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Something you do not see every day This has to have been one of the most interesting interruptions to my outdoor coffee break ever. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved August 4th, 2011 |
 36 comments to Something you do not see every day |
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Bomb Hanoi! Better late than never…
I see the raised debt limit is in force.
BUFF, no?
That is serious death from above. Damn things are over 50 years old and still hanging tough. Shows on occasion that DoD can buy quality.
Someone’s going to get an ass kicking.
One thing about the B-52 is that it sounds really strange to a modern ear. Not only is the airframe really old, but so are the engines. And modern high bypass ratio jet engines sound more muffled, and more low pitched, and just less loud than engines of old, which the B-52 still has.
Which is just one more thing which adds to the whole creepiness factor of having one fly past.
The only plane better? The B-58 Hustler. Now there was a warrior’s aircraft! Watching those take off from MacDill was the highlight of my day when I was eight years old.
I’m in “North-central Texas” and saw an unusual large plane go over a couple of weeks ago and wished my husband had been outside to see it as he could have ID’d it for sure. Only way I could describe it was large, loud (heard it way before seeing it & I thought that meant it was a prop), pretty low, seemed ‘old style military’ and all grey. Couldn’t remember how many engines. I had no luck searching the Net using such words as those so quit looking.
What are the chances it could have been one of these?
Search B-52 photos Patrice to see if it resembles what you have saw.
Today a pilot that operates them have almost half the age of the B-52 it flies.
It shows how worse we are.
The B-52 is a LOT more fun when it flies over at low altitude.
Say, for example, 150 feet.
Especially when it’s in a hurry.
One thing about the B-52 is that it sounds really strange to a modern ear. Not only is the airframe really old, but so are the engines. And modern high bypass ratio jet engines sound more muffled, and more low pitched, and just less loud than engines of old, which the B-52 still has.
In the last decade or so they’ve been toying with an upgrade which would involve replacing the twin engines on each pod with a single, more powerful modern engine. Would have meant an extra 3,000 pounds of thrust per pod and a much greater range. I doubt they’ll do it now because there’s no money, but it would have made a lot of sense.
uh oh…they spotted those Tea Party terrorists in England i see…..!!! Gen. Pelosi always on duty!!!
Ever seen the photo of a B-52 doing a low pass for the Navy guys on an aircraft carrier? They flew past *lower* than the deck level.
Low-level BUFF
… almost as low as an Argus.
Cheers
If you don’t know about the Battle of An Loc in the Vietnam War, read up on it to discover how potent those beasts can be.
A quote from the B-52’s Wiki page from war correspondent Neil Sheehan:
Incredible.
As for the “ugly” tag – I’ve always thought them quite elegant, particularly from the perspective of Dale’s photo – long, slender, fuselage and wings at that sharply acute angle.
@ Patrice Stanton: If it was large and grey it may have been a transport aircraft like this C-130: or this C-17.
There’s something very appealing about hasty, amateur, downright technically bad (no disrespect intended) photos of great airplanes like this one. The fact that, despite all the photography problems – it’s blurry, it’s already half way to being out of site (while you were scrabbling for the gizmo and then working out just which button to press) – you can still tell at once what it is, is the whole point.
One of my life’s little regrets is that I never managed a photo like this of Concorde, despite having gazed happily at it as it came in to land at Heathrow on numerous occasions in the nineties. Alas, the moment when it stopped flying regularly came without any warning. One day it was in the sky, just about every day, around late tea time, then suddenly it crashed and was no more to be seen regularly over London. I think I may have seen it one or two times when I had my very first digital camera, but I never made it a priority to get the picture while I had any chance. Or, maybe I never had a chance. I can’t remember exactly.
Again, there would have been no doubt – no doubt at all – what it was, no matter how crappy the photo.
I was shocked to read a week or two back that the entire current US air force stock of Big bombers (B52, B1B and B2) is only 160 in number.
That these huge and deadly warbirds are still flying after 60 years shows DoD can make quality purchase/design decisions on occasion.
Brian: I can remember standing around in the stairwell of Perry’s back garden with a glass of wine in hand and talking to a visiting friend of his from his college days, and watching Concorde fly over in the pattern. Quite a memorable evening, one of the early blogger bashes I believe.
The good stuff lasts. B-52, C-130, KC-137, DC-3. And lets not forget the F-4, which although not in the USAF inventory is still in front line duty elsewhere. I believe the Turks are still flying them and expect they will make 80 years.
I will not be surprised if the B-52’s make it to the century mark; I would not be surprised if an all composites, new technology version of the C-130 is flying even longer. When something is right, its… right!
The DC-3 still holds the records for tough old birds though. They haven’t been built in over 60 years and they are still flying in revenue generating service all over the world. You just can’t make a better airplane for reliability, easy maintenance with limited resources and the ability to get heavy cargo into tiny dirt patches. If you can’t fix it with gum and bailing wire and fly it out of a field beyond nowhere, it is no threat to the supremacy of the Gooneybird.
I don’t think we even *have* any aerospace engineers who can think like that any more.
Maybe the way to train that sort of engineer is to set them down with a broken airplane in the far Yukon with 10 days food and tell them they pass their final exam if they can fly it out.
Patrice:
Might it have been a KC135 you saw? Basically a Boeing 707 and quite as noisy.
It’s a shame that Britain scrapped its Vulcans and Victors. They were much better planes than the B52, and could easily still be flying today. But then this is the country which scrapped its Harriers overnight, and actually chopped up Nimrods which were finally ready for service, a truly shameful waste of money.
