Another B-52 back from the Boneyard to Minot

45,000 man hours to rebuild it...holy christ.

 

It's amazing that we only have 1/10 of them that we used to.

 

22 man-years, or 14 guys for 19 months. Not that bad if you consider that the total probably includes a lot of in-direct hrs.

 

Yeah, at how many hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour?

 

I wonder if they modernized it too?

 

we chopped up 365 + lot of them when Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty act happened they used a giant guillotine..i saw one of them being chopped up at Davis Monthan...
hard to watch...

 

I don't know if it worths to do such a thing.

Who knows..

 

If McCain and the rest of the idiots in congress and DOD had let us build the 132 planned B-2s it would not have been necessary.

 

Long term rates... so probably less than you think. But even at $200/hr (and I don't know any tradesman who would get even half that on a long term basis) that's only $10M for a fully modernised BUFF...


vs the alternative:

at $1B each (yes I know it would have been less "If McCain and the rest of the idiots in congress...." built more).

Plus I just find it incredible that an aircraft designed essentially before computers is still a front-line combat weapon system

 

I'm scheduled to give a talk at Boeing next month as part of the Centennial. In my discussions with some of the younger set of engineers they are aghast when I described how the early stuff was designed and built...all hands and eyes...and the human computers. They have never heard of ducks and splines, Master Layouts, and Master Models, and Marchand 26 digit calculators. Some of my old drawings have been discovered and scooped up to join others in their tech library.

 

The B-2 was designed on computers that were state of the art at the time and quite advanced. Assembly, Fortran, and other languages were much more efficient than what we use now.

 

The CATIA is what is used now. Draws, computes, tests, assembles,etc. Also can be one huge headache if you aren't up-to-date on a daily basis.

 

And paperless to Bob, don't forget paperless. LOL. We used a lot of paper on the 777. haha. Of course I'm old school and like to see a nice layout that I can scribble all over.

 

I'm with you, Jim. I had a lot of drawings that I had for back up in the beginning but the CATIA won.

 

Great that they are going in the tech library... but better if they were going on the wall!!! Old technical drawings and plans were works of art in their own right - they should be on display!

 

And different versions of Catia sometimes return different results...OOPS. I forgot if it was Boeing or Airbus, but parts made with one version at one manufacturer didn't fit with parts made with a different version at another manufacturer.

 

Airbus.
The Germans using one (2D?) versus French (3D?).
The wire bundles for the 380 were a huge issue as a result (among other things).

 

Boeing has suffered the same maladies from Catia at different levels.

 

I hear that each new version is more trouble than the previous version and it takes a CATIA whizbang expert to interpret it. Looking back, I remember that we tried to make parts for the 747 with CATIA and they wouldn't fit. I think that I posted this before but the CATIA parts were built to 00.00" tolerances and the 747 were built to .03 tolerances. That don't work.