I’m surprised to hear that these very heavy conventional bombs have to be dropped from cargo planes. I thought the B-52 was expressly built to carry 40,000 lb. hydrogen bombs. What’s the deal?
The B-52’s bomb bay doesn’t have room for one large diameter device. The ones I got to crawl around in at the AMARC facility in the late seventies had a catwalk down the middle to inspect bomb racks or large devices on either side. Seems strange a plane that large should have so little room but the BUF is extremely short on interior space.
Guess they’ll have to borrow a WW2 Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber.
http://www.bismarck-class.dk/tirpitz/miscellaneous/tallboy/tallboy.html
(scroll down for photos of the Grand Slam being released).
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Same with the B-17. I was fortunate enough to go through two of the remaining operating B-17s, and it’s surprising how little room is in those things. You’d think they’d be enormous, but that’s not the case.
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I would imagine that for the Daisy Cutter and the MOAB, as I believe they are parachute delivered weapons, it’s probably preferrable to rear launch them from a cargo plane, for the same reasons you rear launch tanks and jeeps. I’ll guess that the forward momentum is slowed at a more acceptable rate, rather than belly dropping them, which would slow down the forward momentum much faster, and perhaps more violently, rendering the parachute system vulnerable to malfunction.
That’s just speculation on my part. Any dropmasters about?
It’s pretty much like rolling a small vehicle or giant crate out the back door.
A bom bay wouldn’t suffice, nor would any type of mount. Simplest and easiest way is to roll the puppy right out the back.
Don’t forget, getting rid of it is the end of the problem. They gotta load that puppy on the plane, too!
Lot easier to roll it on and roll it off!
And there’s also the consideration of instantly losing tens of thousands of pounds of weight in mid-flight. Not that this has anything to do with the OP - I’d just thought I’d throw this out
I’m not sure what this has to do with anything. I’d say instantly losing that weight from a centered location like a bomb bay is preferable to having it slowly roll through a portion of the cabin and out the back, changing the center of gravity as it does so. But, as others have pointed out, the 52 isn’t configured for this type of bomb.
Point taken. I don’t really know that much about flight, but I heard that mentioned somewhere in some context.
Isn’t this exactly what happens when the guy up front hits the bomb release switch? Since bombers don’t crash when the bombs are released, I would have to say that this does not seem to represent a problem.
It isn’t a problem. I’m pretty sure all it really requires is a little nose-down trim after release. I believe there was a thread about this within the last year, and if I wasn’t working with a 24k modem I’d do a search for it. What I’d really like to know is what the MC-130 pilots go through when launching a daisy cutter or MOAB. Unfortunately, 99% of the pilots I know are in the Navy.
Ok, I did some checking and found this List of All U.S. Nuclear Weapons. The B-52H bomber as far as I can tell carried either the Mk-41 bomb with a yield of 25 megatons, or later the Mk-53 rated at 9 megatons. Both were only about 50 inches in diameter. Apparently I’d been thinking of the hugamongous Mk-17/Mk-24, at a whopping 61 inches diameter, which was carried by the older B-36 bomber. By the time the B-52 entered service in the late 1950’s, they’d miniaturized thermonuclear weapons enough that they didn’t need to acommodate giant size weapons anymore.
Why drop bombs from a C-130 instead of a B-52? Because a C-130 is the only thing that can drop the bomb!
As simple as this may seem, it is the result of the weapon itself: when the weapon specs (ie huge amounts of conventional explosives) rule out the obvious delivery choice (B-52), you look elsewhere. A 20,000lb conventional bomb would have to be veeeeery long to be narrow enough to fit in a B-52 bomb bay. Given that the B-52 bomb bay is designed to release multiple small weapons, it would take a major redesign of the bomb bay to accomodate the weapon. Since the weapon is used only occassionaly, it’s impractical to redesign bomb-bays for what might be a once-every-ten-year use. Instead, make the weapon usable by another platform (C-130), and you can have potential bombers in place all around the world all the time. The use of the weapon also helps: the Blu-82 or newer MOAB are not going to be used as precision, first-strike weapons. The size of the weapon means that getting in the general area is good enough; no need for GPS guidance - throw a parachute on that monster and call it good!
As for delivery of the weapon, I have two examples from people that I’ve flown with: the C-130 LAPES (Low Altitude Parachute Extraction) system and the C-141 airdrop of a (small) tank. In both instances the aircrew waits about two seconds after the green light is given and pushes full nose down on the yoke; hold this until the tank/HMMWV/huge bomb is out the back and then recover into a mostly normal position. I’ve never done the LAPES stuff, but I have seen the tank airdrop: it’s downright spooky to see someone jam the yoke full forward and have NOTHING happen: the airplane kind of “chugs”, but you don’t enter the massive negative-G dive that you’d expect. After the “chug”, you bring the yoke back to normal and everything’s fine (except for the poor bastards you dropped a tank on!)
Well, just as a note, the MOAB does have GPS guidance.
I wonder if the START treaty has anything to do with it? They could design a superheavy conventional bomb to be the same size at a thermonuclear weapon but all the planes capable of carrying them came under the Guillotine in Tucson to fulfill the treaty.