B-52

The fuselage angle ain't got nuthin to do with flying the wing straight and level. The Ford Tri Motor had a Goetingen 106 airfoil that had to be set at a NEGATIVE 3 or 4 deg. angle of incidence so that the fuselage flew at a near level attitiude. The airfoil had a great lift coefficient and had to be depressed to kill some of it. This can be seen by looking at photos of a Tri Motor and compare the lack of parallelism between the window belt and the lower surface of the wing. In the jig position, the B-52 wing twists from a positive 7.5 Deg. at the root to a minus 2 deg. at the tip. level flight is an angle somewhere in between in between the two angles. If my memory serves me, the B-52 wing has something in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 different airfoils from root to tip.

 

I envy you at being able to see a couple of B-52's passing as they did. I can still remember my awe and disbelief at seeing the B-52 mock up my first time when I was working at Boeing in 1951. I did many drawings to show the shop types how to build the B-52 and it seems like a weird dream to see that airplane still in the inventory and programmed to continue for many years to come. I honestly believe that it will outlast me and I'm 83 now. Incredible.
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Actually, the high angle of incidence on the inboard wing was to enable the B-52 to get off the ground. This airplane cannot be rotated due to the extreme aft location of the rear main landing gear so the wing had to levitate it off the runway. The CG is somewhere near the half way point between the forward and aft main landing gear, just like a freight car with the load between the wheels. The nose and tail literally hang from each end...hence the wrinkles in the skin.. The fuselage is built around four huge aluminum I beams, no stringers over the frames, just machined skin panels.
The wings were built for smooth high altitude flight and when the Buff was used for low level operations the wing skins started to fatigue and crack from the sharp gust loads encountered there. So many B-52's had to be re-skinned.
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I got to thinking about the problems with tandem geared airplanes. The B-47 was designed to have a built-in angle of attack by virtue of the LG layout that established a nose up attitude and a take off right off the runway. BUT, the problems with that set up was after landing and the wing was still lifting a bit and there wasn't enough weight on the wheels to get effective braking. The drogue chute was deployed on final so that they could make an approach with 60% power in case they had to make a go-around and that eliminated the slow spool up delay. Most of the early gas turbines had acceleration limiters to prevent blow torching the engines.
So, the B-52 had a horizontal fuselage and an angled wing so that it could levitate on take off. On landing they had a drag chute to help with the braking and also ground braking spoilers to unload the wing.
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Having helped in design studies on the 767 and 747 to put larger engines on them I can say that the problems involved are extensive. Structural beef up, aerodynamic effects from airflow changes, flutter considerations and damping changes, and systems rework are a few of the design problems. Then I remember that the airforce hates to change something that has been serving well for 50 years...inventory, training, retraining, support equipment to be purchased, etc. Kinda like stopping a glacier.
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