matters such as HIV prevention.
It’s like the Ukraine war. Perfectly good tanks turned out to be useless sitting ducks in the face of $500 drones.
Why change anything?
Because the enemy did.
Because the rest of the world did.
Certifying, sadly... also yes. I work in government.
Do you think the enemy cares whether you're properly certified or not?
Similarly, do you think hackers care if your CISO has all of your security audit paperwork nicely rubber stamped?
Do viruses care if your unpatched servers have been officially exempt from the update schedule?
In war, only capability matters. Nothing else.
You would know this if you had bothered to do some basic research instead of posting ignorant and irrelevant comments. Like many arrogant engineers who love to pontificate about topics outside your area of expertise, I'm sure you're convinced you're right and everyone else is an idiot. So I'll pass on any further replies and let you believe that you "won".
You can think what you want and I can't stop you, I just want to say that you shouldn't bring this up around people that do real engineering (especially in aerospace and defense) unless you want to look like an idiot.
Previous programs of B-52 re-engining indeed, tried to replace 8 engines with 4. It never worked because of diameter/ground clearance issue. They had to wait until progress in aircraft engines allowed for the engine of same diameter to provide the necessary efficiency boost.
By the way, re-engining will vastly reduce air refuelling needs, and further extend airframe life because of lighter takeoff weights, as they won't need to take as much fuel on most missions. And in a pinch, almost any mission will be doable without refuelling at all.
I don't know anything about B-52s, but I work on a project where we are essentially replacing a 40 year old weapon system with a new one. The new one should of course do the same things, preferably better, and do additional new things. The old system started out simple, but has since had most of its internals swapped both hardware and software wise a number of times. We have full access to all the documentation of the old system, but let's say there has been periods throughout these 40 years where this aspect hasn't exactly been top priority.
It doesn't come as a surprise to me that projects like JSF end up a complete clusterfuck. Everyone tends to underestimate the complexity of the system they operate/produce after a while because most of it is always there and just works.
Do not #%{>€!# with the sewer system. You may be tempted to, because it works so well it is invisible, to reduce its budget, or to overhaul it, or something.
Do not.
Fund it. Hire extremely competent people to run it, and do not replace them.
Do not #%*|!%# with the sewer.
I highly recommend visiting it for anyone interested in this stuff. It's an amazing museum, and it's totally free!
So it's not about any technical failures of XB-70 itself, just that it turned out to be unable to do the job it was planned for.
Wrong?
They might have been afraid of the XB-70 getting hit but it likely never would have just because it turned out to be so hard to hit things at 70,000+ feet traveling at Mach 3+.
The XB-70 looks like nothing that came before, and nothing after it looks like the XB-70. Six engines side by side in the tail. It looks like a 1950s concept for a spaceplane. It was apparently a good aircraft, but expensive and didn't fit any military need of the time.
(The need for high-altitude supersonic bombers declined once surface to air missiles got good enough to hit them.)
But its borderline boring, nothing shiny, nothing to sell new subscriptions or trainings for, nothing to get promotions for, things that just keep running (TM) slip out of focus. Look at how brilliant engineers handle boredom and routine - usually very, very badly. Its not what 'hackers' want to do, despite thats exactly what all normal companies want to get. Unprofessional for sure, but when most of potential and otherwise brilliant employees have issues with this, they tend to get some slack.
The XB70 flew in late 1964. Concorde was doing revenue flights in 1976, cruising at Mach 2, with passengers being served luxury food.
> The Air Force learned that pushing the technological envelope resulted in plane that was difficult to build, difficult to maintain, difficult to fly, and perhaps even more importantly, was incredibly expensive; the program cost nearly 1.5 billion dollars, or around 11 million dollars per flight.
And nothing has changed. Pushing the limits is expensive. Always has been, always will be.
Actually used on the BOMARC and D-21's ramjet engines- which is why you don't originals of their engines on display anywhere.
A 747-8I carries up to 63,034 gallons, or about 400k pounds, on a max takeoff weight of 987,000 pounds, or about 42% of takeoff weight.
Interestingly, the ranges are about the same. The XB70's combat radius (there and back) is 3,725 nm, for a straight line range of 7450 nm, the 747-8I's range is 7730 nm.
High altitude supersonic flight is actually fairly efficient... if you can handle it.
This was actually so clear to the USAF that about five years after the B-70 was canceled (about the time the first XB-70 took flight), when the Soviets actually started to deploy thousands of SA-5 across the Soviet Union, the USAF was convinced it must have ABM capabilities. It wouldn't make sense for the Soviets to use ~10% of their annual concrete production to defend against a threat that the US had already canceled, so they thought that the SA-5 had to be a super-useful national ABM capability (they had already evaluated that the ABM-1 system under construction around Moscow, the so called Triad system, as overmatched by the existing Minuteman I deployments, but thousands of missiles required more even more thousands of warheads to exhaust). In response, the USAF suddenly expressed significant interest in MIRV technology, and the Minuteman III program began, and ICBM warhead numbers started to get really insane.
https://www.generalstaff.org/CDA/Air/B-70/XB-70_Escape_Syste...
In 2014 I got to visit the AF Museum in Dayton, OH. With all the exceptional exhibits there it is completely obvious the XB-70 is THE crown jewel in that museum.
And it snowed while we were visiting and they shut down the hangar with the XB-70 because it required a shuttle ride.
So now I still have on my bucket list to see it.
I mainly wanted to see the YF-23 but here's a pic I took with a fisheye lens of the back of the YF-23 with the XB-70 above. I think they have since moved the planes to a different hangar.
(I tell my family that on every stop on our road trips & vacations.)
The XB-70 used to be parked outside right in front of the main entrance. The cool thing is they also have the X-3, which seems like the same design family so you can see the test article then the attempt at a usable aircraft.
It was also the location of one of the most bonkers thing I've ever seen which was when they relocated an SR-71 to the museum and landed it on this very short old runway at the site. That thing was so big and so fast and that runway even at the time seemed so short. Here's a vid. I saw it from the road off the end of the threshold and it looked like it was going to hit the fence on the landing pass.
The AF museum is our modern history and society shown through the lens of the air and is insane in size.
This small detail peaked my curiosity - did GE have white collar workers on the night shift? If so, that is super interesting to me.
The good old days.
Similar vibe would be the B1-lancer for engine although in 2s
It's crazy it can carry as much payload as a B-52 if I recall right
We no longer needed the SR71 when reconnaissance satellites got good.