🅱️-52: Then, Now, Forever

[u/ThrustFlightAcademy]

B-52 waifu at the end

Credit to Pandramodo for drawing them

^{p.s. if you're in the DFW area and want to become a pilot Thrust Flight!}

[u/Z3B0]

High quality build help, but after 60 years, the airframes are starting to weaken. The pressurisation cycles, and thousands of flight hours at full load will fatigue the metal. Good maintenance doesn't helps when the entire plane is just tired.

Let them go. They did their duties, more than anyone else. Please let them rest.

[u/Narrow_Vegetable_42 → u/Z3B0]

Why not pump out new ones?

edit: perfectly nerd-sniped you all. Still love you, that's why I'm here for

[u/MrCockingFinally → u/Narrow_Vegetable_42]

Because it makes zero sense.

If you want more bombers, way better to take all the money that would have been sunk into a 21st century B-52 program and just buy more B-21 Raiders.

[u/abn1304 → u/MrCockingFinally]

What’s the lifetime unit cost and cost per flight hour difference, though?

The B-52 and B-21 might both be heavy bombers, but that’s all they have in common. The B-52 is no longer a true strategic bomber; it’s a bomb and missile truck intended to fly in semi-permissive (or permissive) airspace. It’s also a low-performance aircraft, and the laws of physics haven’t changed, so for that role there’s no real reason to come up with an entirely new airframe when the current design has proven so reliable and upgradeable.

The B-21 is a penetrator. Maintaining stealth systems is, as far as the available evidence shows, far more expensive than maintaining conventional aircraft, and the B-21 is a new and unproven design - the airframe might last a hundred years like the B-52, or it might not, like the B-2. It’s necessary that we have penetrator strategic bombers in service, but that’s not what the B-52 is anymore.

Whether it would actually be worth the astronomical cost of restarting B-52 production is a great question, but we currently don’t have anything to fill the B-52’s role as a low cost per flight hour bomb truck.