The “Looking Glass” & B-52 “sentry” missions followed a similar pattern as SAC owned the airframes and established the procedures.
As fond as I am of the Air Force, they need to can the B-1, B-2, F-22, and F-35 and start buying good, reliable aircraft that aren’t going to get the people who fly them killed.
]]>Which brings up the point that the original B-2 design lacked a couple of the finer things of life like, well, like a toilet. There’s a small space behind the seats barely bigger than the luggage area of a Cessna, and now they carry a “hassock” type portable toilet, but when you sleep, you sleep in your ejection seat.
As far as the control system goes, there have been problems with the control system for close to 20 years. It was patched and kludged to sorta work and a replacement control computer system was authorized ten years ago but the current control system is still rather unstable. That might have something to do with why the Air Farce is punching the clock on aircrew training rather than having aircrews do shorter-range missions with lots of takeoffs and landings, which are pretty much the only place aircrews actually do anything in big fly-by-wire ships of this sort.
Finally, regarding forward-positioning aircrews for the B-2, there’s a big difference between the C-135 and the B-2. With a C-135, your aircrews will run out of flight hours (max hours they can safely fly) before the C-135 needs a trip to the maintenance depot for service. With a B-2, for each flight hour the thing needs an hour of maintenance at one of the only three maintenance depots available (Diego Garcia, Guam, or Missouri), so you run out of bomber flight hours before you run out of aircrew. So forward-positioning an aircrew for the B-2 doesn’t make any sense. If you flew a B-2 from Guam to Diego Garcia, the aircraft would be in the maintenance hangar for over a day before being able to fly stealthily again, so there’s plenty of time for the aircrew that flew it out there to get some sleep and get mission-ready. The thing really is a flying Edsel, other than the stealth capability it simply makes no sense for any mission that we fly today. Its turnaround time is so terrible that you could fly a hundred B-1B or two hundred B-52 missions in the amount of time it took to fly ten B-2 missions assuming you had twenty of each kind of aircraft available to you. That’s just pathetic…
]]>It’s pretty stupid buying single airframes that cost more than the entire Air Forces of most countries.
They may station advance crews at Anderson and Diego Garcia, which requires flying in a bird for them to use to stay current. We did that with the RC-135s, had crews deployed around the world without aircraft. It means you have a lot of semi-trained crews with too much time on their hands.
]]>Of course, the other question is: What’s a B-2 doing taking off from Guam? It could be shuttling back to Missouri, it could be on its way to Diego Garcia, or it could be on a routine training mission to keep its pilots’ hours up. The USAF is mum on the answer to that question, which makes me think it was on its way to Diego Garcia (note that there’s only three airfields in the entire world with the capability to handle the B-2, so those are the only alternatives).
So the next question after *that* is, what are B-2’s doing at Diego Garcia? There’s no targets for them there, unlike Guam, which is where our aircraft for attacking North Korea are based in case North Korea does the crazy thing of attacking South Korea (crazy because in this case, it’s unlikely China would intervene when South Korea’s much better trained and equipped army and air force smashed North Korea’s peasant army and reunited the country). But a B-2 is useful only for penetrating enemy air defenses. And the only target in the Middle East that has air defenses is… uhm… Iran? Hmm….
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