8 ms·

As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has t

As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked on or even seen in person, and it holds a certain "alternate reality" mystique for me.

Enginerrrd 2y ago
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. As someone that has managed engineering teams for large projects, I 100% agree. One of the issues with computers IMO is that it has made bad engineering easier. Back when you had to check everything with a slide-rule, you had a real appreciation for the skill and engineering prowess and experience to make things absolutely dead simple.
- bdamm 2y ago
  True, but also modeling and iteration does lead you to unexpected solutions that can in turn solve complex problems that you couldn't have imagined could be solved. Landing rockets being an easy one, but that kind of iterative approach has been put to work in all kinds of fields.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  One of the sources of this, which is now over, was the exponential increase in computing power. You could add complexity and your code would always run faster anyway, one of the popular benchmarks saw worse results on average than last year which never happened before. There are a lot of reasons for it some more speculative than others, and clearly computers will get faster in the future. But still. No longer can software engineers arbitrarily add bloat and just get away with it. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/new-benchmark-shows-cpus-are-getting-slower-for-the-first-time-in-history-what-is-going-on https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/new-benchmark-shows...
- Zeetah 2y ago
  One of my favorite things is in the watch world, every mechanism besides showing time is called complication. When one talks about a feature, or an item as a complication, just the act of doing that forces one to be more deliberate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology)
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I like to say that whatever the complexity is, it is in the nature of the problem itself and isn’t something that’s open for us to design. Only when we design a solution we risk introducing complication. Of course, we can always choose to solve the least complex problem.
Syonyk 2y ago
> ...especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. The engineer-type brain is very much prone to "... in order to prove we can," as opposed to "Because we should. Or because this is useful. Or because this even does the job claimed." Across a range of fields. A/B testing "engagement hacks" falls into this category, as far as I'm concerned. It was certainly successful at the stated goals.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  When the project started a Mach 3 strategic bomber that out of the reach of surface to air missiles, and that could hit multiple targets on its way, was a huge advantage. It was obsoleted by ICBMs and better antiaircraft weapons, but it was still a hugely successful development program. It just didn’t provide a useful plane, but helped develop all the parts for future ones.
rqtwteye 2y ago
"Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy." That's what worries me about a lot of the shiny, super high tech, super expensive weapons systems of the US. These are fine against an overmatched enemy when you can fly back to a safe place for doing the necessary maintenance. This may change when there is a war against a capable enemy that can strike closer to home. The US has always had the advantage that the homeland was safe but that may change in the future. And once you lose a B-2 bomber it's very hard to replace.
- nradov 2y ago
  It's literally impossible to replace a B-2 bomber: the production line was shut down years ago and much of the supply chain no longer exists. Existing B-2's (there are only 19 still in service) will be gradually replaced by new B-21 Raiders. One of the long standing problems with US defense procurement is that they build a batch of something, then cut off all orders and dismantle the production line in order to free up funds to develop a successor model. This is tremendously risky because it leaves a gap of many years when it's impossible to replace attrition losses. If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21.
  - FpUser 2y ago
    >"If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21." Assuming the US would actually need B21 capability in a war with China. Those will be probably blown up from the sky very fast. Besides I doubt wars with China and / or Russia will be limited to conventional means. Will probably escalate to nuclear very fast and then everybody is royally fucked.
    - runjake 2y ago
      I think any war with China would be predominantly economic and cyber. I don’t think it’s viable for either party to perform a mainland strikes and I don’t think it would become nuclear, but who knows. If things escalate during the current POTUS’s term, I think it will come down to meetings and deal-makings, because that is POTUS’s passion and preferred way. I think any war with Russia would be, well is, economic and cyber and proxy wars.
gedy 2y ago
