B-52 Stratofortress | Behind the Wings on PBS

I'm Matthew Bichette and this is behind the wings in this episode is on America's iconic b-52 bomber baby this program was made possible by wings over the Rockies educating and inspiring people of all ages about aviation and space endeavors of the past present and future now I say this a lot but how cool is this [Music] you guys are getting a really inside look at this day not everyone gets to do that [Music] damn bio faint Bam Bam Bam welcome to behind the wigs my name is Matthew Burchett I'm the curator at wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum and wonderful Denver Colorado and get ready to learn about some of the most iconic aircraft ever learn about some really cool aviation history and generally come away with just an amazing appreciation for aerospace in general you're not going to want to miss this [Music] the b-52 Stratofortress came to life in 1945 when the United States Army Air Forces needed to expand its bomber capabilities in 1955 the first Stratofortress a''s were delivered to the 93rd Bomb Wing at Castle Air Force Base in California as America's big stick of diplomacy the nuclear-capable b-52 was the nation's main Soviet deterrent during the Cold War designed to fly deep into Soviet territory to strike cities and Industry with nuclear weapons b-52s were on constant airborne alert from 1960 to 1968 luckily the big bomber never dropped a nuclear weapon in combat but it certainly saw extensive action during the Vietnam War with the lessons learned in Vietnam America began to look for a replacement for the aging b-52 while the xb-70 Valkyrie and f-111 aardvark were slated to fill the role of the Stratofortress neither aircraft lived up to their hype and the b-52 soldier Don even with the debut of the b-1 Lancer the b-52 remained a part of America's nuclear triad with continuous upgrades the last b-52s manufactured in 1965 are still serving our country and are planned to serve until at least 20 45 all right that's enough chitchat let's go explore the second oldest b-52 Stratofortress anywhere hey welcome to this episode of behind the wigs which we're highlighting the b-52 bomber here at wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum if you've ever been to our museum you certainly can't miss this monstrosity out front but what you may not know are some of the salient features of this aircraft take for example the wingspan that's a hundred and eighty five feet wide now for comparison's sake that's nearly two b-17 bombers from World War two how nuts is that but even more nuts the length she's a hundred and fifty nine feet long which is nine feet longer than our b1 a Lancer that we have inside but guess what speaking of inside we got places to go baby [Music] we decided to who start at the end and work our way forward so we are actually in the Gunners position of a b-52 B and I will say this there's a distinct smell about old planes and I know there's some guys out there that know what I'm talking about I can't place it but it's kind of funky the b-52 B was equipped with a quad 50 caliber machine-gun turret just like this one but it had a radar gun sight now is the b-52 got older and more complex they went to a 20 millimeter cannon and finally to a 20 millimeter Gatling gun and there was nobody that actually sat back here at all and now they don't even have a gunner station did you know that the b-52 bomber is the largest airplane to have an aerial kill it's true 24 December 1972 the crew of diamond lil encountered a mig-21 fighter over North Vietnam and the rear gunner shot it down with its four 50 caliber machine guns just like we have here now you'll notice that this is not a large compartment and you may or may not notice there's no ejection seat so how did this guy get out well guess what there is a handle right here but it's not for an ejection seat it just makes the entire end of the turret fall away from the plane which means that the guy just had to dive right out uh-huh not gonna happen now as much as I like being back here because there's so much to look at there's even more to look at up front so let's make our way to the cockpit section because we got a lot to talk about there as I crawl through our b-52 there are some things you need to know about this aircraft like the fact that our b-52 is 64 years old there's a saying in the b-52 community that goes this is your grandfather's b-52 which means it's possible that pilots today are flying the exact same plane their fathers flew nuts no other aircraft in the u.s. Arsenal has that kind of legacy okay we've made it to the navigators position yay no more crawling we're actually back here in what they call the black hole you can kind of see why not a lot of ways to look out of these tiny little windows there's one here and one over to my right but this is where the radar navigator said and just to my right was where the navigator said now that sounds redundant but in 1950's parlance the radar navigator was actually the Bombardier and if you look at some of this equipment around me you start seeing special weapons in a SM lock and internal bomb indicator light control you know all that kind of cool stuff but right in front of me is actually the large radar screen that the Bombardier would use to figure out where the target was and when exactly to drop in this case usually a nuclear weapon luckily the b-52 never dropped a nuclear weapon in combat now if you want to stay safe in a super scary environment you definitely need a good Evo he lived above us let's go see what he did so we're up on the flight deck now we've gone up a level