You should be in Colorado Springs on Saturdays during football season–the Air Force Academy gets visited by everything in the AF arsenal, doing flyovers before the game. You’ll see all manner of AF planes (that “just happen” to be in the area at the time) flying circles over town to join in the queue. Once the game starts, many of them land at the airfield on the east side of town to refuel before heading back where they came from. the anti-war types hate it, and consider it a waste of money. I happen to like it, and can imagine worse things for my taxes to be wasted upon.
B52s used to buzz the other service academies at low level during football season too. Don’t know if that still happens.
Long long ago, my summer geology job was based at the east end of Lake Athabaska, Saskatchewan. Back then (1970) the electronic bombing range at Prince Albert a couple of hundred miles south, was ‘visited’ every 20 minutes, 24/7 by a plane of some type. SOP for the bush pilots was to either fly below 300′ AGL or above 2000′ AGL during daylight. This was the low level corridor within which the bombers flew *during daylight.* At night, there was no other air traffic, and the bombers could and did come down to 100′ AGL or less, depending on the tree height!
Being based at Pine Channel, at the east end of very large body of water and being the only lights within 50 miles, the camp made a great navigational checkpoint. And one squadron of B52’s decided to say ‘Hi’. One night about 10:00 a B52 floated down over the camp, throttles pulled back, from the high ground to the north, went to after-burners and stood the plane on its ass, *right over the camp*.
Yeah! those old engines were LOUD! We piled outside, to see 8 violet spots climbing into the night sky. We convinced ourselves that we could actually feel the jet blast.
The next night at almost exactly the same time, another plane *did it again!*. LOUD, On the third night, we were all outside waiting, and this time we actually saw the navigation lights before the plane arrived. BIG and LOUD. Probably only 100′ AGL over the lake.
The fourth night we waited 15 minutes then went inside. The plane was 20 minutes late. And that was the last one.
DC3, McDonnell-Douglas would be well advised to resume production.
The flyby photo with the USS Ranger was impressive, but it doesn’t even come close to the time a Navy pilot flew an F4 Phantom through the airship hangar as NAS Moffett Field, inverted.
B52s don’t have afterburners-only water injection
Better hope Randy Newman isn’t piloting that thing.
Actually did that… twice. Four thousand hours in those things, including some ‘interesting times’.
As a point of interest, the authentic Vietnam-era acronym is ‘BUF’. “BUFF” is the bowdlerised version.
Got a few thousand hours in ’em myself. BTW, the only model still flying is the B-52H, and it has fan jets. All the old “water wagons” are gone or on display.
I grew up in southern Germany in the 1980s and we saw all kinds of great aircraft every day: F104, F4, F15, F16, Tornado, Mirages, A10, even a Navy A7 once. But never a B52.
Always loved the raw “analog” sound of those older engines. And I miss them! I liked seeing them overhead! Haven´t heard a supersonic boom in years.
I know it happened, but that remark was actually a bit of graffiti circa 1980 that I saw in New Jersey (on the campus of Rutgers University) that made me giggle… and just to make it menthol, it was written under a ‘peace sign’ which had been ‘edited’ to add four engines to the upper ‘arms’ of the sign, along with two horizontal stabilisers underneath 🙂
I was hiking in the desert in Utah once, when one flew past very low in a nearby canyon. Sinister looking beast.
I know it happened
Yes, but what Mr PersonFromPorlock meant was that he did it personally.
Yup. I used to claim the military were ‘the only professionals who still make house calls’. But of course there’s SWAT teams now.
Ok. Water injection, not afterburner. Still INCREDIBLY LOUD!
Two other interesting things. Today I was putting some stuff into the garage, when I heard a distinctive sound (again). The Lancaster of the Canadian Warplane Heritage, based in Hamilton, Ontario, flew over. They run 45-60 minute ‘discovery’ flights (for a serious chunk of cash, I expect). Neat experience to hear those 4 Merlin engines. The plane was quite low, due to overhead stratus. NEAT. That is the third time I have seen that plane.
Most people have no idea how much military flying went on during the Cold War. Every summer there were massive ‘Oil Burner/Olive Branch’ exercises. Working in the southern Manitoba bush, I saw lots of military planes, freed from the usual constraints (or breaking the rules). Eating lunch one day, on a ridge above a large river, I saw 2 F-4’s streak by, BELOW me, at just under supersonic speed (no double boom- just loud). Followed about 2 minutes later by 2 Canadian F101 Voodoo’s who *were* supersonic. We didn’t actually see them until it was too late!. Jumped about 2 feet.
That was one of 4 different times I saw military planes, flying at 100 AGL or less…excluding the BUF’s.
Oil Burner/Olive Branch was actually the generic term for a set of low-level training routes, not exercises: specific routes would be identified as, for instance, OB-9.
Amusingly, the honestly named “Oil Burner” routes (fuel consumption triples at low altitude) suddenly became “Olive Branch” routes in around 1971-72, about when the first oil shortage happened and the Peace movement began to get better press.
Thanks for the suggestions. I looked up the 3 or 4 and it was definitely not one of those (especially a C-140: way too big/fat).
Buffip at August 7, 2011 03:06 AM suggested only B-52H’s fly anymore and so I looked that up and at http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/b52/ I found that “The aircraft are being retired at the rate of one every two weeks and are being stored in a hangar at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma, in case they are required in future. ”
Tinker AFB is virtually due north of where we live, so it’s not totally out of the question to think one may have been in-transit to be stored there(?).
Anyhow, I’m convinced it was a B-52, “H” or otherwise. The body was just too long & narrow, with too much wing to be anything else I’ve seen pics of… Thanks again for the suggestions.