I agree with you, but the issue afaik is that B-52 was more flexible whereas the B-70 was basically single purpose and basically obsoleted by ICBMs. B-52s were able to pivot to new roles so have stayed around. I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". Who would have guessed..
- runjake 2y ago
  > I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". That guy may have been me. I was pretty bummed, but quickly learned about its awesomeness (avionics-wise, anyway).
  - gedy 2y ago
    Ha, at Lowry in 1993?
    - runjake 2y ago
      Yep, up until January 1993 or so. "SRAM Howell" ring a bell?
      - gedy 2y ago
        Ah I got there 1/93 so may have missed. I remember going to "fundies", getting called "pinger", etc. Good times.
        runjake 2y ago
        Nobody can understand our fear of washing out and moving to the other side of the dorm to become a food handler and serving your former avionics classmates breakfast. This happened a lot while I was there.
        gedy 2y ago
kjs3 2y ago
Not to make this thread about the B-52, the thing has been operational long enough for 3 generations from one family to fly it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430802/David-Welsh-B-52-Air-Force-Capt-Daniel-Swoop-Welch-piloting-plane-father-flew-Cold-War-grandfather-flew-Vietnam.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430802/David-Welsh...
rmnwski 2y ago
I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?
- retrocryptid 2y ago
  not really.
- runjake 2y ago
  They look the same to a layman, but they are very different airframes, with a different wing sweep and different load capabilities, among many, many other differences.
  - rmnwski 2y ago
    of course the b-52 is a completely different airframe. Just wondering what the reasons are you wouldn't be able to convert airliners to be used in that role. It's been done for fire bombing!
- aerostable_slug 2y ago
  There was thought given to using 747s as cruise missile carrier aircraft. Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Which was an interesting idea, but it eventually evolved into a much much better one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      Rapid Dragon is using cargo aircraft for cruise missiles.
lizknope 2y ago
I was watching a documentary about 20 years ago and they said "It may not be your father's air force but it may be your father's air plane."
jiggawatts 2y ago
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. Which sounds good, but the B-52 planes used eight very old jet engines each that are complex to maintain. Rolls Royce offered to replace these with four modern turbofan engines but were turned down. They finally relented and there’s a new program that will run to the end of the 2030s(!) to replace the eight engines with… eight engines. This doesn’t sound simple, or cheap. I keep pointing out to people that if a real world war broke out, every country with a commercial wide body fleet will immediately convert them to bombers. Far cheaper, far simpler to maintain, and with much faster turnaround times / lower maintenance hours per flight hour.
- nradov 2y ago
  It's always disappointing to see such uninformed and yet overconfident comments on HN. Replacing the eight small B-52 engines with four larger ones was considered and rejected years ago because it would have forced much more extensive modifications to the airframe and other systems. https://www.twz.com/6825/engine-falls-off-b-52-during-a-training-sortie-over-north-dakota https://www.twz.com/6825/engine-falls-off-b-52-during-a-trai... And it's extremely difficult to convert civilian airliners into bombers. The pressure hulls aren't designed around bomb bays and they lack external hard points. Even though the P-8 is based on the 737 the design had to be extensively modified to accommodate weapons through a major program lasting years. The resulting aircraft are new production, not modifications of airliners.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    You're saying that my argument that "8 engines is not simple" is invalid because... it would not be simple to replace them with modern efficient engines... because there are 8 of them. Yes. We agree: the setup is not standard, not simple, and requires 2x the maintenance that 1/2 the engines would for decades and decades. Older and established isn't necessarily "simpler" or "cheaper". The average annual maintenance cost of a B-52 is $70 million. The maintenance cost of a 747 or a similar sized plane is more like $4 million, and they operate far more hours than the B-52 fleet. A commercial plane equivalent to a B-52 costs something like $200M to purchase new, which is just three years of maintenance for a B-52! Sure, sure, the out-of-the-box default for a commercial wide-body airliner is not immediately usable as a strategic bomber, but it's not that hard to add a bomb bay, in-air fuel port, etc...
hi_hi 2y ago
I am in awe of anyone who worked on bringing forth such projects into the world. In the mean time, in my little corner of the world, a team of people are struggling to conjure up a relatively "simple" website.
zppln 2y ago
