B-52s still at the ready

As a young Second Lieuey I did my solo T-38 cross country to Castle in CA from Willie in AZ. Taxiing out for takeoff at Castle I got stuck behind a BUFF going to the active runway. I remember feeling like I was a gnat following an elephant. When the BUFF got cleared for TO, he did a quick flight control check and I remember, like it was yesterday, the spoilers popping up on the top of the wing and realizing that each seemed bigger than my entire jet! Fun times...

 

Will- We are both dating ourselves. Castle, Williams, and my F-111s are all gone now. Castle closed in 95, Williams in 93 and the USAF F-111s retired in 96.

 

Was it that long ago? Sheesh.

What a killer airplane! They always made a huge impression on me as a kid at airshows. My acro instructor is a former Aardvark pilot, and he told me standard evasive procedure was typically just "throttles forward"

 

Didn't a few of them have the tail come off? I know the Broken Arrow incident over Maryland was caused by the loss of the vertical stabilizer (the aircraft was lost, along with all but one or two of the crew, if I recall correctly).

 

I only know of one that lost portions of the vertical fin and it landed safely. Directional control by asymmetrical thrust and spoilers. I mentioned it earlier in a post how Tex Johnston head wandered over the Canadian border by mistake on a test flight in 1952 and they were detected crossing the border into the US by our defense people and our fighters were scrambled. Tex got the word and simply added thrust and out climbed and outran everybody. If my memory serves me, we had F-189's and F-102's then. I saw an F-89 try to track or intercept a B-52 from behind one day in that time period and it obviously stalled because all I could see was a flashing of bright metal as it tumbled away from the B-52.

 

I found it. 13 January 1964. The vertical stabilizer separated from the plane in a snow storm. Everyone but the radar bombardier ejected. The navigator and tail gunner died of exposure. Only the Pilot and Co-pilot survived.

The two nukes were found among the wreckage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Savage_Mountain_B-52_crash

 

Thank you for this report. I was unaware of it.

 

I've seen a documentary that interviews the pilot. Apparently the turbulence that hit was quite severe.

 

There was the G-model that suffered a wing failure while sitting on the ground, being re-fueled.

 

The BUFF was really tough, but was actually designed as a high altitude bomber. When SAC started using them low level, it introduced all kinds of new loads, so some patching was inevitable. Plain old metal fatigue takes its toll, too, over all those decades. The B-2 and B-1B were supposed to replace the B-52s, but McCain and his cronies killed that when they stopped the B-2A production at 22 from the planned 132. The BUFF would have still hung around even if 132 B-2s had been built because the B-2 was initially not really designed for conventional weapons. One reason why the Buff fought in Desert Storm and the B-2 stayed home.

 

Yes, that was one of the reasons the vertical stabilizer was redesigned on the 'H' and G models.... it was shortened to decrease the moment on that member.
The new stabilizer has the same area as the old one, IIRC.

See this photo, the 'white' H has the new tail plus the new fan engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#/media/File:Nasa-b52-040721-wp-cr.jpg

 

The B-52 A,B,C,&D have a vertical fin height of 370" with an area of 460 sq.ft. The B-52 G,H have a vertical fin height of 268" with an area of 403 sq.ft. 102 " shorter. I seem to recall that the tall fin was no longer required because of the effectiveness of the crosswind gear and engine out performance on take off could be handled with a shorter vertical fin.

 

Any info on the one that broke up over NC in 1961? That's the one that almost nuked Goldsboro

The aircraft, a B-52G, was based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro. Around midnight on January 23–24, 1961, the bomber had a rendezvous with a tanker for aerial refueling. During the hook-up, the tanker crew advised the B-52 aircraft commander, Major Walter Scott Tulloch, that his aircraft had a fuel leak in the right wing. The refueling was aborted, and ground control was notified of the problem. The aircraft was directed to assume a holding pattern off the coast until the majority of fuel was consumed. However, when the B-52 reached its assigned position, the pilot reported that the leak had worsened and that 37,000 pounds (17,000 kg) of fuel had been lost in three minutes. The aircraft was immediately directed to return and land at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.

