The B-52 Just Keeps on Flying | Hacker News Reader

The B-52 Just Keeps on Flying

airspacemag.com

87 pointsdnetesn64 comments

Once you have control of the airspace over your opponent then stealth takes a back seat and what you want is a (relatively) low cost way to delivery large amounts of ordinance over a long distance.

A Bomb Truck.

The B-52 does that better than anything else out there.

Throw in that much of the design was built with 50's technology originally which meant when it was ripped out and modernised you had massive amounts of space to play with which made upgrading them easier as well.

What is fascinating is that the law of diminishing returns was hit so quickly after the introduction of the jet engines for sub-sonic bombers.

As far as I know there is no such things as stealth in aircrafts. If you are using modern radar then you can spot any aircraft, even those new stealth jet fighters that the US is about to start cranking out.

Sure there is.

Stealth capability isn't a boolean property. Intermittent detection isn't enough to target an aircraft. Being able to track from the ground, with numerous antennas and supercomputers, is much easier than tracking from the limited-diameter head of a radar-guided missile.

I'm curious: Can modern missiles just rely on ground-based radar?

Obviously SAMs can, some Air to Air missiles could in theory if you have a nearby ground station guide them. However, the missiles that are guided by the plane have less range, requiring that ground station to be conveniently close by. Thats if were not including ground based radar just providing info to the plane itself.

It can be decidedly unhealthy to be broadcasting a radar signal when the enemy might have SEAD aircraft with radar-homing missiles.

Having to keep the radar on though-out the missile's entire flight would be a good example of a possibly life-shortening exercise for the sender of the missile.

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

as the joke goes, these missiles were very old - they were produced when there were no stealth planes, and thus they didn't know that that plane was supposed to be invisible to them.

Some IRCM systems have historically encountered this same problem in their development. Modern missiles were defeated, but very old missiles were actually attracted.

It isn't really a joke so much as a humorous way to describe a nasty reality.

Yes, really. Did you read the article?

"Stealth" is an array of technologies that can reduce vehicle signatures across significant portions of the EM spectrum. No technology can protect against all wavelengths you might usefully use to detect, and you cannot be equally stealthy with respect to every wavelength from every angle, but you can dramatically reduce the overall apparent cross section (several orders of magnitude) and thus make the vehicle more survivable.

ITYM "ordnance" - in contrast an "ordinance" is a rule or law.

So they’re trying to pay for them with PFIs. That didn’t work out well in the UK for hospitals, schools, police stations or anything else they were applied to. PFIs are perfect, though, if you want to let an external body decide what you need and make you pay for more than 6 times the value of something that doesn’t solve your original problem.

Are you in the wrong thread?

no, he isn't:

> "To go out and buy new engines for the B-52, you'd have a really hard time fitting that into our program, but that's why we're interested in a public-private partnership, which would be a different way to amortize those engines over time and pay for them in the savings that they actually generate, instead of paying for them out of savings that you hope for.

This sounds like a Private Finance Initiative as the GP mentioned

So basically, asking GE or Pratt & Whitney to fit modern turbofan engines upfront for free, and getting paid out of the fuel and/or maintenance savings over time?

That’s the idea, but it’s a profit making exercise for these companies. In all, they charge far, far more than the up front cost.

Not to mention, they’ll charge based on an annual fee for every year the engines are in service. And if there’s anything the original B52 taught us, it’s that avionic hardware is in service for far, far longer than we estimate when we buy it.

I suppose, not knowing what "far, far more" actually is, that could be appropriate. Typically, whether it's a loan or some kind of "partnership" when you ask someone else to front the expenses for your project/purchase you end up paying a lot more over time than if you had the cash in hand.

"Public private partnership" is a scheme that avoids traditional approval processes for debts, and introduces risk elements that allow the private partner to make money, and makes the financing cost difficult to measure. Instead of bonding engines and carrying the cost in the books, they are effectively leasing the engines.

>Instead of bonding engines and carrying the cost in the books, they are effectively leasing the engines.

leasing by the Line-Of-Business vs. capital investment through IT has been the root of the cloud revolution in the IT industry. Now military starts to learn the trick. Weapons as a Service...

"PFIs are perfect, though, if you want to let an external body decide what you need and make you pay for more than 6 times the value of something that doesn’t solve your original problem."

That does seem to be the standard operating procedure for a lot of the US military.

Meanwhile new metal just does not cut it.

http://www.jqpublicblog.com/the-little-fighter-that-couldnt-...

Among the crippling problems highlighted in the DOT&E report:

- Software glitches disrupting enemy identification and weapon employment.

- A redesigned fuel tank that continues to demonstrate unacceptable vulnerability to explosion from lightning or enemy fire.

- Departures from controlled flight during high-speed maneuvering, a six-year-old problem that apparently will not be solved without sacrificing stealth or combat capability.

- Helmet issues fundamentally degrading pilot situational awareness.

- Engine problems so severe they’re limiting sortie rates, impeding the test schedule, and generating risky operational decisions.

- Nightmarish maintainability issues leading to over-reliance on contractor support.