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I don't know anything about B-52s, but I work on a project where we are essentially replacing a 40 year old weapon system with a new one. The new one should of course do the same things, preferably better, and do additional new things. The old system started out simple, but has since had most of its internals swapped both hardware and software wise a number of times. We have full access to all the documentation of the old system, but let's say there has been periods throughout these 40 years where this aspect hasn't exactly been top priority. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that projects like JSF end up a complete clusterfuck. Everyone tends to underestimate the complexity of the system they operate/produce after a while because most of it is always there and just works.
- freen 2y ago
  There’s an urban legend in NYC that every incoming mayor since something like 1890 gets a letter, handed down from mayor to mayor, signed by all of the mayors, that says something like, and I am guessing here, but it is supposedly a very short letter: Do not #%{>€!# with the sewer system. You may be tempted to, because it works so well it is invisible, to reduce its budget, or to overhaul it, or something. Do not. Fund it. Hire extremely competent people to run it, and do not replace them. Do not #%*|!%# with the sewer.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
They have one at the Air Force museum in Dayton. I highly recommend visiting it for anyone interested in this stuff. It's an amazing museum, and it's totally free!
- 6stringmerc 2y ago
  When I saw it, an SR-71 was parked under one of its wings. Talk about a stellar presentation of aviation engineering magnificence.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    That's a YF-12, not SR-71 but indeed very similar
- technothrasher 2y ago
  They don't have "one". They have the only one. The other one built crashed in 1966. The one in Dayton is all there is.
- adzm 2y ago
  https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195767/north-american-xb-70-valkyrie/ https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact... I'm not really into this kind of thing but this museum is truly fascinating; I second the recommendation wholeheartedly
  - rsprinkle 2y ago
    Not only is the museum itself awesome (and free), they are also responsible for almost every US warplane on display around the world. You can download a spreadsheet from their website showing where planes are on "loan".
- holuxian 2y ago
  One of my favorite photo renderings of the XB-70: https://erik-simonsen.pixels.com/featured/xb-70-valkyrie-under-the-stars-erik-simonsen.html https://erik-simonsen.pixels.com/featured/xb-70-valkyrie-und...
anovikov 2y ago
Well, as i understood it has failed because it could no longer provide the main benefit over B-52 it was initially intended to provide: high-altitude penetration - over it's development time, engagement envelope of SAM systems expanded in altitude and speed so much that even XB-70 could no longer hope to get through. So it wasn't any better than B-52, except much pricier. It could also get to the target faster, but for applications where time of flight was critical, nothing could beat an ICBM anyway. They switched to cruise missiles - to keep B-52s out of harm's way, and low-altitude penetration (B-1B), then when radars became capable of discerning things vs ground reflections too well, they switched to stealth - but Soviet Union fell apart before they knew if it could work or not. So it's not about any technical failures of XB-70 itself, just that it turned out to be unable to do the job it was planned for. Wrong?
- ben7799 2y ago
  This seems unlikely just because the SR-71 never got hit with a missile. They might have been afraid of the XB-70 getting hit but it likely never would have just because it turned out to be so hard to hit things at 70,000+ feet traveling at Mach 3+.
Animats 2y ago
A good look at the XB-70. No narration, just highly detailed pictures.[1] The XB-70 looks like nothing that came before, and nothing after it looks like the XB-70. Six engines side by side in the tail. It looks like a 1950s concept for a spaceplane. It was apparently a good aircraft, but expensive and didn't fit any military need of the time. (The need for high-altitude supersonic bombers declined once surface to air missiles got good enough to hit them.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GhYBVM7UHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GhYBVM7UHQ
jajko 2y ago
KISS should always be #1 engineering principle, in any engineering. In software one I can speak a bit, the unnecessary complexities always bite back. Maybe not the creator of them, but given company always. Or as one quite bright guy said - 'this should be as simple as possible, but not simpler'. But its borderline boring, nothing shiny, nothing to sell new subscriptions or trainings for, nothing to get promotions for, things that just keep running (TM) slip out of focus. Look at how brilliant engineers handle boredom and routine - usually very, very badly. Its not what 'hackers' want to do, despite thats exactly what all normal companies want to get. Unprofessional for sure, but when most of potential and otherwise brilliant employees have issues with this, they tend to get some slack.

