Well, the point being made by government and press is that the recent Russian activity is for propaganda purposes not for any real intelligence one - letting us know not to get too enthusiastic about encroaching on their backyard.
So do we do that too - fly missions that have no intelligence or patrol value, just to show we can get up close ? I guess we probably have but not so much we would hear about it, and the Russians rather regard the things we do on land to be the assertive and aggressive behaviour (don’t really have to guess that bit, they have said it for years).
Yep.
One area that has been getting some attention lately is the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Ownership of these islands is in dispute, and China has recently been asserting its control over air and sea areas in and around certain islands. In response, the U.S. has been routinely flying spy planes through areas that we consider to be international airspace, and has also been sending ships through what we claim are international waters. It’s more to make a point to China that we don’t recognize their claim than to actually gather intelligence.
We’ve also flown B-52 bombers over areas that China disputes with Japan, just to prove that we don’t recognize China’s claim there either.
In response to some of the Russian incursions, we also flew a couple of B-2 stealth bombers right up around their border last summer and practiced refueling in flight and everything else that we would need to do to send those bombers into Russia if we wanted to. B-2 bombers aren’t spy planes, so that was clearly sending a message to the Russians, as well as giving our bomber guys some real-world practice.
We’ve also been sending B-52 bombers on training missions in the arctic and northern Europe, partly to make a point to the Russians and partly to train crews how to operate in those cold conditions.
These types of things have been going on for decades. It’s nothing new. What is new is that certain flights in certain areas are getting more aggressive, which is probably more about sending political messages back and forth than anything of any real military significance.
So it’s pretty much a game for two or more players aged 18-50 ?
Didn’t know you still had B-52s, must be a good design.
How cold is it at 50,000 feet?
They’ve been updated a few times over the years, but most of the B-52s that are now flying are older than the pilots that are flying them. The current plan is to keep them operational until somewhere around 2040.
I’m thinking you are going to at least want to bring a jacket along with you.
Your comment made me think that it’s awful darned cold up there no matter where you are, isn’t it? So I went poking around a bit online (the exercise was called Operation Polar Growl, by the way). It seems that the training had more to do with navigation through the arctic and communication and coordination with allies during the exercise. None of the articles I could find mentioned anything about cold being a factor, so maybe it was just the way that it was worded in the original article I read that made me think it was an issue.
Anyway, this article makes the point that the B-52s were flying over an area that Putin wants to assert more control over, so it seems like at least part of the point of the exercise was to let Putin know that we weren’t going to let him get away with that.
A quick google suggests that you lose about 5-6 degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet of elevation. Depending on weather, humidity, alignment of the planets, and the whims of the President, as with anything else having to do with the weather.
I was curious, so I did some poking around, thinking that there might be some difference in the temperature 50,000 feet above the arctic as compared to the temperature 50,000 feet above Louisiana.
It turns out that once you get above 37,000 feet, the temperature is constant at -69.7 deg F (-56.5 deg C).
A bit chilly.
There’s also the matter that in the Cold War the USSR and US set up ground rules on interceptions and such to prevent the situation from escalating into a shooting war where Russia now is much more aggressive, with the corresponding danger of someone getting shot down.
Weather prediction is not a science, it is a Black Art.
In the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) the temperature declines with altitude. In the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere) the temperature is more or less constant at -55ish degrees C. The thin boundary layer between them is called the tropopause. There are additional atmosphere layers & temperature characteristics up much higher (e.g. above ~120,000 feet), but their not relevant to current aircraft or to this discussion.
The stratosphere temperature varies only a smidgen from pole to equator and across the seasons. What varies instead is the altitude of the tropopause.
In the tropics in the summer the tropopause may be as high as 60,000 feet. In the arctic in winter it may be as low as 20,000 feet. The 37,000 number you found is a reasonable global average and about what we see in the latitudes of Europe and the US during spring & fall.
In fact in the Arctic it’s possible to find extra cold air in the upper troposphere where as you climb up past the tropopause you get into the higher and *warmer *stratosphere.
The absolute service ceiling of a B-52 is 50,000 ft. They tend to cruise in the mid 30 thousands like most older airliners do/did.
Aircraft that cruise for extended periods in the Arctic in the upper 30 thousands can encounter problems where the air is so cold that the fuel starts to freeze. They’re too heavy to climb above the tropopause where it’d be warmer and end up needing to descend and speed up to keep the fuel warm enough to flow properly.
The nature of jet fuel is that it doesn’t freeze solid, but rather gets slowly thicker and jelly-like. Also, all fuel has some percentage of dissolved water. Various additives work to prevent or delay the formation of ice crystals, keeping the water as supercooled individual micro-droplets. But if one cruises long enough in cold enough conditions, eventually the supercooling gets beyond the ability of the additives to counteract. And water slush starts to form within the thickening hydrocarbon matrix. Once that gets going it can quickly turn into a real disaster.