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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-seem-to-make-a-better-mousetrap dept.

Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in The New York Times about B-52's and why the Air Force's largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until 2040, are not retiring anytime soon. "Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," said Ronald Reagan in 1980. Today, there is a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather flew the plane.

Originally slated for retirement generations ago, the B.U.F.F. — a colorful acronym that the Air Force euphemistically paraphrases as Big Ugly Fat Fellow - continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement's replacement. And its replacement's replacement's replacement. The unexpectedly long career is due in part to a rugged design that has allowed the B-52 to go nearly anywhere and drop nearly anything the Pentagon desires, including both atomic bombs and leaflets. But it is also due to the decidedly underwhelming jets put forth to take its place. The $283 million B-1B Lancer first rolled off the assembly line in 1988 with a state-of-the-art radar-jamming system that jammed its own radar. The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later, had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain. "There have been a series of attempts to build a better intercontinental bomber, and they have consistently failed," says Owen Coté. "Turns out whenever we try to improve on the B-52, we run into problems, so we still have the B-52."

The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like "flee and live, or stay and die," then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls "assurance and deterrence" missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers recently flew defiantly near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. "The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game," says Maj. Mark Burleys. "Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary."


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:55PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:55PM (#274133) Homepage Journal

    A couple of errors there. First, grammar: it's not "B52's" when referring to more than one B52. "B52's" is a possessive, as in "The B52's engines are powerful, and a fleet of B52s will hold a lot of bombs."

    Second, it isn't BUFF, it's BUF. Only one F. B52s aren't fat, they're long and lean and really scary looking machines. BUF stood for "Bug ugly fucker". BUFF would have fit that fatassed C5-A transport.

    When I got to Utapao in August of 1973, a BUF took off every thirty seconds. I guessed they were dropping as many bombs as they could before the congressionally mandated end of bombing, but I met a man ten years later who was stationed at Utapao five years before I was, and he said one took off every thirty seconds the whole year he was there. I wonder how there's anything left of North Vietnam after all that.

    The last several months I was stationed at Beale was the best job I ever had, and the scariest. Scary because if I actually had to perform that job, millions of people would die. My job was to gas up a pickup truck, make sure everything worked properly, and drive it to the flightline to wait for World War III, where there were more B52s than you could count. All I did all day was shoot pool, play pinball, and read. If an atomic war broke out, I was to drive the pilot to his nuclear-armed BUF.

    I found out later that only two or three dozens of the bombers had nuclear arms, the rest had flown to Beale from Southeast Asia as the war died down. It had become a staging area.

    B52s were also known as "stratobombers", which explains why they've stayed in service so long -- a plane that will hold as much ordinance as a B52 that can drop those bombs from the stratosphere where it's nearly impossible to shoot one down is pretty damned useful to a military.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @11:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @11:40PM (#274165)

    The term BUFF goes back to the C-97|KC-97, which was quite large for its time.
    The term "aluminum overcast" was also applied to that early supersized aircraft.
    ...and those are rather ugly. [airplanesofthepast.com] Page [airplanesofthepast.com]

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:16AM (#274236)

    Before you start lobbing stones about others grammar, perhaps, you should look up run on sentence.

    The comma is not an excuse to run on and on.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:33AM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:33AM (#274351)
    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"