Enginerrrd 2y ago

> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. As someone that has managed engineering teams for large projects, I 100% agree. One of the issues with computers IMO is that it has made bad engineering easier. Back when you had to check everything with a slide-rule, you had a real appreciation for the skill and engineering prowess and experience to make things absolutely dead simple.

bdamm 2y ago
True, but also modeling and iteration does lead you to unexpected solutions that can in turn solve complex problems that you couldn't have imagined could be solved. Landing rockets being an easy one, but that kind of iterative approach has been put to work in all kinds of fields.
colechristensen 2y ago
One of the sources of this, which is now over, was the exponential increase in computing power. You could add complexity and your code would always run faster anyway, one of the popular benchmarks saw worse results on average than last year which never happened before. There are a lot of reasons for it some more speculative than others, and clearly computers will get faster in the future. But still. No longer can software engineers arbitrarily add bloat and just get away with it. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/new-benchmark-shows-cpus-are-getting-slower-for-the-first-time-in-history-what-is-going-on https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/new-benchmark-shows...
Zeetah 2y ago
One of my favorite things is in the watch world, every mechanism besides showing time is called complication. When one talks about a feature, or an item as a complication, just the act of doing that forces one to be more deliberate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology)
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I like to say that whatever the complexity is, it is in the nature of the problem itself and isn’t something that’s open for us to design. Only when we design a solution we risk introducing complication. Of course, we can always choose to solve the least complex problem.

Syonyk 2y ago

> ...especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. The engineer-type brain is very much prone to "... in order to prove we can," as opposed to "Because we should. Or because this is useful. Or because this even does the job claimed." Across a range of fields. A/B testing "engagement hacks" falls into this category, as far as I'm concerned. It was certainly successful at the stated goals.

rbanffy 2y ago
When the project started a Mach 3 strategic bomber that out of the reach of surface to air missiles, and that could hit multiple targets on its way, was a huge advantage. It was obsoleted by ICBMs and better antiaircraft weapons, but it was still a hugely successful development program. It just didn’t provide a useful plane, but helped develop all the parts for future ones.

rqtwteye 2y ago

"Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy." That's what worries me about a lot of the shiny, super high tech, super expensive weapons systems of the US. These are fine against an overmatched enemy when you can fly back to a safe place for doing the necessary maintenance. This may change when there is a war against a capable enemy that can strike closer to home. The US has always had the advantage that the homeland was safe but that may change in the future. And once you lose a B-2 bomber it's very hard to replace.

nradov 2y ago
It's literally impossible to replace a B-2 bomber: the production line was shut down years ago and much of the supply chain no longer exists. Existing B-2's (there are only 19 still in service) will be gradually replaced by new B-21 Raiders. One of the long standing problems with US defense procurement is that they build a batch of something, then cut off all orders and dismantle the production line in order to free up funds to develop a successor model. This is tremendously risky because it leaves a gap of many years when it's impossible to replace attrition losses. If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21.
- FpUser 2y ago
  >"If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21." Assuming the US would actually need B21 capability in a war with China. Those will be probably blown up from the sky very fast. Besides I doubt wars with China and / or Russia will be limited to conventional means. Will probably escalate to nuclear very fast and then everybody is royally fucked.
  - runjake 2y ago
    I think any war with China would be predominantly economic and cyber. I don’t think it’s viable for either party to perform a mainland strikes and I don’t think it would become nuclear, but who knows. If things escalate during the current POTUS’s term, I think it will come down to meetings and deal-makings, because that is POTUS’s passion and preferred way. I think any war with Russia would be, well is, economic and cyber and proxy wars.

gedy 2y ago

I agree with you, but the issue afaik is that B-52 was more flexible whereas the B-70 was basically single purpose and basically obsoleted by ICBMs. B-52s were able to pivot to new roles so have stayed around. I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". Who would have guessed..

