Here's an article I read on Boeing news the other day, thought you guys might enjoy it.
Glance down from the ageless expanse of blue sky into the cockpit of the Air Force's largest bomber, and the panorama is decidedly more dated -- banks of steam gauges quiver above aluminum levers built during the Eisenhower administration, obsolete knobs and dials unused in decades gather dust.
And much of the rest of the mammoth B-52 bomber is just as antiquated. Vacuum tubes have been replaced with microchips, and the once-standard ashtrays are gone. But eight engines along the wings still connect to the cockpit by yards of cables and pulleys, and the navigator often charts a course with a slide rule.
''It's like stepping back in time,'' said Capt. Lance Adsit, 28, the pilot. He banked left to start a mock bombing run, wrestling a control yoke forged decades before he was born. Time had stripped it entirely of paint.
''I love the B-52,'' Captain Adsit said. ''But the fact that this is still flying is really insane.''
A few minutes later, his onboard navigation computers crashed.
The B-52 is an Air Force plane that refuses to die. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, it continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and it laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement's replacement. And its replacement's replacement's replacement.
Air Force commanders are now urging the Pentagon to deploy B-52s in Syria.
''We're ready, we're hungry, we're eager to be in the fight,'' said Col. Kristin Goodwin, who commands the Second Bomb Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where about half of the bombers are based.
Now in its 60th year of active service, the bomber is slow, primitive and weighed down by an infamy lingering from the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s. But 76 B-52s still make up the bulk of the United States' long-range bomber fleet, and they are not retiring anytime soon. The next potential replacement -- the Long Range Strike Bomber, which has yet to be designed -- is decades away, so the B-52 is expected to keep flying until at least 2040. By then, taking one into combat will be the equivalent of flying a World War I biplane during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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,'' said Owen Cot
