Posted on Feb 20, 2015
TSgt Joshua Copeland
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This is one reason!

A B-52H Stratofortress takes off after being taken out of long term storage Feb. 13, 2015, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz. The aircraft was decommissioned in 2008 and has spent the last seven years sitting in the “Boneyard,” but was selected to be returned to active status and will eventually rejoin the B-52 fleet. The B-52 was flown by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Greg Steele)

This bird is now sitting on the ramp down the street from my house.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-ghost-rider-b-52-rises-from-the-grave-to-ride-aga [login to see]
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Responses: 6
SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL
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Edited 10 y ago
TSgt Joshua Copeland, another persons junk is somebody's else paradise. Is the way in the U. S. Army Transportation Corps. Make "waste do with haste". When I was in Iraq, it was how we made mission and did our jobs driving M915s all over Iraq/Kuwait from 2003-2005. The Outlaw days of the War. Simply you just had to survive, boneyards were our bedrock to success, because the system was backlog(maintenance). O2 priority parts took forever and on a seniority basis.
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CPT Hhc Company Commander
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Beautiful!!!! Another weapon that should remain in the USAF Arsenal for many years.....right alongside the C-130 and A-10.. .
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Lt Col Aerospace Planner
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Edited 10 y ago
We signed the start treaty the only so many strategic bombers would be in active service. The Start treaty is so serious that Russia sends a delegation to verify that static displays are no longer flyable. I actually seen this once where Russian officers where inspecting the b-52 on display by the gate at Grand Forks. We also do the same thing with theirs as well.

We mothball them to be replacements when one becomes unserviceable or is lost. Back in 2008 we lost a b-52 in the pacific near Guam. We lost a B-2 in Guam after takeoff the crew bailed out of the 2 billion dollar plane. We can not build a new B-2 since all of the tooling was scrapped. There has not been tooling available to make a B-52 since the late 60's. So we can take a mothballed bomber that had relatively low flying hours because it sat on a ramp most its life on alert and bring it back to service for a one to one swap.

At some point the B-2 will be past it's service life due to the amount of missions they have flown in the past 30 years which is why it will retire sometime in the next decade. When that happens we will have more than triple the amount of of BUFFs that we will be able to legally reconstitute to fly another 50 years.
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TSgt Joshua Copeland
TSgt Joshua Copeland
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Lt Col (Join to see), it is START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and we are now on what is called New START. The Russians show up every couple months here. We actually have a GS position that all they do is deal with New START.

The BUFF crew that went down was one of ours. RAIDER21
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Lt Col Aerospace Planner
Lt Col (Join to see)
10 y
A theory was that they had runaway stab trim while practicing a standard rapid decent profile making the aircraft virtually unrecoverable from a nose down attitude.
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TSgt Joshua Copeland
TSgt Joshua Copeland
10 y
That is what the SIB found, could not id a cause of why.
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Lt Col Aerospace Planner
Lt Col (Join to see)
10 y
Probably either a malfunctioning trim switch on the yoke that did not disengage when released, or the jack screw sheered or separated from the retaining bolt. Most likely the aircraft accelerated into the critical Mach regime. This causes a phenomenon called Mach tuck which basically prevents any pitch control. As the plane accelerates it's gets worse as it forces the aircraft to pitch further nose forward is some cases. It's almost unrecoverable in all cases and is known as the "death dive."

Chuck Yeager was the first to experience this during his initial attempts to break the sound barrier. He discovered the traditional control surfaces which almost every subsonic plane uses are ineffective in the critical Mach area. This is why fighters move their entire horizontal stab verses having a fixed stab with an elevator that moves independent from the stab. He found out by using his trim which moves the entire rear stab that he was able to control pitch. Heavies use this for trim to this day versus having a little tab on elevator like a Cessna 172. In theory if you use your trim you might be able to get out of it. Without trim available it's a done deal unfortunately.
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