just ahead the inevitable question off of the pass this is not a green screen people often wonder they often ask today mega-projects the b-52 Stratofortress is these subjects and let's crack on [Music] the date is the 25th of June 1955 it's not but let's imagine it is for the sake of storytelling preparations runs away at the castle Air Force Base which is 125 miles east of San Francisco East is that way it's mirrored so yes okay I always screw that up this is gonna be the inaugural thright of a true monster as it's eight engines roared into life this fearsome mechanical dragon took to the skies for those watching that day few would effort envisions that 65 years later the same enormous design would still be in operation and would have transformed aerial warfare the b-52 stratofortress which is the most epic name of any airplane ever I think unless they do like a mega fortress or something it won't be surpassed it is become more than just an airplane like the Spitfire in the UK and the Russian mig-21 it reached iconic status long ago this is a story not just about the mechanical wizardry but also the many extraordinary moments that this old workhorse of a plane has been connected with over the years the b-52 has shall we say unkind nicknames that rather aptly describe it which feel entirely unnecessary because the thing is called a strata fortress its official name is already epic some refer to it as the strata Saurus hilarious while more commonly in the airforce at least it's known as buff short for big ugly fat and I'm definitely gonna sleep that out because I like monetized videos this is not an object that is gonna win any beauty prizes anytime soon but that was never why it was designed I don't think many military aircraft are designed to be good-looking it's just like how can we reign death down on terrorists as efficiently as possible yeah essentially this was an airplane that was just designed to wreak carnage now while b-52s are known as these kind of great juggernauts of the sky and certainly in my mind's when I was thinking we should do a video about this I'm like these planes have got to be massive right or as he is they're actually quite a lot smaller than modern jumbo jets at forty nine point zero four meters which is 160 point eight nine feet in length with a wingspan of 56 point 40 meters that's 185 point one feet you could comfortably fit it inside a 747 jumbo jet and then there's it's empty weight which is just over 78 tonnes and that's less than half of that of a passenger airliner in 1956 the cost of a b-52 was about fourteen point four three million dollars which adjusted for inflation because that would be an insane bargain today is about a hundred and eight million dollars by 1962 as models have been improved on the cost had come down to nine point two eight million which is around sixty point two million dollars today possibly the only time in history that something military got cheaper on board that's probably not true there's probably a lot of stuff that gets cheaper as technology goes on but you know military's famous for being super expensive on board it carries a crew of five a pilot a co-pilot a weapons system officer and navigator and the electronic warfare officer who definitely has the coolest job it's got bunk beds available for longer missions and even a small kitchen area despite their use for death and destruction these machines have claimed a place in popular culture in the 1960s a popular haircuts known as The Beehive also went by the nickname the b-52 because of its similar cone-shaped design in the 1970s a band calling themselves the b-52s came to prominence and have been together ever since really are they the guys who sing Love Shack butter something right they they're music so what their musics so old I remember it sounds bad they're still together there you go this year celebrates the 65th birthday of the b-52 in terms of longevity and is almost unparalleled with other military equipments but why has it survived for so long and why does the b-52 evoke such pride in some and such utter terrors in others well because one is like part of the giant military machine of the United States and the others you know well they were just having bombs drop something by it [Music] the close of World War two had brought peace but also a determination to considerably expand long-range bombing capabilities yay peace let's build Bombers the US had taken part in bombing raids in both theaters of combats in both Europe and in the Pacific with the latter proving particularly problematic the vast distances involved meant that aircraft carriers or forward refueling points were often needed but these also came with problems while aircraft carriers could not support heavy bombers with their short runways airfields closer to primary targets often have to be captured first in 1946 plans for a long-range bomber were submitted to High Command the original X b-52 design was very different with six engine propeller design instead of the Jets that we see today two years passed before that concept was finally rejected you see the jet age had arrived and high