Author:
mark farmer
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Date Posted: 18:47:38 04/08/15 Wed
>Another column lifted from the paper.
>
>I was swinging through one of the national news pages
>to see if I could kindle an idea for a column, and
>happened to notice that today is the sixtieth
>anniversary of the first flight of the B-52.
>
>The big bomber has been around for a long time.
>Although it first flew sixty years ago, the actual
back when Carswell was a SAC base (into the 80's), I can see those squadrons of 52's coming across the lake, reaching for altitude, into that October wind. Gathering leaves, I could almost believe that I could count the rivets as they thundered over.
talking to a neighbor one day, we would fall silent as a 52 demanded its acceptance. Then, he looked at me & laughed ... beats the hell out of red stars on those wings.
>roots of the design go back even further than that.
>The Air Force still has about ninety of them flying,
>and all of them are over half a century old, since the
>last of them were built in 1963. The big old bird has
>outlasted several newer planes, mostly because it has
>been proven fairly easy to upgrade and modify for a
>variety of missions over the years. At present, the
>Air Force plans to keep operating them until the
>2040s, which when you stop and think about it is
>pretty amazing for a combat aircraft.
>
>The part that really seems amazing is that the B-52
>was designed in a period when aircraft design was
>changing rapidly. In World War II, which wasn't very
>far in memory when the pencils for the B-52 first hit
>the drawing board, an aircraft a year or two out of
>date was a hazard to its crew from being so obsolete
>-- yet the B-52 has hung on forever.
>
>The B-52 is not the only aircraft out of the 1950s
>that has hung on forever doing just exactly the job it
>was expected to do, and no matter how much technology
>has changed, it still is nearly impossible to replace
>with something better. The C-130 was first conceived
>of in 1951 and first flew in 1954. They are still
>being built.
>
>The C-130 is pretty close to a universal airplane. It
>has done everything. Designed as a cargo plane, it has
>been used for just about anything that can be crowded
>into its cavernous interior, everything from gunship
>to hurricane hunter, spy plane to forest fire control,
>from bomber to tanker. Don't get me wrong -- it's a
>BIG airplane, and I know, for I was a passenger in one
>several times almost fifty years ago. But big as it
>was, that didn't keep the Navy with experimenting with
>flying them off a carrier deck. Although they decided
>to not go through with it operationally, they are
>still the biggest airplane to ever fly off an aircraft
>carrier.
>
>In the late 1960s the Air Force decided to explore the
>idea of a C-130 replacement and came up with the idea
>of a design competition. Lockheed entered the C-130 in
>the competition -- and won! Only now is the Air Force
>halfway serious about considering a C-130 replacement,
>and it probably will not go into production until the
>2040s, if at all.
>
>The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, also a 1950s design,
>is still flying and will probably be well into the
>future. The Air Force also operates KC-135s, which
>were early model Boeing 707s, also dating from the
>1950s.
>
>It extends to helicopters, too -- the UH-1 "Huey" and
>CH-47 Chinook are both 1950s designs, and are still in
>active use. The Army is now phasing out the UH-1, but
>the venerable CH-47 is still in production, and there
>are other slightly younger designs that are coming up
>on their fiftieth anniversary.
>
>Old aircraft designs staying active for decades is not
>just a military thing, either. I can rattle off
>several civilian planes that are still in use -- and
>some still in production, after fifty and sixty years
>of service. It is not unusual for a single airplane to
>remain in use for forty or fifty years, with good
>maintenance and equipment upgrades as needed.
>
>The point that comes to me out of all this is that
>developments in aviation just aren't coming as fast as
>they once did -- but that once they get things right
>they might as well keep them right. Or, to say it in a
>different way, just because it's new doesn't
>necessarily mean that it's better. It's something we
>all ought to bear in mind.
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