from where we were before and we're in the eros station and if you remember correctly Iwo stands for electronic warfare officer now when the b-52 was created was really meant to go straight into the Soviet Union and in bomb cities and large factories in that kind of thing well the Soviets knew we were probably going to come and they had an amazing anti-aircraft system set up with triple-a batteries which is anti-aircraft artillery in Samms and that was the big threat the surface-to-air missile they had the sa-2 which was an amazing piece of equipment it didn't do great for us but it was great for the Soviets so the Iwo was there to counter that threat one of the things that he had as his disposal was the AL q 117 and it was a suite of electronics that could literally prioritize all the threats coming at this plane in fact the e was like to say that it worked auto magically which is kind of cool when you think about it but it was a deadly game that they were playing because the Soviets were launching missiles from the ground and from their aircraft to try to take down these bombers in the Iwo was trying to jam their radars throw off their heat-seeking missiles and generally keep themselves alive and get back home but how would you get back home let's move up front and let's see where the pilot and co-pilot work [Music] to my left is where the pilot would sit and I'm sitting where the copilot would sit now one of the things you're probably looking at already is there a lot of bells and whistles in here you got to remember the b-52 had eight engines which means eight throttle levers and all of these gauges for the corresponding engines you've got fuel flow you've got rpm exhaust temperature pressure ratio all these kind of stuff that you know you don't have to look at a lot but you definitely got to keep your eye on the stuff you really need to keep your eye on luckily like any other plane he's always right in front it's the six-pack it's your turn and Bank indicator it's your altitude it's your airspeed all that important stuff that you really need to know to fly now one of the other things you're probably noticing is some of this stuff looks kind of beat-up well there's a reason for that in 1998 a gentleman came by before Laur he was really well populated he climbed up on a ladder and he doused the cockpit section with gasoline and he licked this plane on fire now why did he do that well he was protesting America's land mine policy now what does the land mines have to do with b-52s I got no clue but in his mind it made perfect sense luckily he was caught in this plane had some damage to it to the tune of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars but luckily our volunteer corps came to the rescue and was able to repair this plane otherwise sadly she probably would have gone to the scrap heap not a really fitting end for such an amazing plane so as I sit here I'm struck by how much of the original equipment is still in here all the gauges and dials and it gets me to thinking what's the difference between a 64 year old b-52 and a b-52 that well is maybe 60 years old but is still flying for the Air Force I know they've got to be changes you know technological advances and whatnot but luckily there is an Air Force Base not too far from here that still flies b-52s so I'm thinking why not my not [Music] [Music] okay so you can tell we are no longer in Colorado we're in Minot North Dakota everything you've ever heard about it is true it's cold out here and I've only been here a couple of hours but Minot is also home to the 23rd and 69th bomb squadrons that fly the b-52 like the ones we have up front except Mucho modernized and we are gonna see some of that stuff up close and personal but right now we're gonna go talk to the base historian because I'm freezing so let's go did you know that my not Air Force Base is one of two be 52 bases in the United States and also one of the areas where we store some of our nuclear munitions in fact if this base were to secede from the United States it would be the third largest nuclear power in the world Minot Air Force Base is also home to over 5,000 military personnel who have access to their own grocery store neighborhoods and even a fitness facilities now it's time to meet up with the historian Rob Michael to understand how b-52s in the fifth Bomb Wing found their home in Minot North Dakota so give me a little bit of background on the fifth bomb warning how did it get here what did it do before it got here so the fifth is a really old unit started out in 1919 at Luke field in Hawaii if you were look at an overhead image of battleship Errol right that's Ford's Island and it was actually Luke field so the fifth is kind of famous because they bombed a volcano they did blow on Aloha give us a brief overview of what the heck that was all about it's an interesting story and it's debatable on whether or not it worked so the volcano was erupting and the bomb group happened to be there right at Luke field so scientist came up with the idea to actually bomb the lava tubes to save the city of Hilo from volcano the 23rd and 72nd got in there Keystone bombers he's still the Keystone's and decided to drop some bombs on the floor it sounds like something right out of an episode of Gilligan's Island because it's just kind of goofy now that we've got the fifth Bomb Wing established when did it come to Minot in in why Minot well the shortest path to Russia or to the Soviet Union is over the pole right so all these northern tier bases that were being built we're kind of usurped by sac right and taken over you know what sac said hey let's put some