command's they really wanted something completely untested what we see of the b-52 today was essentially dreamt up in a hotel room in Dayton Ohio probably the ever leading edge of aeronautics this happened over a single weekend in 1948 Boeing's chief engineer ed Welles and his design team were in the city on business when they received a call informing them that the propeller design had been rejected Air Force chiefs were now looking to the future and requested an all jet bomber instead I don't imagine they did it so casually like hey guys we need you to swap out the engine it's just not gonna work we need jets Welles and his team worked feverishly through the weekend and slowly a new design to excite a scale model was cobbled together using balsa wood and a 33 page report outlines their hastily constructed idea but it worked Air Force chiefs there were impressed in the first order of 13 b-52s were submitted to Boeing just five years after the end of the bloodiest conflict in human history the United States found themselves in a new war far from home as the situation worsened in Korea those in power eager to push the b-52 forward as the next intercontinental bomber and by 1954 the first tests took place first designed as a high-altitude nuclear bomber they're all slowly adapting with the times I will use the general term b-52 here but they have in fact been 13 different b-52s it would take me hours to compare them all but essentially these models were just slight updates rather than any enormous changes being done extra fuel tanks were added to the wings and changes to armaments took place over time to either increase capacity or to alter what could be carries but structurally much has stayed the same over the course of their 65 year history with the Korean War ending in 1955 with an uncomfortable stalemate it gave the military the opportunity to really test this new Flying Fortress ii after the 1950s advertised both the extraordinary ability of this aircraft but also the horror that it was designed to carry on the 26th of May 1956 of b-52 traveling far above the Bikini Atoll part of the Marshall Islands opens its bomb hatch what fell to earth that day was the world's first air dropped thermonuclear bomb and by the way I've done a whole video about Bikini Atoll on another channel I do called Geographics and talking about the people on those islands you had to move because well the military just wanted to blow it all up with atomic bombs it's extraordinary the nuclear testing that went on there there was this one they dropped a bomb insert this it was like a undergone almost dropped a ball into it and the explosion was so big that it sent an entire ship like a Navy ship up into the air crazy check out that video link below the question mark still remained over b-52 many still doubted its capabilities and whether it was safe enough to take part in long-distance bombing raids with such fearsome weaponry on board so well naturally it was time for the b-52 to prove its worth in the space of less than a decade any doubts over the b-52 were dispelled as it shattered countless flight records this was a time of rising tensions between the East and the West as the Cold War pitted the tube global superpowers against one another the US and the Soviet Union they were both eager to display their military might and the Americans were more than happy to let their beast off the leash between November the 24th and 25th 1956 eight b-52s completed what would become the first of many endurance flights aimed at proving their effective once and for all operation quick kick called first something that never been done before these bombers circumnavigated the entire North American perimeter without stopping and with just four in Air Refueling x' along the way using kc-97 is a much more primitive propeller powered machine now exact times varied from plane to plane but the fastest managed to complete the 13,500 mile journey in just 26 hours a time that most eminent agreed that could have cut down by five or six hours had they been able to refuel with an aeroplane that could match their own speed and just I think it's important to remind us L said that this was occurring in the 1950s it's pretty incredible what you know while war sucks and military spending is insanely high it's pretty incredible what they can accomplish especially the Cold War is like you built this you did all this other stuff that we're definitely gonna cover on this channel in the future so well subscribe but this was just the start operation power flight in Nice 57 saw 3 b-52s complete the first non-stop circumnavigation of the globe which is a distance of 24,000 325 miles and it was done in 45 hours and 19 minutes again with the aid of kc-97 s for fueling doubts about their long-distance capabilities were being answered but still they were pushed further in 1958 a b-52 set the world speed record of 597 point six seven five miles per hour while the single distance record of an unfilled flight was broken and then broken again in January 1962 alone aircraft recorded a mammoth twelve thousand five hundred and thirty two point