I don't really know of too many sophisticated military weapons that don't require contractor support. The military doesn't really hire professional engineers. The involved enlisted serve as maintenance crew and understand basics and know how to read manuals and use tools, officers fly and command things. Even the vocational schools for the enlisted that learn to do the maintenance on such equipment are often taught by civilians. Engineering takes a lot of schooling which would be on the level of an officer, but officers are commanders. Officers are management, not usually individual contributors except for maybe in the medical field where nurses are officers.

When I was an engineering student I had several friends who were enlisted in the Air Force reserve while in college. They did pretty advanced electronics / avionics maintenance during their weekends and inevitable 3 month deployments in Afghanistan. When they graduated with electrical engineering degrees they stayed enlisted since it was less stress / more fun to work with the hardware than manage.

Just because someone is enlisted doesn't necessarily mean they aren't educated or specialized.

Adding to my sibling post, the USAF hires a ton of professional engineers. Many officers are engineers by education, though higher ranks are rarely engineers by trade. Many LTs and Captains do engineering work, but career progression is harder if they want to stay in it so they either switch or get out and continue as a contractor or civilian after 4-10 years. On the civilian side, there are many thousands of civilian engineers employed at the depots and other locations, but not as often at the operating locations.

In my experience, those officers may have engineering backgrounds but are not doing direct engineering work. They are usually project and program managers.

You will find the most civilian engineers at major ranges and test facilities. Places like Edwards AFB, White Sands Missile Range, Patuxent River NAS, China Lake, etc. The DoD employs tens of thousands of engineers at these and other sites.

Yeah, the Air Force wants all its officers to be "leaders of men" and not technicians. They really ought to bring back the warrant officer track for people with critical technical skills and no interest in management.

The world needs more of a "warrant officer track" in general, IMO.

Given that the B-52's roots are in the bomber design of WWII, I don't wanna have the circumstances that make design of "new metal" an existential necessity.

Given that humans are slow, expensive and heavy and increasingly a liability in most combat scenarios and the future of manned fighters does not look good since at this point any "new metal" called forth by active hostilities would be most likely automated and (relatively) disposable.

Unfortunately we seem to have lost our moral qualms about bombing civilians some time ago so any coming wars will look like skynet with flying murderbots killing based on policy decisions made far away by people who will never see their cousins body lying where the missiles blew it.

And if you think that's a bleak and hopeless view; just think how the Pakistanis, Afghans and Yemenis who've been living with that reality for a dozen years now; feel.

    > we seem to have lost our moral qualms about bombing
    > civilians some time ago

First UAVs (balloons, as it happens) used by the Austrians to bomb Venice in 1849. Just think how the Europeans, who've been living with that reality for ~150 years now feel. Unconstrained civilian massacre by aerial bombing had peaked in terms of shakey moral justification (Dresden?) even before the Americans dropped The Bomb and won the numbers game.

I think it might not be a fair comparison since Europe is now inundated with tourists and the Middle East countries mentioned are experiencing these scenarios right now.

OP was trying to suggest that the world has become more callous about civilian casualties, using drones as an example, and was wrong on both counts

One of the greatest benefits of visual mass media has been showing the general public that wars mean suffering on the other side. The enemy civilian and their suffering is humanised when you can picture them; when they're not just a byline. This is one of the reasons that the US military didn't let journalists have free reign in Iraq - they'd learned that lesson hard in Vietnam.

What does this have to do with heavy bombers?

The USAF is looking to re-engine the fleet. It will be interesting to see how this affects fuel and range.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/once-again-the-usaf-is-look...

Why is there the emphasis on keeping the B52 an eight engine aircraft?

Edit: A increase in minimum runway length and a decrease in payload capacity don't seem like the right answers in light of past four engine proposals that improved both specifications (the replacements had over double the thrust) while delivering even more fuel efficiency.

I would guess they want the ability to take off and land on relatively short runways, and, as indicated, they want to reuse existing engines.

Bombs are heavy.

A-380 is over 2.5x the weight of a B-52.

As other posters have mentioned, short take off fully loaded with ordinance, as well as for extended range/engine failure scenarios.

They might not be the most economical choice, but for nostalgia's sake: I love the fact that these dinosaurs are still in service. A service history this long is not totally unheard of: the U-2 spy plane was introduced in the same year as the B-52, and is still in active service today.

Fun fact: the Russian counterpart of the B-52, the TU-95 'Bear' (1956) is also still in service today.

This does make me wonder why they cancelled the service of planes like the A-10 warthog. There's simply no replacement, and unlike strategic long-range bombers there is still a need for planes like this on a 21st century battlefield.

I thought B-52 will be replaced by F-35 :-}

Definitely! The B52 is way obsolete and the F35 can do everything it can do, only faster and better, and stealthier! /s

How did you manage a blank username???

It's not blank, you just can't see it yet.

i don't understand. i can totally see the username. does that mean i can see the ... whoa.

When I was in Tech school we used to play in the training Buffs at lunch time. They are so big and clunky looking. When they taxi down the flightline, it looks like they couldn't manage anything. Until they get up there; then they're beautiful.

