Flying over Little Rock, obviously low enough to identify. Perhaps on a landing approach to LRAFB at Jacksonville. For a moment I wondered, just as when I was nine and saw B-58 Hustler’s fly over my Grandfather’s farm if we were shooting at someone. 
I’ve only ever seen a B-52 in the air twice, both in the early '80s: once somewhere west of Fort Worth, Texas, doing a smokey takeoff from whatever air base is in the vicinity, the other while driving down I-80 in western Wyoming. The Wyoming sighting was spectacular. I was riding shotgun in a truck hauling a laboratory unit, and the big bomber flashed across the roadway about a half-mile ahead of us, at treetop level if there had been any trees. It was only in view for a couple of seconds. I shouted “Whoa, did you see that!” and the driver hadn’t even noticed.
Amazing planes.
Agreed. In my USAF days, I was stationed on a Strategic Air Command base in Minot, North Dakota. I used to love just watching them take off and land wondering how in the hell those wings stayed intact.
Q
If you hang out along an ‘oil burner’ route, you can have that tree top experience right over your head. ::: can you say loud? ::;
Agreed! In my USAF days, I was stationed on an Air Combat Command base in Minot, North Dakota. I used to love just watching them take off and land, wondering how in the hell we’re keeping a fifty year old aircraft in one piece, with the intent of flying them until they’re eighty year old airframes. Boeing built 'em damn good, for sure!
Tripler
A bomber guy at heart, even though he’s CE.
That would have been Carswell AFB, which was a SAC base with B-52s stationed there. It’s now Carswell Joint Reserve Base, serving as a Navy reserve base as well as an Air Force Reserve base. The bombers have been gone for years, but occasioanally one will still fly by on a visit. When you’re driving across the north loop, you can see them on their approach from the north for miles away by their smoke trail.
Some historical trivia: The movie Strategic Air Command (Jimmy Stewart, June Allyson) was filmed there when the B-36s were still around. The movie is worth watching just to see the B-36s and B-47s flying and to see what the base looked like in the 1950’s.
I’ve touched this one. I have a lithograph (signed by the artist and X-15 pilot Pete Knight) of that B-52 launching an X-15.
Was it in the love shack while eating rock lobster?
A group of C130s (3 or 4) used to make a fairly broad turn over my Dad’s farm near Dardanelle on a regular basis. Fairly low altitude, too. They came from the west, so I figured the came from Chaffee or Ebbing, but that might not be right.
B-58’s used to go over Grandfather’s farm carrying a weapons pod and come back the other way without it.
Freaked me out at the age of nine.
That one was still out there as of a couple of years ago.
I’ve seen this one up close a bunch of times. I was always impressed by its bigness. It also astonishes me that a plane that looks so big, has a fuselage so skinny.
I’m just bummed that they picked up this B-1B after I moved out of the state. 
That is one nifty-looking plane.
I’ve seen one indoors at Duxford. There are many other planes in the exhibition hangar but that mofo even makes a B29 look small. :eek:
From what I’ve seen on TV, its surprisingly graceful looking.
The best I’ve managed is a Catalina and a B-17 here in Northern Ireland. RAF Aldergrove, a few miles outside of Belfast, used to be a dispersal base for the V-Bombers, there might have been some there during the Cuban Missile Crisis, although Google says nothing about it.
I really should find a way to punish you for writing this thread at exactly the right hour to show up on the SDMB at the beginning of my night shift, causing “Love Shack” to run through my head all night long.
One of the coolest plane sightings for me was in 2001.
I was in Mizzoura at a Mizz/Baylor football game, and a B2 did a flyby over the stadium during “The Star Spangled Banner”. It wasn’t that far above the stadium, and the thing was you couldn’t hear it until it was past. I mean - I was watching the pre-game and looked to my left and suddenly there was a bomber there!
Pretty amazing to me.
Ha! My purpose is half-fufilled…
…now we need “Rock Lobster” stuck in your melon.
I saw a B2 flyby from maybe 10-15 miles away. (I wasn’t in the stands; I was at a friend’s house.)
Not only was it quiet - you could hear it at that distance but it didn’t sound like a jet ought to - it was surprisingly agile for such a large plane. I watched it bank and turn just before approaching the airfield for the flyby. The plane rolled so far that I thought it would slide sideways out of the air and into a parking lot. I didn’t have a protractor on me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was about a 30 degree roll.
Oh and it didn’t look so much like a plane of death as it looked like a flying surfboard.
There was a SAC wing at Wright Patt when I was growing up and we’d get weekly fly-overs at our house. I never failed to stop what I was doing to watch them fly. Very impressive.
My FIL had one auger into the ranch one evening back in the 80s. It hit a sand hills area in a really desolate part of the property. He didn’t even know until the foreman called to say there were AF types crawling all over the place. They sealed it off and spent about a month covering it, sifting it with a fine-toothed comb. Still makes me sad every time I pass by there at the loss of life. I’ve looked around a bit and there’s no marker or anything which I think also is a shame. There must have been what, 6 or 7 men that passed there?