Mourning the B52 crew

Getting put on his Ignore list is often a blessing.

 

+1

We may never know.
There were 8 beans aboard....meaning 3 pax, probably.
They were working out at Edwards on something with "testing" in the description - meaning probably 'Secret Squirrel' stuff.
Weather was CAVU.
There were the military equivalent of CVR/FDRs aboard.....but good luck getting those data.
Pretty senior people aboard that bird - eh?
I'm guessing that the NTSB isn't going to be investigating this one - although the three extra pax may be a wildcard.

The Buff is an extraordinarily safe bird, especially when you consider their age and the number of cycles they've amassed.

We'll see.

 

Some other article mentioned that it was in the air about 3 minutes, executed a 180 degree turn, and at the end was 'descending' about 5000/minute, much faster than it should, 'landing' on a parallel runway from where it took off. I believe these details were taken from a flight radar system, not from any visual witness.

 

Besides the ah.....interesting crew composition, the crash site is also interesting.
It didn't 'mush in' like most aircraft at speed.
What we see is a rather compact 'auguring in' suggesting a departure from flight from a stall or loss of pitch control.

If we knew everything the USAF folks know the clouds wouldn't get much thinner.
Scheduled flight duration?
Fuel load?
What was being tested?
How many cycles for this bird?
Lots of recent gripe sheets?
Any weapons aboard?

An all ossifer crew is ops normal for a BUFF.
The USAF rolls like that - sending officers, if not senior officers into harm's way while the enlisted stay behind, but two 05s and three 04s is a little interesting for a 5-bean crew, along with the three civilians - but probably not the stuff of a Tom Clancy novel.
They might have been testing anything from a new interphone system mod to a civilization (or drone) threatening death ray.

Probably closer to the former given the dearth of standers-by.

 

Those videos and telemetry have not been publicly released, so we the public are still going on very sparse other information.

 

Do you think this B-52 was part of the engine replacement program going on at Edwards for B-52s?

 

See also your link in post #3:

"The first re-engined B-52s will be tested at Edwards Air Force Base, California, before the go-ahead is given for the rest of the fleet. As the 76 B-52H bombers receive their new powerplants and a radar upgrade, they will be redesignated B-52Js."

Follow that "radar upgrade" link, the B-52 Radar Modernization Programs starts at page 71:



I live in Boeing's home territory, and saw a local news story about this crash making specific reference to this radar upgrade program, though don't recall the details.

 

B-52 with key radar upgrade flies to Edwards for testing

Makes sense.
Those old mechanically scanned radars are wearing out.
Never knew, but should have suspected that the F/A18 and the F15's radars share that much DNA.

 

The USAF concurs.
They're hoping to build 'a minimum' of 100 B21s to replace the 19 B2s 44 Bones and 75 remaining Buffs.

I personally hope they keep the Bones around for a little bit longer and accept the higher per-frame cost - because as crazy as it sounds they're quite effective at non-lethal warfare AND they're able to carry loads comparable with the BUFFS.
15-echoes and F/A-18s can keep an enemy up at night by rattling windows with sonic booms.
Bones shatter windows and crack drywall!
They're feared on a battlefield nearly as much as the Warthogs are.

and!!....they're fairly stealthy to Radar.
They're a tougher bird for fpv drones to down.
I've heaped lavish and (IMO) justified scorn on the Penguins (f35) for all the right reasons, but the one thing that they have going for them is that they're LARGE flightless birds.
The one that the Persians winged brought the pilot home.
We have 75 BUFFS remaining in inventory.
Recent crash notwithstanding, they still enjoy an exceptional safety and reliability record - and they'll almost certainly still be flying tactical missions well after the last B21 Raider is delivered.

Half true.
About par for the course for fake news.

People have been prattling on about the "military industrial complex" here in the US for decades now but they forget one thing......it's still 'doing the thing' - albeit at a cripplingly high cost and with a few very noteworthy blunders.
They're a good 'works programme' and not all of them are the "white collar welfare" jobs that you and I are so familiar with.
NOBODY who has been anywhere NEAR a shipyard would confuse THAT whit 'white collar!!!'

The LCS might be turds - but in this case?
Turds often float!
We still have 28 hulls in service.
They have a low crew number, very large flight decks, and they can still show the flag - meaning that they're armed, maybe even enough to defend themselves.
They're not slow, and we've been able to bolt missile systems to their decks in a few hours at a forward pier rather than having to back-haul them to a shipyard.


So.....back to the Ukies and Russia's strat bombers and strike aircraft.
The Ukies have probably accounted for knocking out 20-30% of their pre-war airframes.
That's NON trivial - but you also have to remember that those aging TU 95s (about as old as the BUFFS!) and the TU22s were circling the drain well before the war and the TU160s are more off-line for modernization than drone damage.

Why?
Because the Rooskies do NOT have even our flawed 'military industrial complex.'

 

We used to have to put people high up in dangerous places in order to achieve military superiority because perfect navigation is really hard... These days you can put near anything at very precise coordinates for an astronomically lower price than ever before. So we're fast running out of reasons to have human pilots in modern warfare... We're living in profoundly transformational times!

For example these $6K stratospheric based weapons with a graphite warhead that weighs less than 30 pounds can fry all the primary circuits of an entire electrical sub-station and multiple numbers of them can take down a whole power plant at a very low cost and no risk to the soldiers that fly them: