Eli5 why does the US still use a bomber from the 1950s when they have built two newer ones since then?
In: 7
Cost of operation and readiness ratio. The B1 and B2 make trade-offs in cost, fuel efficiency, and range. USAF doctrine is to achieve complete air supremacy, at which point the lack of stealth or speed on the B-52 isn’t relevant anymore. We own the sky.
The B-52 still carries out its mission in a more cost efficient manner.
We have 19 B-2s and around 102 B-1 Lancers. Those are our first strike aircraft.
Example: China hits us with a nuke or destroys one of our aircraft carriers. The gloves come off.
To avoid full scale nuclear war, we will hit back with a massive conventional strike.
First, we jam the satellites and radar.
Then, we send in hundreds of cruise missiles and Drones to knock out air defenses and command and control centers.
This is followed by the B-2 knocking out crucial military and political targets.
The B-1s follow up by obliterating military bases, naval ships, harbors, fuel storage and merchant marine ships/docks.
The B-52s come in and blow up key railroads, bridges, dams and manufacturing.
Assuming the war doesn’t go nuclear, it will be over in a couple of weeks.
Another view is that the B-52 was designed with an old-fashioned mentality of fly high, fly far, carry a lot, drop it on the enemy. Later designs like the B-58, B-70, B-1, and B-2 sacrificed a lot of that “carry a lot” and “carry it far” for the sake of “carry it really fast” or “carry it really, really fast” or “carry it invisibly” in the hopes of getting through enemy air defenses. Only it turns out sometimes the enemy’s air defenses are so good that just going fast or high is not a sufficient defense, so out go the B-58 and B-70. Also, sometimes the enemy air defenses are gone, so you don’t need all that special high-fast-invisible flying, you just want cheap carrying capacity.
Shifting to a metaphor, you might buy a race car to get to work faster, but if there’s traffic the race car’s capabilities are nullified. And what takes sixteen trips in the race car can be done quicker by one trip of the old pick up that won’t go over 60 without a tailwind and steep slope.
At the end of the day sometimes there are designs that are so good that they last a really long time. Someone might come up with something that’s better in certain circumstances, but in general use the old reliable is, well, the old reliable. John Browning’s 1922 .46 automatic pistol and his M-2 .50 caliber machine gun would be two examples. The M-16 has been the army’s rifle for longer than any other. People still race P-51 Mustangs. Your basic hammer has been for sale for hundreds of years even though there are specialty hammers that outperform it in particular situations. The sphygmomanometer that measures blood pressure has remained mostly unchanged for a surprisingly long time. The bicycle continues to evolve, but the basic design has been the same for many decades.
It would take a lot of money to develop a new “sky truck” like the B-52, and no one’s sure enough that we’re going to need one long enough to spend the money when we can just keep upgrading these. We keep thinking that soon there will be no need for bombers, and we keep being wrong.
Because older more intuitive engineering is not necessarily inferior to newer more computational approaches. The older approach is more durable while the newer is more cost-conscious. The older examples tend to be over-engineered in terms of capabilities: they could not be as precise, but they also didn’t need to be as efficient. So sunk costs and sticking with what works combine to make updating older designs attractive, despite the wizz-bang of newer models.
The EP-3 is a version plane of the P-3 (a Lockheed Electra) developed in the 50s (1958 I believe). The Navy still flys that bad boy
Another amazing aircraft that is still in operation is the U2. The USAF still operates 31 of these planes (probably lots more off the books at other agencies) and in 2020 fifty million dollars was invested in the AF program with the intended purpose of keeping these planes in operation for another 30 years.
The B-52 is not supersonic, so once you decide that you have a need for a heavy dump-load that doesn’t need to outrun enemy fighters, then…you have achieved air-superiority.
Once you are not afraid of enemy fighters and SAM’s, why send six medium bombers instead of three heavy bombers? So you have decided you need a heavy bomber that can carry a shit-ton of ordnance. If you were designing a brand new bomber from the ground-up, what would you change?
It needs to take off and land on the hundreds of existing strategic runways. It needs to fit inside the hundreds of existing Air Force hangars. These two facts pretty much limit you to a max size of the B-52. So, the new bomber will be the same size.
There are hundreds of various existing weapons pallets that fit into the B-52 bomb-bay, so the bomb-bay of the new bomber will need to accept these existing weapons modules.
Boeing is known for having a large vertical stabilizer. A smaller one would have less drag, but bombers need to have exceptional stability for bombing runs when using the more-affordable unguided bombs. The new bomber will have a large single vertical stabilizer.
Aerial refueling: In Desert Storm, B-52’s flew 35-hour round trip missions from the continental US to Iraq.
The extra-large bomb-bay forces the designers to have a high-wing, which also has the benefit of shortening the landing gear, once it is now forced to be located on the fuselage (like the C-17).
Private airliners have gone to two large engines, instead of three or four smaller engines. This has reduced life-cycle engine costs for maintenance and repair. The B-52 has four twin-engine pods for a total of eight jet engines. A move to larger engines “could” allow the air Force to use four or six engines instead of the current 8.
Other than that, a “new” heavy bomber would probably end up looking a lot like a B-52.
Under arms control treaties such as START, the number of nuclear capable bombers was capped. So creating a new bomber required scrapping an existing working B-52. Newer bombers don’t offer much of a capability upgrade over the existing B-52s, and would also require a new trading pipeline for air and ground crews. Why spend the money?
Fun fact:
The B-52 has no sitting toilet, and crew members must defecate into bags and dispose of the waste when they land. The Bombers are used for long-haul missions and can stay airborne for up to 40 hours
real eli:5. Because physics never change so planes that work great with current physics don’t need to change.
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