Interior 'tour' of B-52 at "Wings" museum, Denver

Everybody thinks that the older B-52's look older because there are wrinkles in the skin. The first XB-52 had wrinkles in the skin because, as you mentioned, there are no stringers in the structure. In flight the wrinkles disappear and between frames the skin puffs out slightly from pressurization . The B-52 is built around four extruded beams like a boxcar, two on the lower fuselage and two on the upper. The landing gear is positioned at each end of the bomb bay, like a RR boxcar. The rest of the fuselage is to streamline the boxcar and provide something to which the wing and empennage are attached. Most of the upper deck of the body is a fuel cell as are the wings. The lower fuselage is bomb bay designed to carry a nuclear weapon but now it holds umpteen droppable munitions.
This airplane is one of the most amazing machines ever. I mentioned earlier that one of my first jobs at Boeing was working on this masterpiece in 1950. I'm now gone and it continues to operate better and better.

 

Bob- Last one popped out on a 1962 contract and that means they are older than all the crew members that fly them. Same for most of the KC-135s. Good engineering by rules of thumb and guaranteeing your part of the design will not break.

 

Thanks for that video, very good. Largest plane with an air to air kill, I suppose that had to be Mig/Vietnam?

 

I have to mention something that I remembered when I first entered the B-52 mock up. The aft fuselage, aft of the wing, had a 10 inch did. duct running from the forward fuselage to the tail. It had a large diameter loop in it before it went somewhere aft. I asked about it and I was told that it was the fuselage fuel tank vent and the loop was necessary to keep the duct from breaking when the aft fuselage flexed in flight. I then learned how flexible the airplane was. The wing tips have an arc of 34 feet at full flex and the fuselage twists about 4-5 degrees between the wing and empennage when the spoilers are fully deflected. I have a photo of that some place. It is a live piece of structure in flight like the old B-24 but much more. Very unlike the old B-17 that was rigid as concrete. Watch a B-52 on take off and you will see the outboard wing start to lift long before the airplane starts to take off.

 

I should have said, " When the spoilers were deflected in a banking turn."