bombers up there how does the Air Force come around and just grab the land is it is it literally a land grab and just say hey we're the Air Force and we get to do what we do or is there a process so the citizens of might not decide heard that the Air Force was shopping North Dakota to put in an Air Force installation so the residents and the local business owners said hey this is gonna be a great thing for the city right it's gonna bring us a lot of money those local businesses and the citizens donated $50,000 in the late 50s know to buy the land where my dad Air Force Base sits I just don't see that happening today I don't even that's amazing all right so I'm standing here in dock 8 which in Air Force parlance means well hanger and this guy is Captain arpan now you're actually a b-52 pilot that's correct that is very cool before we get to that tell us about where we're standing so duck eat as you said a hanger is one of our more recently built hangars and as you can see behind us we do have one b-52 currently in the hangar there's actually room for an entire another b-52 in this hangar so that maintenance operations can continue even when the weather is bad outside that is nuts in considering Minot North Dakota in the winter you don't really want to be doing that stuff outside so tell me a little bit about yourself how long have you been flying the b-52 five years in the b-52 now or closer to six but five years here up in Minot how do you like it it's a lot of fun I tell you what the b-52 requires a lot of actual flying as opposed to a lot of newer airframe oh that's nice well what I'd like to do is just kind of do a walk around and kind of talk about some of the salient features of this plane are you cool with that yeah absolutely hi let's go see we're standing here in front of the monster engines on the b-52 captain ARP and tell us about these things all right so we're standing in front of engines number one and two the b-52 which iconically has eight of these TF thirty-three turbofan engines now we've been seeing these guys take off all day long and they're super smoky what's going on with that generally because these are a slightly lower efficiency engine this year than you're used to seeing today and what you're seeing is actually a little bit of the imperfect burn coming out of the back of the engine we can carry up to 290 thousand pounds of gas as a full fuel load so just in comparison my super-awesome Subaru Crosstrek holds a whopping 16 gallons that's a whole lot of Subarus in that plane right there and you guys refuel in the air all the time yeah no big deal very typically on most training stories and definitely on any sort that we're taking out any further than outside of the continental US that's awesome well let's keep walking around because there's way more that we want to talk about we're in the bomb bay right now and this thing this looks really super scary what is this so we're looking at here is called a conventional rotary launcher it's actually one of the newer features that we have and it allows us to drop JDM and other precision guided munitions where we actually have the capability to talk to the weapons from the bomb bay whereas what we used to do is only release our gravity weapons so really no concern no inertial guidance no any kind of guidance out of the bomb bay so this gives us the capability now to launch smart weapons out of the bomb bay and allows us to really increase the overall amount of smart weapons so all these plugs literally get plugged into the weapon and then the weapon in the plane talk to one another that's correct so all these there's a plug in every single one of the eight stations which can carry up to a 2,000 pound smart weapon so each one of these plugs actually allows the weapon to talk to the aircraft and allows us to program into that weapon in flight where we want it to go taking a tour around this aircraft got me to thinking how much of the aircraft is original well everything you're looking at on the outside is actually from the 1960 yeah the tech on the inside has been replaced but considering there's no Boeing store you can go to and say hey I need a new front landing gear maintaining this old girl for over 50 years is impressive Oh big difference though the tail so one of the things I really wanted to point out was this guy the tail ours is a b-52 B which means it's got quad 50s in the back this has got nothing what you definitely notice here is absolutely correct they've removed the gunner position and it really kind of came about when we realized that there's really not much more at gunner can really do for us in the way of Defense with long-range missiles and stuff like that to defend against a gunner really isn't gonna take care of that I am loving this I could spend all day checking this out but I really want to see the inside can we go to that well as you can see behind me Matt we've got a little bit of active maintenance going on so we can't check it out right now but we can come back later and when we do I'm gonna bring out a full b-52 crew and they can show you around the crew compartments and talk to you a little bit about what they do and seriously okay I can probably wait for that maybe waiting for the b-52 crew to get ready I headed out to the flight line to watch some b-52s take off man to actually see these guys fly was amazing big yes a bit smoky yeah but what do you expect from a plane that your grandfather could have flown in back inside dock 8 it was time to meet up with our ppens crew and get a tour of the inside of the plane up first we join captain Henry in the cockpit this really doesn't