two eight mile journey without landing or refueling to give you a visual image of that it's still about a thousand miles short of London to Wellington in New Zealand and bear in mind that doing that on a commercial plane these days pretty much doesn't happen very rare at this point it may seem like it was plain sailing or flying but a bum bum for the b-52 fleet but this certainly was not the case between its launch in 1955 and 1959 b-52s were involved in four accidents killing a total of 32 Airmen and destroying five planes if the math seems a little off there it's because two b-52s collided in midair during one accidents these were incredible machines but like many early evolving models they came with a high price sadly these accidents continued through the 60s and early 70s but with these came an entirely different problem now b-52s have been designed to carry nuclear weapons and considering that you must think oh they're insanely safe right and they can never crash with nuclear weapons onboard now if you've seen my other channels you might have seen a video that I've made about this and say no they definitely crashed six times astonishingly the United States has reported six separate incidents in which a b-52 has crashed or been damaged while carrying nuclear weapons four times on US soil and twice abroad so let's just briefly talk about a couple of the more notable incidents on the 23rd of January 1961 at B 50 you traveling above the small city of Goldsboro in North Carolina began breaking up in midair caused by a fuel leak in one of the wings apart from the obvious dangers that this presented to those on board and the population below the major issues that day with a to three to four Megaton mark 39 nuclear bombs that were on board those are enormous nuclear bombs as the plane fell below 2,000 feet and with most of the crew successfully ejecting the two bombs detached themselves and began their slow parachute down to American soil the first was found standing perfectly upright after its parachute had been caught in a tree the second did a muddy field and disintegrated without any detonation it had been a really close call but we didn't find out why so close into 2013 when it was revealed that three of the four arming mechanisms had in fact activated on one of the bombs if that fourth one had activated this is generally considered to be the closest the US has ever come to a nuclear disaster to give you an idea of strength what was traveling above Goldsboro that day was 250 times more powerful than what fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki now the second example was worse but it still falls well short of an all-out disaster a collision between a b-52 and a refueling tanker Nepal Moroz in Spain in 1966 once again left nuclear bombs plummeting unplanned down to earth of the four on board three fell on land and one fell in the sea two of those on lands fell near the small fishing village of Palmas and detonated their conventional explosive but not their nuclear payload so I'm Zin a nuclear bomb I believe is theirs the nuclear core and then you have this conventional explosive which pushes in on it and then explodes the it causes nuclear fission I suppose fortunately that didn't work out just the traditional explai the conventional explosive exploded nevertheless despite it not causing fission it did still spreads all that plutonium around the place in fact a square mile was contaminated an enormous military effort got underway to recover the bombs and despite clearing efforts over 40 years later there are still small traces of radiation in the area by this point the United States was a war again and the b-52s were pushed into a very different kind of bombing than what they had been designed for the Vietnam War posed a very different set of challenges and by 1965 many of the b-52s that undergone modifications commonly known as big-bellied in which their payload was greatly increased while their external capacity stayed the same at 24,000 500 pounds that's 227 kilograms or 750 pounds that's 340 kilogram bombs their internal capacity jumped from 24 to 84 for 500-pound bombs or from 27 to 42 for 750 pound bombs these modifications boosted their capacity to a total of 60,000 pounds using a hundred and eight bombs and I really feel it's important that we give a bit of an illustration of just how much carnage that can cause this vast capacity was actually a problem it was regarded as too destructive a formation of six b-52 bombs dropping their full capacity load together at the effect of something close to a tactical nuclear weapon as a result they were initially used to target the Vietcong in sparsely inhabited areas perhaps one of the most iconic image over the Vietnam War is video footage showing a steady stream of bombs descending to the Vietnamese countryside from b-52s the horror that these drones inflicted during their carpet bombing tactics is truly unimaginable in more modern times b-52s flew the first modern military sorties in Operation Desert Storm as coalition forces began to strike targets within Iraq and Kuwait that night two planes codenamed