As it descended through 10,000 feet (3,000 m) on its approach to the airfield, the pilots were no longer able to keep the aircraft in stable descent and lost control of it. The pilot in command ordered the crew to eject, which they did at 9,000 feet (2,700 m). Five men bailed out and landed safely. Another bailed out but did not survive the landing, and two died in the crash.[3] The third pilot of the bomber, Lt. Adam Mattocks, is the only man known to have successfully bailed out of the top hatch of a B-52 without an ejection seat.[5][6] Although the crew's final view of the aircraft was in an intact state with its payload of two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs on board, it broke apart before impact, releasing the bombs. The wreckage of the aircraft covered a 2-square-mile (5.2 km2) area of tobacco and cotton farmland at Faro, about 12 miles (19 km) north of Goldsboro.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

 

Accident record on the B-52 is nothing compared to the B-47.

 

A B-47 dropped a nuke off the coast of Tybee Island (after an F-86 collided with it) before landing safely. There are conflicting Air Force records as to whether or not the Mark 15 bomb contained it's operable core. It's still out there, moving around in the silt.

I hope I didn't give the impression that the B-52 was a poor aircraft, I just remembered the tail coming off the one over Maryland and the plane coming apart over Goldsboro from the documentary I had watched.

 

A B-36 dropped a Mark 17 Nuc in Albuquerque (city limits) in May, '57.

Fell out, right through the bay doors near Kirtland AFB.
I was in school about 1.5 miles away...

The conventional explosive detonated, killing livestock... no radiation outside the crater.

 

In 1958 a B-47 dropped a Mk 6 on a child's playhouse in Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

 

Yes... terrible. Something like 10% of them crashed. Pilot error mostly, but metal fatigue also. There's a book just on the subject that I read years ago.
Interested, as I grew up with B-47's flying over our house at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque almost daily when I was a kid.

 

Both of the B-47 and B-52 airplanes were pushing the envelope in design and pilot skills. All were in a state of advancement and it is an historic drama. One can look at many airplanes and people who thrusted against the status quo of aviation. Billy Mitchell , Jimmy Doolittle, Jaqueline Cochran, Howard Hughes, Tex Johnston, and too many others to bring up just now. The engineers at Douglas, Lockheed, Jack Northrop, and Boeing pushed the design limits and all have had a huge influence on the advancement of commercial and military aviation.

 

We finally got rid of the last bombs that did not have insensitive explosives in the mid 90s. All of us on the Nuclear Weapon Systems Safety Group breathed a sigh of relief. We had long since stopped flying bombers and fighters with live nukes, but the old style conventional explosives were scary at best, especially if a C-141 or C-130 crashed. No C-17s back then.

 

My number two son was a lineman for BPA and worked the high steel transmission towers in eastern Washington and he said that every once in a while a B-52 would appear in the distance coming at them at low altitude, lower than they were at 260 feet. As the Buff approached, they would pull up with just enough altitude to clear the lines and drop down again. The B-52 was NEVER designed for this kind of operation and it rapidly had dire effects on the entire structure of the airframe, wings first. He said that they could see the wings flex upward as they made the pull up. What they weren't seeing was the hard jolts from low level turbulence that could impose loads that reversed in micro seconds. Not good for a wet wing.

 

Yep... lost the tail over southern Colorado (low altitude, monster turbulence) and flew back to Arkansas like that... rear bogie sub'd as a vertical stabilizer.

 

"...hell, it's only a coupla hundred miles.......might as well just go on home......whaddya think guys?......."

In contrast with all the pajama-boy bs in the world today, it's nice to think about when guys who had to, just got it done.....

 

Yeah, like in the 60's when the Zero Defects push was going on. One of their signs, "THIMK FIRST! ELIMINATE ERRORS!' These guys in the B-52 thought it out first before panicking, took the correct action, and went home. Tex Johnston did the same thing when the -80 went into a serious flutter mode in the vertical stabilizer. He got it back with a lot of damage but saved the airplane after figuring out what he had to do.