US Air Force B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff, Edwards Air Force Base says (opens in new tab)

I worked on B-52s and other aircraft. Their systems (bomb/nav/comm/etc) were refreshed many times and the airframes inspected and improved regularly.

The reason B-52s are still around is because they are combat-effective and cost-effective relative to other aircraft, such as the B-1 and B-2 (both of which I also worked on). Whatever replaces the B-52 will have to be something new and something cost-effective. I don't think that currently exists.

The B-1 has only been combat/cost effective in more recent years after an extended rough patch spanning decades -- actually, I'm not even sure it's cost-effective. The B-2 has always been combat-effective, but was never cost-effective to operate or maintain.

Please do more research. They are most decidedly not “simply too old”. They have been “refreshed” many times over - from engines, to flight electronics, to targeting and comms systems, to airframe structures, to coffeemaker automation.

> planes that are simply too old

Planes don’t really age like that, at least not if they’re serviced. They’re constantly being rebuilt and inspected.

The only reason airliner fleets churn as much as they do is fuel efficiency and maintenance standardization.

Planes don't age in the same way cars do. There is a maintenance schedule that inspects and replaces almost literally every component at some point. So the engines on these planes can be just a year old for example.

And the military has a tendency to also upgrade the avionics and capabilities at several points in the lifetime of a program. So there is a lot of tech in these planes that's much newer than 60 years old.

The USAF has been neglected for a long time. The service has seen reductions in both headcount and airframes with no gains in efficiency or effectiveness.

Too many types of aircraft to operate and maintain, with too few people to do it and too few available airframes to maintain a combat capability.

True, but the B-52s that are currently in operation are very much a Bomber of Theseus situation.

George Will mentioned in a recent article that some of the B-52s used against Iran were built before the first Beatles album.

The B-52 lives in an awkward niche. Bomb trucks over utterly unprotected airspace might just not be a thing anymore.

If that holds for the forseen future, the B-52 will not have a real successor.

Currently, it looks like non-precision bulk bombing is just obsolete.

We "depend" on the B-52 because it still works, and there's a lot of chance it shouldn't get a replacement.

Are there any other planes we "depend" on that are old but not being replaced? Our tanker fleet is old but we are looking to replace it. Maybe some transports are getting old? But they probably don't need a new design. EWACS is old but also seeing new systems being built.

It’s been confirmed that the entire crew perished, and sadly the max complement of eight was aboard.

RIP!

As a betting man… this is not survivable

there are sadly all too many cases like this: the Concorde's last flight comes to mind. Just horrible.

RIP

B-52 crew has to bail out, no ejection option.

Is this after cleanup? There's almost zero wreckage and if it was at takeoff it shouldn't have enough speed or descent angle to atomize.

The US military has 10-15,000 airframes. The US military trains hard and flies a lot of hours so accidents and failures are not completely preventable. They explicitly plan to lose an average of 2 airframes per month due to attrition, which is roughly their historical average. The crew is able to escape most of the time.

It may seem odd that they plan for these losses but the optimal amount of risk is non-zero. Excessive safety-ism interferes with effective training and operations, which risks lives in other ways. They aren't reckless but over-prioritizing never risking a life in training would defeat the purpose of it and institutionalize behavior that is ill-suited for actual warfare where risk is unavoidable.

Statistically the military environment is quite safe, particularly for young males, relative to the median lifestyle in the US. That is true even in some war zones, ironically.

It's only notable now because of how safe aircraft are now and how rare these incidents are. Like, of the 116 B-58 Hustlers built, 24 were lost in crashes. Over 200 B-47's were lost during its service life, killing 464 crew members.

This is the first B-52 crash in almost 20 years.

I would guess that when you are training you are still doing activities that are not as safe as just traveling from point A to B: flying low, pointing the nose at the ground, landing a helicopter in a less than ideal spot (it seems like half of those are helicopters), etc. That hypothesis doesn't really apply well to transport planes or B52s though. Military pilots probably spend a higher overall fraction of their flying career as trainees?

They are very rare these days compared to the 1950s-80. I presume it's a combination of aircraft design developing and also the scale of the military and the intense training during the Cold War.

Have a flick through these links listing losses or two RAF types, it's quite sobering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/harrier...

I don't understand the fascination with watching people die. I'd rather not, thanks.

And Tu-22M3 today as well. Not a good day for bombers

Strictly speaking that was a Soviet bomber. The Russians ended up with them, but they can't make more of them, at least not right now.

It's common in news headlines when an event is very recent or a story is still developing. A report about, say, the US bombing a previously unreported site in Iran several weeks ago would be in the past tense "US bombed <site> in Iran". When the US bombs Iran today, it'll be titled "US bombs <site> in Iran".

Because a HN user posted the link and other HN users upvoted it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website