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But the real reason I think it deserves this title is sheer longevity, because there are are still several hundred of them flying today -- not in air shows, but out there in the real world, doing work. They're being flown commercially, nearly fifty years after the last one was manufactured. No modern designer has ever managed to come up with a new aircraft which can compete on performance, durability, reliability and price with a leaky old Goonie Bird. Well, how about the best warplane (discounting that the C-47 was such)? Again, there really can't be any question: it's the B-52, and again the proof is in longevity. Airplanes get names and sometimes the official ones stick and sometimes they don't. The superb A-10 "Thunderbolt" is universally known as the "Warthog" and that has nearly become an official name for them. (They're great jets, but they're ugly as all get-out.) Equally, the official but never used name for the B-52 is "Stratofortress", which is an evolutionary name deriving from the B-17 "Flying Fortress" and B-29 "SuperFortress". (Equally, the Navy had the F4F "WildCat", the F6F "HellCat", the F8F "BearCat" and the F-14 "TomCat".) But no-one uses that name for the B-52, and the universal name for them is BUFF, which stands for Big Ugly Fat Fuckers. Which no more betrays contempt than does "Warthog" for the A-10, because in fact the B-52 is very highly regarded in boththe Air Force and in the other services. The "grey ladies" fight on, though the last ones were built in the 1960's. They've been instrumental in the war in Afghanistan, and this report says that they're conducting the bombing of Kunduz right now. Which leads me to ask the question: What of the B1 and B2? We'll take the B2 first; it's easy to talk about because it's useless. They are too damned expensive and require too expensive and complicated of ground support to be practical. They have made a few attacks in this war, but they're flying from Missouri because they can't be deployed forward. So their missions are ungodly long and they have to refuel several times on the way. In practice their contribution has been negligible; they've been used mainly to give their pilots live-ammo training. If they didn't exist the war effort would not be notably different, for everything they've done could have been done just as well, and more cheaply, with other aircraft or weapons. The original plan was to built over 90 of these bastards, at a staggering cost of more than $1.3 billion each, but only about 20 were built and I doubt there will be many more. It was a mistake; it's a plane which came online just as its primary mission became obsolete, and there's nothing it can do for us now that justifies its price. Anything that a B2 can do which we're actually going to need done, a Tomahawk can also do, and for the cost of each B2 we can buy more than a thousand Tomahawks. If the B-52 is the greatest warplane ever deployed, the B2 vies for title of the worst. Then there's the B1, and this one is more tricky. The B1 was originally cancelled by President Carter because he believed what the Pentagon told him about the B2. Reagan revived the program, and now we have about 70 of them. At a paltry $200 million each, they're more affordable (cough). But after they were built, they rapidly became hanger queens. They couldn't be flown safely; it took years of retrofit and redesign to make them usable. As a result, in the Gulf War, the B1 and B2 were the only major aircraft we had which were not involved in the war. Everything else we had was used and served well; the B1 and B2 stayed at home and collected dust. But the B1 did get fixed, and some of them are deployed in the Indian Ocean theater now and have been involved in the bombing of Afghanistan, especially in the early days. On paper it should be a superb replacement for the B-52 (ignoring cost, of course). So why the heck is Kunduz being bombed by B-52's? Well, because the B1 actually isn't a good replacement.
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