Tech school at what ATC base?

Lowry in Denver. It's not there any more.

Oh yeah, I remember. I was at Sheppard a couple of times. Was just trying to remember if any B52's were there. If not, most everything else sure was flying into that base.

I remember reading a story where some engineers calculated that the B-52 should not be able to fly.

Perhaps it's powered by bumblebees.

They're swiveling landing gear is pretty cool, although it does look unsettling when a plane on the ground isn't moving the same way its nose is pointing e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94AcSHpcZbI&t=39

The B-52's were built by people who had experience building and tweaking the bombers of WWII. The practicality of the B-52 stands as a shining example of the scary efficiency of war when people put their minds to it.

Because Boeing's engineers had experience in production-oriented bomber building (Ford gave them that at Willow Run, where they were building a completed B-24 each hour¹), they knew not to gold-plate their design. Create the minimum that will do the mission, and make it easy to service & repair.

¹ http://www.strategosinc.com/willow_run.htm

Makes me want to dig out my copy of Flight of the Old Dog .

There were a lot of weird errors in the article.

> tur- boprop-powered XB-52 > missilessiles

Conversion artifacts from an original typeset article

>This reasoning was based on the assessment that the cost of fuel wasn’t that high, but the service forgot that B-52s are voracious users of air-to-air refuel- ing. By the time the gas comes out of a KC-135 tanker’s boom, the delivery cost has increased by a factor of 15

How is this kind of oversight even possible?

Also, this is the crap that got copied onto my clipboard when I tried to copy that quote:

    Read more: http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/b-52-just-keeps-flying-180953933/#ixzz3V90kF6sx

    Read more: http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/b-52-just-keeps-flying-180953933/#2mI866OqRKfEWivD.99

    Save 47% when you subscribe to Air & Space magazine http://bit.ly/NaSX4X Follow us: @AirSpaceMag on Twitter

Fucking obnoxious.

"How is this even possible?"

It doesn't seem at all implausible to me. Running a KC-135 and a crew of 4-8 to deliver the fuel at altitude isn't going to be cheap.

JP-8 fuel appears to cost around $3.00/gallon at ground level, so a factor of 15 would be $45/gallon delivered.

JP-8 has a density of about 0.8 kg/l, or about 6 lb/gallon.

Civilian airline fares are somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.20/seat-mile. If you SWAG the weight of a passenger at 200 pounds, that's about $0.001/pound-mile. Now figure that the fuel might have to be flown 5,000 miles (possibly in multiple trips) That's $5.00/pound, times 6 pounds per gallon would give $30.00/gallon delivered (at commercial airline rates).

Now figure that this is all military and $45/gallon actually starts to look pretty cheap.

Edit: I think you edited your post. I assumed you were wondering how the cost could go up by a factor of 15. Now it looks like you're asking how this kind of mistake could happen. That's a different issue. :-)

How is this kind of oversight even possible?

It's not.

Ten years ago all the Airforce's money was going on the F22. If they'd asked for money for bomber engines then it would have been likely that it would have meant cut-backs in the numbers of fighters purchased.

Remember, for the Airforce: Fighters always matter the most.

Now the Airforce is looking at what to spend money on after the F35.

I'm not sure it's true. It looks like there have been a lot of evaluations over the years. Here's one from 2003:

http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA428790.pdf

A relevant quote from the executive summary:

"A 2001 DSB study calculated the cost of fuel delivered in-flight to be $17.50 per gallon, using USAF provided figures, excluding the capital cost of tankers. Previous studies valued all fuel at about one dollar per gallon."

While it looks like that oversight may have happened before, by 2003 they were looking at something like the real cost of tanker fuel.

As for how that oversight is possible, this report discusses at lengths how evaluating the cost of tanker-delivered fuel is extremely difficult, because how much you use tankers depends a lot on exactly what kind of missions you fly, and a lot of the cost of tanker-delivered fuel is tied up in things like maintenance and operating overhead in the tanker fleet, so to save that 15x multiplier would involve reducing the tanker fleet as the B-52s needed it less, not just the simple act of burning less fuel. The report also mentions that only about 10% of the B-52's fuel was delivered in flight, so while it's expensive, it's not large in quantity. Put it all together and it's sensible to just do a conservative analysis where you assume fuel costs are the price at the pump.

I'm not at all convinced that the relevant factor that changed the outcome of this recommendation was accounting for tanker costs. There are a ton of factors discussed, and it's a complex subject. One obvious factor can ben seen here:

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=jet-fuel&mo...

Why did a 2003 study find that more efficient engines were worth the cost, while previous ones did not? I'm not sure exactly when the previous ones were done (this study just says there were three previous ones since 1996) but the fact that jet fuel suddenly got a lot more expensive right around the time this study was being done is certainly suggestive.

In short, when a journalist says "they forgot" what it can actually mean is that in the analysis of a complex problem, a reasonable simplification was made.

> Also, this is the crap that got copied onto my clipboard when I tried to copy that quote:

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