Forum: Military Aircraft of the Cold War

This was in the parking lot next to the main building of the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Planes in the parking lot don't have plaques talking about them, but this is the only one (in the parking lot) that I didn't know myself.

(Yes, that is snow, near sea level. Before I took the trip, I was told that this never ever happens.)

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http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/ ... -stratojet

without the snow... Very Happy

(In the 70's, civilian pilots flew a Navy version of the B-47 out of Tulsa to support fleet EW training. I checked one of these guys out in the F-100 when the Tulsa Guard transitioned from C-124's to fighters. Shocked

)

I was lucky enough to see what was as far as I know the last flight of the B-47.

Much of this story is 2nd hand information gathered from others on base after the landing/crash.
We had heard that a B-47 would be flying into Castle AFB from China Lake where it had been set aside in the 60s as a ground target but was never actually destroyed for some reason. Some of the folks from our base participated in getting some of the equipment on board running again including radio and instruments so perhaps we ourselves were partly to blame for what happened next.... Embarassed

On the day of, they pulled straws or made wild promises of 49 virgins or some other evil plot was hatched and convinced an old B-49 pilot to don his flight gear, wake that bird up and fly it out to Atwater CA.
The flight included a chase photo plane and lucky that there was one too considering.
The desert is cruel to old wiring harnesses after a couple of decades of idleness I should add...
The flight was going well when murphy's law started to kick in at some point.
The instruments started acting up and soon they had unreliable airspeed indications.
The chase plane was able to relay airspeed information so that seemed to be solved until some radio problems added to the challenges.

On approach everything looked fine except it wasn't. I think airspeed was too low and the flare out touchdown took place very near the start of the runway. To add to that issue the B-47 uses a leader drag chute followed by a main drag chute. AFAIK, the leader is deployed very soon after touchdown, then the main chute deployed soon after once your firmly on the runway. At least that's how the B-52's play the game. In this case the B-47's lead chute came out followed almost immediately by the main chute while the bird was still about 50' off the ground. A hard landing occurred right away. The B-47 has little outrigger wheels at the ends of the wings but I'm not sure if those are deployed during landing. In any case if they were deployed, they didn't stop the force of the landing from hard scraping one of the outboard engines against the runway.

Everyone walked away so a success by all measures that matter. Applause

The boys and girls in the sheet metal fab shops soon had the engine cowling banged back into shape and the bird rests quietly again in it's permanent home:

http://www.castleairmuseum.org/boeing_b47e.html

.

During it's early years in SAC, the B-47 used to practice a loft delivery of it's nuke payload that amounted to the jet accomplishing a half Cuban 8 (or an Immelman, depending on who ya ask). This led to an abnormal amount of wing cracking from the pullout and SAC discontinued the move. Still....something that big pulling off a move like that? Tex Johnston was smilin' somewhere. Smile

B-47 Loft (LABS) vid on YouTube

LinkF16SimDude wrote:

During it's early years in SAC, the B-47 used to practice a loft delivery of it's nuke payload that amounted to the jet accomplishing a half Cuban 8 (or an Immelman, depending on who ya ask). This led to an abnormal amount of wing cracking from the pullout and SAC discontinued the move. Still....something that big pulling off a move like that? Tex Johnston was smilin' somewhere. Smile

B-47 Loft (LABS) vid on YouTube

Funny,

That video narrator points out that the blast cloud, let alone the thermal and ionizing radiation, from a megaton-size bomb could extend up to 40,000, and be miles across. One wonders if, even with lob-tossing, how many of these sorties would've been one-way missions for the planes and crews.

Maybe Slim Pickins* had the right idea.

-N

*'One forty-fahve calib'r auto-matic with spare mag'zine. One hunr'd dollurs 'n gold bool-yon. One com-binashun Rooskie phrasebook and Holey Bahble. One pair nayhlon stockin's...Shoot, uh fella could havva purty good weekend in Vegas with all this stuff.'

I know for a fact that the B-52 could deliver thermonuclear weapons and survive.

Another point, there's a delivery method call laydown. The F-4 (I believe it was the WRCS panel) could deliver tactical nuclear weapons in laydown mode. This would effectively cause the weapon to descend on a parachute, impact the ground, and detonate at some point afterwards. The aircraft would very likely survive the blast. (This would also dramatically increase fallout, but that's not really the topic of discussion)

Well the jet in the vid was obviously on a training sortie using a dummy shape. But for a real-world delivery I'd suspect the device would be either ballute or parachute retarded in some fashion. So you'd lob this thing from X amount of miles from the target and the ballistic arc and decreased descent rate would give a jet even as big as the 47 a little extra escape time, such at it is.

Forum: Military Aircraft of the Cold War

What plane is this?