B-52s

I kinda pride myself as pretty knowledgable with aircraft, but I have a question to ask.

On TV the showed fotage of BUFFs taking off for areas “unknown”. I noticed when the take off and start to climb, the nose of the aircraft appeard to actually almost be level with the horizon… if not lower. The tail really looked higher than the front of the aircraft and it was climbing.

Do they have some funky flaps that enable it to do this? I’ve never, ever seen any other aircraft appear to be pitched “down” when climbing.

I’m pretty sure that the appearance that the nose was down is an optical illusion. We expect to see planes “nose up” into the sky. When loaded, however, the BUFF has the climb rate of a large stone, a wingless large stone. It maintains a nearly nose-level attitude as it climbs, and that appears as nose down. A plane in level flight, filmed from below its quarter (4-5 o’clock low or 7-8 o’clock low) will always seem to be pointing down.) Find a photo of a Blue Angel or Thunderbird doing a grandstand fly-by. If the photo was taken from the tarmac, the plane will be slightly nose-down. The films/videos of the B-52 are undergoing the same effect.

I think I saw the same film you did, TomnDeb. I’ll throw out another explanation, which is speculation based only upon some comments made by an engineer who once worked for Boeing (teaching an aircraft design course I was taking).

The B-52 has an unusually long distance between the front and rear fuselage-mounted landing gear. Take a look here, I think this one is landing. This is probably to accomodate the bomb bay. This means that it would have trouble rotating its nose up during take-off (it would take a large moment about those rear wheels, still on the ground). If you can’t get the nose up, you can’t get angle of attack on the wing, and you can’t get off the ground. One way to solve this problem would be to mount the wing on the fuselage with an unusually large angle of incidence (that is, the wing is cocked leading edge up) as compared to other aircraft. This allows you to get angle of attack without rotating the airplane very much.

The side-effect of this would be that, compared to other aircraft, you’d be able to get off the ground and climb out with the nose pointed lower that ususal, and probably (at light weights) even down somewhat.

That’s my hunch.

Nuts, I meant to say I saw the same footage as bernse, not tomndeb.

And the link I meant was:

http://www.af.mil/photos/images/bombers_b52_0001.jpg

Sheesh, Sorry, dunno why it wouldn’t work.

Kelly is right the wing are mounted with the leading edge higher than the trailing edge. This results in the BUFF’s ability to climb in a nose down position. This allows the aircraft to land with all ten wheels (nose, main and wingtip) hitting the ground at the same time. It also allows them to take off without having to rotate the nose up. Rotating would not be possible with a full bomb load.

This is a better view of how the wings are mounted to the fuselage.

http://www.af.mil/photos/images/bombers_b52_0008.jpg

Out of curiosity do you know what country is being bombed in that picture?

Looks like the U.S. (although it might be Iraq).

If they’re taking pictures of a single bomber alone in broad daylight, over what appears to be a uninhabited mountainous country, I’d guess it was Testrangeistan.

Am I the only one that thinks it a great achievement that something so ungainly and unflightworthy in appearance makes it off the ground on a regular basis?

And has for my entire life. Wish I was in as good of shape as those old girls. Of course, they’ve had a few nips and tucks here and there…

Perhaps it’s worth repeating this FOAF story. A friend’s engineer friend was working for an outdoor air museum (Ohio?) which was going to place a complete B-52. This fellow’s job was to make sure the plane was well secured in case of high winds. As a result he had to calculate the unloaded flight characteristics of the plane. To everyone’s astonishment, they discovered that an empty B-52 had an unloaded take-off speed below 80 miles per hour–low enough that it was in danger of lifting off in extremely high winds, if not anchored to the ground.

Don’t know if it’s true or not, but this might be a good place to debunk that story.

It doesn’t actually give the answer to your question, but you can see the caption that goes with that photo, http://www.af.mil/photos/bombers_b52_0008.html

Thought I might find an answer to the unloaded B-52 take-off speed UL in some of my Air Force Museum books (the Museum is located at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio), but no dice. I do know that the Museum’s lone B-52 is part of a permanent indoor display. Don’t know if or how long it was kept outdoors before moving it inside.

It reminded, however, that the first B-52 flew in 1952 (they became operational in 1955). Fifty years this thing’s been flying! The last ones were produced in 1963 so even the ‘newest’ B-52 is almost forty years old! That’s the sort of lifespan you expect from steel armored ships, not precision flying machines.

This sounds about right. I had a friend who was a crew member on a BUFF and i think he said that that they landed at about 95 mph air speed. My memory is a little fuzzy on the exact speed but it sounded slow to me as well.

The caption says:

So i think its safe to assume it is over Iraq.

There’s a “.” in that line. Two seperate thoughts, not necessarily linked. Also, please note that the mountains in the background are thouroughly covered in snow. I can’t think of any areas in Iraq that got the “treatment” from a B-52 tha would be that snowy. It’s likely Nevada, or some other US bombing range.

You like that, huh? The Air Force plans to keep them in service until 2040. The oldest ones will be almost 80 years old, and may by then be crewed by the great grandchildren of their original crews.