A retired U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress nicknamed 'Damage Inc. II' was recently taken out of storage at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group's 'boneyard' at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and disassembled before beginning its journey eastward across the country to be partially reassembled for research and development purposes. Now the stripped-down 'BUFF' is on the road and drawing huge amounts of attention.
They're retards for not cutting that fuselage in half.
ReplyDeleteAs a default the gov't always finds the least efficient way of doing anything.
free money is easy to waste
the mission controller had to be democrat. retard proper name plate for the lad.
DeleteAwsome name.
ReplyDeleteThe Chanute Aerospace Museum (now closed) in Rantoul Illinois, used to have a nose and cockpit section of a B-52 you could climb and sit in. Even that small section of that bomber was massive. That third photo only gives you a little sense of the scale of the thing.
ReplyDeleteI was there in 1985 and loved walking the (closed) flightline with all of the aircraft on display.
DeleteYou would think they would figure out to make the axle part of the trailer into a truck. Mount it on a swivel. At tight turns, cut the swivel loose, have a do driver walk alongside and steer the back truck while the front end pivots the lead and the rear end drives straight. When the front end is mostly aligned with the road turn the rear truck around the corner, get everything lined up, lock the swivel and set the trailer drive axles to free wheeling. Reduce all the intersection blocking.
ReplyDeleteI could be wrong but in one of the photos in one of the articles it looked like the trailer's axles were steerable.
DeleteHere's how loggers would have moved it-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da6SwBa7yX8
Look at that traffic jam in the first pic.
ReplyDeleteIdiots.
I was just wondering why they didn't use rail.
ReplyDeleteThey should have used the original builder for the move. Boeing moves huge assemblies from their Auburn, WA facility to the Everett, WA plant.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering why they didn't just, y'know, fly one over.
ReplyDeleteIt couldn't be that much harder or more costly to refurb one enough for a short one-way flight than disassembling one and trucking it there.
This as a bag-of-hammers stupid as trucking a cruiser to Montana.
Oh, wait, government X military.
That explains everything.
It had been retired for several years and would have been far more expensive to make it airworthy than the two-plus million it cost to truck it.
DeleteAlmost all of them have been retired for several years.
DeleteThe problem is spending two million dollars for anything, as if the data - any data - you'd get from a brokedick old BUFF was unobtainable any other way.
Only Hollywood and the government are this stupid, because they're the only ones who burn other people's money by the trainload.
Looks like the front dolly has its own pivot for the float, separate to the tractor's hitch. Looks like the rear dolly is steerable, I think it would pretty much have to be to navigate those city corners.
ReplyDeleteThat front dolly is what's called a jeep, standard issue on 9 and 11 axle lowbed configurations.
DeleteI used to work for the defense division of Emerson Electric, in St. Louis. The had the tail section of a B-52H parked out back, because they designed and built the ASG-21 tailgun system (search & tracking radars, Vulcan 20mm). They had aircraft structural fabrication capabilities and as I understand it, they also built the bomber's entire tail cone (minus the vertical and horizontal tail surfaces), for Boeing's later integration with a newly-constructed fuselage.
ReplyDeleteWhen I came aboard the AWADS radar system (for C-130) was the hot project, and they acquired the nose of a boneyard ex-Coast Guard Hercules. We made mock-ups of the two-dish antenna (pencil-beam and fan-beam) and the R/Ts, for two different frequency bands. One R/T lived in the nose-wheel well, and the other lived on a shelf above the antenna, enclosed by the radome. That nose section was priceless in terms of getting the design right, and for use in design reviews with the customer.
Since the boneyard had sawed the nose off behind the cockpit one could easily see its structure, and I was very impressed by the thickness of the belly skins. It's no wonder the C-130 is such an impressive short-field, unimproved-runway performer. The obvious weight of the structure also made appreciate the power of a modern aircraft engine.
There have been many improvements - in efficiency of aircraft design, materials, aerodynamics, electronics, etc., but I wonder if any single one of those can top the contribution made by powerful, lightweight, and compact engines.