runjake 2y ago
> I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". That guy may have been me. I was pretty bummed, but quickly learned about its awesomeness (avionics-wise, anyway).
- gedy 2y ago
  Ha, at Lowry in 1993?
  - runjake 2y ago
    Yep, up until January 1993 or so. "SRAM Howell" ring a bell?
    - gedy 2y ago
      Ah I got there 1/93 so may have missed. I remember going to "fundies", getting called "pinger", etc. Good times.
      - runjake 2y ago
        Nobody can understand our fear of washing out and moving to the other side of the dorm to become a food handler and serving your former avionics classmates breakfast. This happened a lot while I was there.
        gedy 2y ago

kjs3 2y ago

Not to make this thread about the B-52, the thing has been operational long enough for 3 generations from one family to fly it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430802/David-Welsh-B-52-Air-Force-Capt-Daniel-Swoop-Welch-piloting-plane-father-flew-Cold-War-grandfather-flew-Vietnam.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430802/David-Welsh...

rmnwski 2y ago

I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?

retrocryptid 2y ago
not really.
runjake 2y ago
They look the same to a layman, but they are very different airframes, with a different wing sweep and different load capabilities, among many, many other differences.
- rmnwski 2y ago
  of course the b-52 is a completely different airframe. Just wondering what the reasons are you wouldn't be able to convert airliners to be used in that role. It's been done for fire bombing!
aerostable_slug 2y ago
There was thought given to using 747s as cruise missile carrier aircraft. Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Which was an interesting idea, but it eventually evolved into a much much better one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    Rapid Dragon is using cargo aircraft for cruise missiles.

lizknope 2y ago

I was watching a documentary about 20 years ago and they said "It may not be your father's air force but it may be your father's air plane."

jiggawatts 2y ago

> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. Which sounds good, but the B-52 planes used eight very old jet engines each that are complex to maintain. Rolls Royce offered to replace these with four modern turbofan engines but were turned down. They finally relented and there’s a new program that will run to the end of the 2030s(!) to replace the eight engines with… eight engines. This doesn’t sound simple, or cheap. I keep pointing out to people that if a real world war broke out, every country with a commercial wide body fleet will immediately convert them to bombers. Far cheaper, far simpler to maintain, and with much faster turnaround times / lower maintenance hours per flight hour.

nradov 2y ago
It's always disappointing to see such uninformed and yet overconfident comments on HN. Replacing the eight small B-52 engines with four larger ones was considered and rejected years ago because it would have forced much more extensive modifications to the airframe and other systems. https://www.twz.com/6825/engine-falls-off-b-52-during-a-training-sortie-over-north-dakota https://www.twz.com/6825/engine-falls-off-b-52-during-a-trai... And it's extremely difficult to convert civilian airliners into bombers. The pressure hulls aren't designed around bomb bays and they lack external hard points. Even though the P-8 is based on the 737 the design had to be extensively modified to accommodate weapons through a major program lasting years. The resulting aircraft are new production, not modifications of airliners.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  You're saying that my argument that "8 engines is not simple" is invalid because... it would not be simple to replace them with modern efficient engines... because there are 8 of them. Yes. We agree: the setup is not standard, not simple, and requires 2x the maintenance that 1/2 the engines would for decades and decades. Older and established isn't necessarily "simpler" or "cheaper". The average annual maintenance cost of a B-52 is $70 million. The maintenance cost of a 747 or a similar sized plane is more like $4 million, and they operate far more hours than the B-52 fleet. A commercial plane equivalent to a B-52 costs something like $200M to purchase new, which is just three years of maintenance for a B-52! Sure, sure, the out-of-the-box default for a commercial wide-body airliner is not immediately usable as a strategic bomber, but it's not that hard to add a bomb bay, in-air fuel port, etc...

hi_hi 2y ago

I am in awe of anyone who worked on bringing forth such projects into the world. In the mean time, in my little corner of the world, a team of people are struggling to conjure up a relatively "simple" website.

