Boeing B-52 Stratofortress
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is an eight-engined strategic bomber that first flew in April 1952 and remains in United States Air Force service more than seven decades later. Designed to carry nuclear weapons deep into the Soviet Union, it became the backbone of Strategic Air Command's deterrent, then flew conventional bombing campaigns in Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Boeing built 744, the last delivered in 1962; only the B-52H variant remains in service, assigned to Air Force Global Strike Command, and planned engine and radar replacements are intended to keep the fleet flying into the 2050s.
Why It Mattered
The B-52 was created to deliver nuclear weapons against targets deep inside the Soviet Union, and Boeing describes the type as a cornerstone of United States national security and strategic deterrence. Its standing rests on endurance as much as on that mission: Robert F. Dorr called it, sixty years after its first flight, the longest-serving warplane in history. It has served as a strategic nuclear bomber, a conventional heavy bomber and a test aircraft, changing roles as strategy and weapons changed around it. Boeing notes that the bomber, originally an intercontinental high-altitude design, has been adapted over decades to meet evolving defence needs. The B-52H that remains in service today is the U.S. Air Force's primary standoff cruise missile carrier.
Design Notes
The design took its decisive shape over one weekend in October 1948, when a Boeing team working in a Dayton, Ohio hotel set aside the straight-wing turboprop bomber it had come to present and instead proposed a swept-wing jet built around Pratt & Whitney's J57 engine. The result had a 35-degree swept wing with eight turbojets podded in pairs on four pylons beneath it, and stood on bicycle landing gear. The huge wing was flexible enough to deflect through a 32-foot arc, and an ingenious crosswind main landing gear let the aircraft land in a direct crosswind. The prototypes seated the pilots in tandem, B-47-style, but production aircraft adopted conventional side-by-side seating. Later models changed the formula in detail: the G and H had a shorter vertical fin and integral wet-wing fuel tanks, and the H replaced the J57 turbojets with TF33 turbofans offering about 30 percent more power. At 185 feet in span and up to 488,000 pounds gross weight, it could carry some 70,000 pounds of ordnance.
Operational History
The second prototype, the YB-52, made the type's first flight from Boeing Field, Seattle, on 15 April 1952. Strategic Air Command declared initial operational capability with the B-52A on 19 June 1955, and the first operational aircraft, an RB-52B, reached the 93rd Bomb Wing at Castle Air Force Base on 29 June 1955. Boeing built 744 B-52s; the last of them, a B-52H, was delivered on 26 October 1962. For the Cold War deterrent the fleet stood ground alert from October 1957, its bombers required to be airborne within 15 minutes of the order to take off. The B-52 entered combat from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, on 18 June 1965, opening Operation Arc Light over Vietnam; in eight years of that campaign the force flew 126,615 sorties. For Vietnam the B-52D fleet received the "Big Belly" modification, raising its conventional load to 108 bombs carried internally and externally. The campaign peaked in Linebacker II, from 18 to 29 December 1972, when B-52 crews flew 729 nighttime sorties against targets around Hanoi and North Vietnamese defences downed 15 of the bombers. In the 1991 Gulf War, about 80 B-52Gs flew more than 1,600 sorties and dropped more than 25,000 tons of ordnance, opening the war with a 35-hour mission from Louisiana that was then the longest combat mission in history. The type returned to combat over Kosovo in 1999, then in Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003 to 2011.
Afterlife
Attrition and economics thinned the fleet until, by 1991, only the B-52G and B-52H remained in service; the G has since retired, leaving the H as the only variant still flying. Retired aircraft survive in museums: Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson displays the NB-52A 52-0003, the oldest B-52 in existence, which served as a mothership for the X-15 rocket plane, alongside one of its B-52Ds. The type's afterlife is unusual because the fleet never left service: Air & Space Forces Magazine reports 76 B-52Hs in the inventory, based at Barksdale and Minot, with test aircraft at Edwards. The Air Force is now replacing the fleet's engines and radar, work the magazine says is meant to extend the fleet through the 2050s; re-engined aircraft, designated B-52J, are expected to complete fleetwide retrofit by 2038.