storm 1 and storm 2 left Barksdale Air Force Base in the United States their 20,000 mile round trip remains one of the longest active military flights in history and despite coming 300 foot from hitting a Saudi Arabian airliner above the Mediterranean it was seen as a great success the active role has continued with missions in Iraq nearly fifteen years later and also in Afghanistan and in Syria all the most famous and yet truly bizarre stories involving the b-52 came in 1969 entrenched in the Vietnam War Richard Nixon took an extreme course of action to try and break the deadlock in October a message was indirectly passed to the Soviet Union stating that a madman was on the loose and that all US military forces had been ordered to full readiness a fact that was never reported to the American people the madman in all of this was actually President Nixon who seemed to have come to the conclusion that by presenting himself as a crazed lunatic willing to do anything to end the war he might in fact be able to force the Vietnamese to the negotiating table for three consecutive days a squadron of b-52s flew patterns along the Soviet border complete with a full arsenal including thermonuclear bombs and that's kind of scary considering how many of them crashed be like whoops we bombed Russia finally the president called off the mission and the planes returned to base on madman theory had failed much like Nixon's presidency this may have been the most blatant attempt to intimidate the Soviets and their North Vietnamese allies but it was not the only one between 1960 and 1968 Operation chrome-dome called for multiple b-52s to be airborne at once all fully arms and patrolling a set route which essentially circumnavigated the US and Canada but more importantly drifted really close to that Soviet border it's fair to say that there are few military machines that have walked the perilous line of nuclear war so closely but luckily for all of us you never came to that the fact that this model is still in operation is a true testament to its ingenuity while boeing has manufactured more than 740 b-52s it's thought that only about 75 remain today of these hardy stalwarts their average age is around 55 and so you might be thinking now well that's near the age of retirements but well no currently the US Air Force plans that the b-52 will still be used until 2045 that's not to say they'll be on the front lines until then and with a new b21 under construction it's likely that the role of the b-52 will decrease over time but while they can't match modern planes for speed or stealth these monsters will still rule the skies for now at least that's a hundred years of service that's insane a plane that was designed in the 1950s and flying in the 1950s will still most likely be flying in almost a hundred years later but these planes have always been great innovators and this still continues well into the 21st century in September 2006 b-52 became the first military aircraft in the u.s. to fly using alternative fuel 50/50 blend of synthetic fuel and conventional JPA jet fuel to begin with this was only used in two of the eight engines but on the 15th of December 2006 of b-52 climbed into the sky with synthetic fuel powering each of its eight engines the seven-hour flight was deemed a huge success and led to the Department of Defense assured fuel initiative a goal of reducing crude all usage the point where half of its aviation fuel would use alternative sources by 2016 it's not immediately clear if this has been achieved yet and with a change of administration in the White House it's difficult to know if this is still a priority also the planes have been upgraded while on the outside they may resemble an aging grandfather inside they've been equipped with the latest technology new engines installed have increased efficiency and range while it's weapon systems today would be unrecognizable to those who first sat inside the planes in the 1960s so the b-52 is rightly known as the ancestor of modern long-range bombers so herculean aircraft boasting records and impressive statistics but we shouldn't shy away from their dark side during the Vietnam War they came to symbolize two things yes military might but also death which one you think of probably depends on if you were watching it on TV or standing below as those Bombay doors opened and he'll descend it in terms of other mega structures it may seem small perhaps even in significance but the b-52 deserves its place in the pantheon of mechanical creations with many approaching their 60th birthday and still flying strong one particular phrase rings true they just don't build them like they used to sorry guys I really hope you enjoyed that video the b-52 Stratofortress epic plane epic named 100 years of service quoting will be a hundred years of service quite incredible if you like this video please do smash that like button subscribe this channel is obviously new so subscribing makes a big difference it uh it lets me know that you're actually liking this channel obviously leave a comment all of that good stuff and well thank you for watching [Music]