zppln 2y ago

> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I don't know anything about B-52s, but I work on a project where we are essentially replacing a 40 year old weapon system with a new one. The new one should of course do the same things, preferably better, and do additional new things. The old system started out simple, but has since had most of its internals swapped both hardware and software wise a number of times. We have full access to all the documentation of the old system, but let's say there has been periods throughout these 40 years where this aspect hasn't exactly been top priority. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that projects like JSF end up a complete clusterfuck. Everyone tends to underestimate the complexity of the system they operate/produce after a while because most of it is always there and just works.

freen 2y ago
There’s an urban legend in NYC that every incoming mayor since something like 1890 gets a letter, handed down from mayor to mayor, signed by all of the mayors, that says something like, and I am guessing here, but it is supposedly a very short letter: Do not #%{>€!# with the sewer system. You may be tempted to, because it works so well it is invisible, to reduce its budget, or to overhaul it, or something. Do not. Fund it. Hire extremely competent people to run it, and do not replace them. Do not #%*|!%# with the sewer.

CoastalCoder 2y ago

They have one at the Air Force museum in Dayton. I highly recommend visiting it for anyone interested in this stuff. It's an amazing museum, and it's totally free!

6stringmerc 2y ago
When I saw it, an SR-71 was parked under one of its wings. Talk about a stellar presentation of aviation engineering magnificence.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  That's a YF-12, not SR-71 but indeed very similar
technothrasher 2y ago
They don't have "one". They have the only one. The other one built crashed in 1966. The one in Dayton is all there is.
adzm 2y ago
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195767/north-american-xb-70-valkyrie/ https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact... I'm not really into this kind of thing but this museum is truly fascinating; I second the recommendation wholeheartedly
- rsprinkle 2y ago
  Not only is the museum itself awesome (and free), they are also responsible for almost every US warplane on display around the world. You can download a spreadsheet from their website showing where planes are on "loan".
holuxian 2y ago
One of my favorite photo renderings of the XB-70: https://erik-simonsen.pixels.com/featured/xb-70-valkyrie-under-the-stars-erik-simonsen.html https://erik-simonsen.pixels.com/featured/xb-70-valkyrie-und...

anovikov 2y ago

Well, as i understood it has failed because it could no longer provide the main benefit over B-52 it was initially intended to provide: high-altitude penetration - over it's development time, engagement envelope of SAM systems expanded in altitude and speed so much that even XB-70 could no longer hope to get through. So it wasn't any better than B-52, except much pricier. It could also get to the target faster, but for applications where time of flight was critical, nothing could beat an ICBM anyway. They switched to cruise missiles - to keep B-52s out of harm's way, and low-altitude penetration (B-1B), then when radars became capable of discerning things vs ground reflections too well, they switched to stealth - but Soviet Union fell apart before they knew if it could work or not. So it's not about any technical failures of XB-70 itself, just that it turned out to be unable to do the job it was planned for. Wrong?

ben7799 2y ago
This seems unlikely just because the SR-71 never got hit with a missile. They might have been afraid of the XB-70 getting hit but it likely never would have just because it turned out to be so hard to hit things at 70,000+ feet traveling at Mach 3+.

Animats 2y ago

A good look at the XB-70. No narration, just highly detailed pictures.[1] The XB-70 looks like nothing that came before, and nothing after it looks like the XB-70. Six engines side by side in the tail. It looks like a 1950s concept for a spaceplane. It was apparently a good aircraft, but expensive and didn't fit any military need of the time. (The need for high-altitude supersonic bombers declined once surface to air missiles got good enough to hit them.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GhYBVM7UHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GhYBVM7UHQ

jajko 2y ago

KISS should always be #1 engineering principle, in any engineering. In software one I can speak a bit, the unnecessary complexities always bite back. Maybe not the creator of them, but given company always. Or as one quite bright guy said - 'this should be as simple as possible, but not simpler'. But its borderline boring, nothing shiny, nothing to sell new subscriptions or trainings for, nothing to get promotions for, things that just keep running (TM) slip out of focus. Look at how brilliant engineers handle boredom and routine - usually very, very badly. Its not what 'hackers' want to do, despite thats exactly what all normal companies want to get. Unprofessional for sure, but when most of potential and otherwise brilliant employees have issues with this, they tend to get some slack.