look that much different than the aircraft that we have at the Museum no and it wouldn't she's she's got some new tricks but she has not changed a lot as far as just the the aesthetics internal to the jet so we have our you know our 80 eyes altimeter is VBI things you would expect to see in a you know your normal aircraft but as far as systems are concerned some of your systems that keep the the jet operating we have our hydraulics off to the left-hand side there and then you get your instrumentation right here for what's going on with the engines you got oil pressure up across the eyebrow panel here we've got electric software right here inside here as well so kind of some-some big picture systems it does look so similar to what we have in our in ours is literally the second-oldest yep it really does look look the same but this this old girl still has some teeth on her and goes out and does the mission so yeah well like they say this is your grandfather's b-52 it really is well thank you so much I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna climb around and see some of the other positions okay sounds great Matt have a great time okay Sara where are we well Matt we are in the electronics suite of the b-52 so we also have the retired gunner position sitting next to me we are upstairs facing backwards behind the pile in the copilot all right so what exactly do you do as an Evo obviously with a great car behind me a lot of my equipment is classified but what I do my primary mission is defense of the jet and defense of the crew if you go around the world each country has surface-to-air missiles better known as Sams and when they want to take a shot at an aircraft that's thousands of feet in the air they have to radiate with a radar each threat system has an original sound to it and we study those so that we can identify it as soon as possible onboard so when you say you listen to it are you getting a tone yeah so we have our headset on we get audio a lot of people in our career field we'll call it the beeps and squeaks and once I determine what threat or Sam that is I probably the appropriate jamming package to it so when they do take a shot hopefully they miss so literally through the beeps of the squeaks you can go okay that's an sa 21 or whatever correct Wow so you're pretty good at your job are you I try to be there's a lot of studying oh I bet well and you've got a lot of people counting on you exactly so this is the only crew compartment that has one individual so there's a lot of pressure writing on it but you also get a lot of reward too because you're the one who's gonna bring the crew home very cool thank you okay so I'm now in let's just face it a black box yeah cool and I'm with newly minted captain Kingfisher certain gratulations on the promotion happy so tell me what you do down here in this very tiny black compartment yeah so this is the we call the offense compartments where the navigators of the weapon systems officers sit we work together because a lot of times we'll be trying to navigate and employ weapons at the same time hence two people down here it's didn't get kind of busy but yeah it's a kind of a primary thing is to navigate and work with the weapons I noticed that you guys have the same kind of tunnel situation that we have do you guys ever go back there's that just kind of sealed up since there's no gunner oh we go back there not on every flight but yeah when we need to when you drop weapons out of the bay for dropping you know like 27 gravity weapons out of the bay we don't always have a way to verify that all of them released and that we don't have any weapons still back there okay so in that case what we'll do is we'll descend down and we'll depressurize and then we'll send one of our crew members one of our weapons qualified members back through that door and we'll go back into the bomb bay and make sure all the weapons are gone and then we call back here and you know I think the Lord was still alive ya know it's it's not too bad how's it like flying in this box you know I love it it's one of the things you get used to I mean there's a lot going on in here I'm sure there's a lot going on you don't have windows we have a floor which works on those jets so you can kind of get something of a picture outside for the most part in your banking and turning and it's dark down here it's fun I I like it I enjoy it I would I don't want to do anything else though well excellent well I am going to stay here for the next month or so I think the camera crew might go out and film other stuff but it was actually like good enough moon down you lay down and sleep this Oh seriously oh I am totally moving in yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll be just fine this is an aviation icon a timeless aircraft that has been literally flying for generations from crawling through the second-oldest b-52 in existence to watching active b-52s take off at Minot Air Force Base and even taking a tour inside with a full crew we've taken you behind the wings of the b-52 Stratofortress [Music] benign fun ha I can't talk in the cold Captain Archer

Channel: Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum

Views: 343,193

Rating: 4.8209791 out of 5

Keywords: B-52, B-52 Stratofortress, Stratofortress, BUFF, Behind the Wings, RMPBS, Behind the Wing, B52, Wings Over the Rockies, Air and Space Museum, Matthew Burchette, Minot, Minot Air Force Base, Scott Hennelly, Ben Theune, Bombers, B-52 Bomber, Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Museum, Minot North Dakota

Id: 2szWRgM3WfA

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019