B-52 Aircraft Tour

it's a factor van westrom a venture 2017 I'm standing in front of a 57 year old b-52h there have been several attempts to replace this access none of them have able to do what this airplane is capable of here is major Keith van der grift to give us a tour and tell us more about what the b-52 can actually do so the first thing everybody generally looks at is obviously they throttles for they different engines generally people fly in the bottom but you know you can kind of fine-tune the engines come to least four and five to kind of make small throttle adjustments there the airplane doesn't have a Lorenz as air brakes air brakes are set right here when you move the yoke you actually raise the air brake on one side when we fly around in the pattern you know or do a landing we use air brakes in position four and that kind of gives us the most control authority because they're about halfway up and so when you make a left hand input this one goes down and that right air brake goes up or vice-versa little bit backwards so gives you a little bit more control on the pattern for a given amount of yoke deflection versus you know all the way down the next thing people kind of gravitate to is the crosslink wrap system so obviously our tip gear is 148 feet apart we have a crosswind crab selection here so we figure out what our cross wind component is you say hey that's 70 degrees or 60 degrees off at 10 knots it looks like it's a four degrees across from crab so we pull up the cross one crab knob turn it left or right depending on the wind direction and it's set right here in this so what's happening is the front and a skier are rotating so what we're trying to do is set the crab of the airplane so we're flying straight down the runway and the wheels are aligned with the runway we have touchdown it's almost like landing a glider if you've ever done that before so you basically fly it down onto the runway rotate the airplane out and the goal is to land with the ask trucks touching down first and the front trucks about a half wheel diameter of the f truck and it's going to be a little bit of a you know it's not greasing it on them like you do on a tricycle landing gear it's a firmer touchdown but what you want to avoid is if you land too fast because the angle instance of the wing you'll land front truck first and that can cause a lot of bouncing and piao and stuff like that so we kind of accept a little bit firmer touch down and land on that way obviously we got the eight engine instruments one for each engine obviously you have got in to pressure ratio rpm egt and fuel flow those are the fuel totalizer our landing gear indicator this is a feel totalizer right here so that takes in everything we have from each individual quantity indicator which is out here no automatic fuel at all we we do everything on our own it's based on a fuel sequence that Boeing is calculated for us and generally the idea is to keep the airplane within the center of gravity limits while at the same time keeping as much fuel in the wing as we can and what that does is give strength in the wing reduce wing flutter and stuff like that we actually have a wing flutter warning system and we have these green bands so the idea is to keep fuel under the green bands as much as we can if you add up all the fuel quantity in here it'll hold about 300 10,000 pounds of gas we usually flight plan about 400 knots true but the airplane will go 2.8 for an hour max range cruise at your optimum altitude is like 765 Mach and you can get 99% of your max range at 7 8 9 so I think the older bus for some around 0.92 is a max max Mach so it would go pretty quick any skid system brakes is probably one of the things I would want to get replaced on the airplane if I had the choice the way it was designed if you read the - one was lightweight and for one full time use so we have a drag chute that's one of the things you know I had to tell people like if drag chutes were the way to go then every airliner would have a drag chute no airliner has a drag chute so it's obviously we can't count on the drag chute either it's just an aid to reduce brake wear to use we use it on every pretty much every full-stop landing unless it's a specific scenario so we use it when we land it here just because it's a shorter runway and I'm going to take all the help I can get stuff in the airplane so this airplane is that is redundant in the extreme we have six engine driven hydraulic pumps we have four electric pumps if those happen to go out we have to rudder elevator electric pumps so those have ox pumps that are also powered by the main engine driven pumps we have four generators and one generator is generally enough to power everything that we really need we have an emergency gear extension and retraction system so if for some reason we need to emergency retract a year we can do that and that would be for like a nuclear scenario when you know range is very important this downstairs we caught the offense system or where the offense crew members sit got a navigator in the right seat and the radar navigator is a compartment commander down here in he sits in the left seat so they had the same two green screens that we have upstairs and they can put data in both of them that dtc so this is how a mission plan will cut our mission to a dtc and load it into the system here they put them and they're basically giant cartridges like this you know stuff that could be put on a little SD card now but that was top of line in the 80s when that came out so we do a lot of a offset endpoint bombing the radar kind of runs the show down here as far as getting that together a lot of what we're doing especially downrange right now the radar is doing a lot of the working the pod and weapon system and the navigators kind of keeping us in the area making sure we don't fly where we're not supposed to well at the same time assisting the radar navigator so pretty much all the weapons stuff goes through down here the nav actually has a altimeter and true airspeed indicator outside air temperature as well so when they have to do and IRC is well instrumented fresher course and all that so there's a lot of a CRM that goes into they watch our altitude keep track of our airspeed so we can maintain timing to wherever we're going we get them to where we need to go and they do the hard work down here so yeah if you're sitting in the seat here you know you're going to get strapped in first and there's a pen that goes in between your seat latches up and if you're going to eject your pullout here put your legs back it actually has like a stirrup that comes out it wraps around your leg and you know you want to sit back and make sure your keyboard is in and then you'll go straight down underneath it's 250 feet above the ground as the min altitude for a downward objection assuming you're straight and level there's six objection seats but we can actually get 10 people on the airplane there is a procedure where we could actually get all 10 people off off the airplane and that usually involves a navigator going first and then we get all the extra crewmembers off so we'll have a guy in the instructor pilot seat an instructor navigator seat there's a defense instructor seat and then we call this guy bunk or tenth man and then they would all go out the hole that the guy the Navigator made and you just clip on your it's like jumping out of a c-130 or something you clip on and as you go out you just fall out the bottom of the airplane and then we get everybody else off and then aircraft commander is always the last one to go so that's a controlled scenario it's kind of funny like this airplane is this far away from the Wright Flyer you know they'd Vietnam it'd be like flying the Wright Flyer in Vietnam that's how old they are from this airplane right now when it was first built so that we have a bunch of squadrons there's actually I think four at Barksdale the 20th Bomb Squadron right six bombs quoting the 11th and the 93rd we're all founded in 1917 so this is 100th anniversary it's also the 70th anniversary of the Air Force and 75th anniversary of 8th Air Force so that it's a big bomber air share this week we're going to have b-52 here we have the both flying b-29s and I think a couple b-17 and b25 out here there's a lot of bomber history here at the Oshkosh and we're trying to play that up and you want to you know fighters are the cool thing to do but when you want to get stuff done you send a bomber over there to change people's mind fun fact this 2,000 pounds of concrete sitting in the tail is ballast for where the tail gunner used to be this airplane will be in Boeing flaws on all week you should come see it [Music]

Channel: AVweb

Views: 1,390,263

Rating: 4.7768445 out of 5

Keywords: Airventure 2017, B-52, Bomber, Air Force, Cockpit tour

Id: GPhxUYzUamc

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017