Nope. Consider the 747 again. It is not unreasonable to expect a commercial 747 to fly (I dunno) 12 hours a day every day for its entire service life of (I dunno) 20 years. A B-52 might fly 10 hours a day for five days a week for its entire service life. Further, the 747 would never really undergo a major rebuild, while darn little of a modern B-52 is the same as when it left the factor 50 years ago.
The bombers, for example have gotten new wings a couple of times. I suspect Boeing has never re-winged a 747.
So 50 years of air force flying and maintenance is much easier on the airframe that 20 years of commercial service.
I don’t know about that. In numerical terms, the C-47 may well be the most successful, but you said “most famous”. These days that might be Air Force One, a converted 747.
That would be an interesting thread unto itself. There is so much interplay between military and commercial plane development. It just makes sense to use what is currently in stock or on the drawing board to merge the two.
Think about this. The youngest B-52 is 50 years old this year*. The very oldest 747 is 42. The earliest 747s (747-100) have been retired by the major carriers. The 747s you see at the airports today are most likely now 747-100s from the early 1970s.
The DC-10 and the L-1011 were both contemporaries of the early 747s. When was the last time you saw a tri-star at an airport? According to Wiki the were gone by about 2001. The DC-10 hung around until 2007, but it’s gone also as are the early versions of the 747.
Also back inthe day SAC kept a percentage of their bombers airborne at all times.
Those B-52s have a lots of hours on the airframe.
*That youngest B-52 has dropped bombs in SE Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan.
What I am trying to say, and without my morning coffee to help, is that the B-52 has fewer hours than you would think given their age in years. But without the actual numbers at our fingertips, we can only make general statements, so I propose to let this interesting portion of an interesting thread lapse.
Which is the opposite of something like a 747 which needs to fly (a lot) to make money. There’s no reason to fly a bomber to maintain currency. That can be done in simulators. In fact, something like the B-2 is best kept in the hanger because of the maintenance involved.
Good God, how much redesign is really necessary? The B52 is extremely good at its basic carpet-bombing mission. It has never really been useful in a situation where the American military doesn’t already have air superiority*, and based on current trends, we’ll continue to have a need for bombers in relatively safe situations. You could almost just build a gross of new ones to 1955 specs and call it a day. I know that it’s already scheduled to last until the 2040s, and I suspect that if they’re still useful then, the US Government will simply order a few very similar planes, or extend the service lifetime some more. I suspect we’re looking at an .
*OK, so B-52s have two recorded air victories in their entire service career, both in Vietnam or SE Asia. Still. They’re designed for situations where enemy fighters are mostly absent and SAM or flak capabilities are mostly destroyed. Still, this is hardly a weapon against enemies whose defense are already crushed.
True enough, but the B-52 will have been out of production for 80 years—it’s not like they can just go to the B-52 Factory, pull the dust covers off the equipment, and start building brand new ones. Simply restarting production of replica B-52s with currently existing tooling, factories, and contractor experience might be less practical than designing (or modifying) a new plane entirely.
And that’s assuming you’re dispensing any upgrades that might be genuinely handy without changing the overall mission—like an increased payload, or better fuel efficiency/range, the ability to fly unmanned, etc.
The US Air Force has about 60 KC-10s in service too. That said, while the KC-10 is a derivative of the DC-10 (sharing about 88% of the parts between them), the oldest ones were built in 1980, so a little bit younger.
Yes but the my point is that the 747s you see wearing United, American, delta logos are nowhere near 40+ years old. The major airlines will cycle them out in 15-20 years.
Now comparing a 50 year old -52 to a 20 year old 747 the hours could be very similar or greater for the -52. The 747 will have more cycles, but less hours.
The world is a strange place. The B-52 community is nothing if not adaptable. Presently, they describe the BUFF as ultimate close air support aircraft as it can loiter over the battlefield for insanely long times, above the weather and invisible from the ground. If the air controller can identify the target it can be struck with one bomb.
(The bomb of course seems to come from nowhere. It must be a remarkable experience.)
Have you noticed no American soldier has fought without air supremacy (blue skies) since Korea?
Sure, but a lot of those upgrades are things that we’ve already adapted to the B-52 today, and it would be less work to put together a new blueprint for an adapted, upgraded B-52 than to design a whole new airframe. And while you’d certainly need to retool a factory to build B-52s, you’d need to do just as much retooling to build a successor aircraft. It’s a basic starting point for something that we already know works and serves the mission needs (assuming those needs haven’t changed radically). You’re right that by the 2040s we might prefer to adapt a newer aircraft to suit our needs, but I don’t think that at this point we can write the BUFF off entirely.
I have-- otherwise the B-52 would probably have been retired or at least cut back! It’s an elegant solution to our current needs. But I do contest that point a bit; there were a couple of hundred American air victories in Vietnam and SE Asia. The skies were controlled by the USAF, but there were constant pushes against the USAF and plenty of US planes were shot down. With ever-improving SAM technology, it’s not hard to imagine a war in which the US can’t use the B-52 with total impunity and aircraft like the B-2 would be much more effective. There are countries that we might considering military action against today (i.e., Syria) that probably have enough radar and SAM capability to shoot down some portion of B-52s that might fly through their sky.
Mind you, the BUFFs have some tricks up their sleeves for that sort of thing, such as launching missiles from standoff distances (the list of anti-aircraft weapons with a range of 100+ miles is a very short one), using electronic countermeasures, or even deploying decoy drones to draw off defensive fire.
But really, if an enemy has an intact air defense network, that’s what UAVs, cruise missiles, and fighter bombers are for. Clear a path for the heavies.
You’re right, but cargo is a bit of a different animal, isn’t it? When was the last time you saw a DC-3 or a Convair 440 in mainline passenger service? Cargo airlines still fly everything from Beech 18s to 747 classics every single day. Even the “mainline” cargo outfits fly a lot of old equipment - UPS landed their last DC-8 just two years ago, and FedEx still runs a bunch of old 72s. It’s easier to pick up cheap airplanes that the passenger airlines are dumping and just pay out the nose for fuel and maintenance than it is to budget for new whiz-bang good-smelling airplanes from the factory, and the boxes certainly don’t care one way or the other. As Raguleader described, the USAF operates under a similar mentality, I think due mostly to the shortsightedness bred by the political environment here in the US.
Every time I watch an episode of “Ice Pilots NWT” featuring the Buffalo Airways “sked” run between Yellowknife and Hay River. Seriously, that’s the only DC-3 service left in the world, and the show has made it a popular trip for planeloggers.
