
B-52 Bomber Gets Its First New Communications System Since the 1960s - MikeCapone
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/boeing-b52-bomber-upgrade/
======
runjake
The headline is completely inaccurate. The B-52H communications systems have
received multiple upgrades since they were built in 1960-1961.

They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs
and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the
late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system
and the software.

CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a
lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like
this.

Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems
even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were
probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.

~~~
mikeash
I'd wager (and please correct me if I'm wrong, your experience no doubt means
you'd know better than I) that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a
big factor too. The B-52's primary mission was nuclear bombing for a long
time.

~~~
runjake
Yep. Everything is nuke (EMP) hardened. Another bit of trivia: the nuclear
flight crew used to have a lead eye patch, so that they'd have one good eye to
operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.

~~~
glesica

      > so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
    

Serious question, this is quite interesting to me... why? I mean, if the Cold
War had gone "Hot" there likely wouldn't have been anywhere for them to land
(presumably the Soviets would have bombed the bases), they'd have been
basically dead upon takeoff. Seems like they didn't even really need to carry
enough fuel for a round trip, just carry enough to get to the target and fly
faster. Do you know what the plan was for after the bombs went off?

~~~
vilhelm_s
Each plane has more than one planned target, so they need to be able to fly on
after hitting the first one. Early versions (before introducing stand-off
missiles and cruise missiles) carried up to 8 free-fall bombs.

In the outbound direction they would get aerial-refueled over the arctic, so I
don't think they can make a roundtrip. I've read (but don't have any
authoritative sources) that the war-plan called for flying to western europe
at the end of the mission, but that during simulator training they just shut
down the simulator and stepped out after hitting the last target.

~~~
glesica
Ahh, you and another commenter pointed out multiple targets, I supposed that
alone would be reason to need a functioning crew after the detonation. It's
interesting stuff.

~~~
mikeash
It definitely is interesting, in a horrifying sort of way.

Those of us who grew up towards the end of the Cold War (I'm assuming most of
the participants in this conversation fit that) got exposed to nuclear war as
The End of the World As We Know It, a brief, rapid orgy of destruction that
leaves everyone dead. And by the 80s, that was probably about right unless the
superpowers could figure out some way to keep the war limited in scale.

But there were two or three decades before that stage where the situation was
pretty complicated. Nuclear bombs started out envisioned as being an improved
version of the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. (And indeed, neither
Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the deadliest ones.) As bombs grew in number and
power and bombers got better, there was a whole series of moves and
countermoves involving better bombers, better interceptors, better radars,
short-range ballistic missiles, tactical weapons up to and including nuclear
bazookas, ICBMs, ICBM countermeasures, ICBM counter-countermeasures, ICBM
counter-counter-countermeasures, submarines armed with ballistic missiles,
submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes....

There are three fictional treatments of nuclear war which, to my limited and
imperfect knowledge, appear to give a pretty realistic picture of what a real
war would have looked like.

Two, surprise surprise, focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knows
that it came close to a nuclear war, but until I read these, I didn't realize
that it literally came down to a single officer objecting to the launch of a
nuclear torpedo while on a submarine, while two other officers were in favor
and tried to convince him.

Those two are The Cuban Missile War
([http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=...](http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=65071))
and The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust
([http://mrtomecko.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/9/13292665/what_if...](http://mrtomecko.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/9/13292665/what_if...cuban_missile_crisis.pdf)).

Spoiler alert: both end up with the US largely intact and Russian reduced to
an extremely niche language, as the disparity in nuclear arms between the two
nations in 1962 was enormous.

Then there's Warday
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday))
which deals with the aftermath of a limited and quick war in the 80s.

No doubt all three have inaccuracies, but I think they paint a much more
realistic picture of the situation than the more typical "mutants everywhere"
or "literally every single human being dies" treatment.

------
JohnBooty

      According to a March 2014 budget request, the Air 
      Force plans to spend $14 million on the project this
      year, and a total of $40.6 million between 2014 and 2019.
    

I'm ashamed to admit it, but that seems incredibly cheap. I didn't think the
military could change a roll of toilet paper for less than $50 million. (Much
respect to those in the military - I think we're all just used to hearing
about programs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars)

~~~
mikeash
Well, cost effective programs rarely make the news.

Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the
infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an
environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was
actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on,
and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a
few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane.

Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets
reported....

~~~
hga
As I recall, and agreeing with the first link Google supplied
([http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-
the-...](http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-
the-600-hammer/5271/)), the hammer might have been somewhat special, but the
outsized price was simply an accounting artifact, the contract supplied N
spare parts and tools, and overhead was evenly allocated to each part, whether
it was a hammer or a complete jet engine (I think it was a contract for
maintaining them).

The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a _huge_ transport, our biggest
ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of
coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ...
more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot
coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to:

The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a
military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any
modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going
to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval
patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember,
we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt
canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive
restart of only 50 in 1985-89.

~~~
mikeash
The trend is towards building fewer of each type of aircraft, too. For
example, while 744 B-52s were built, only 78 remain in service. Which makes a
$40 million avionics upgrade program pretty impressive. Imagine trying to get
a design and production run of under 100 units of military-grade hardware done
for half a million dollars apiece....

And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when
somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of
more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal
cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about
$150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the
relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece.
Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the
$150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and
wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....

~~~
hga
Heh. While drafting the above I decided to omit WWII production numbers, such
as 18,482 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers (the all time record for a single
type), or perhaps more comparable, as long as we're talking heavy bombers:

3,970 B-25s Superfortresses, which we kept using for a long time, along with a
B-50 upgrade, 370 units.

384 B-36 Peacemakers.

744 B-52 Stratofortresses (but we actually used them in hot wars).

100 B-1B Lancers, although they were built as stopgaps, and the remaining
active fleet of 67 have had their nuclear weapon capability removed.

21 B-2 Spirits, for like the F-22 we stopped production way too early.

Anyway, the problem here is that, someday, we're going to fight a serious hot
war again, and these paltry numbers, which will decline due to wear and tear
and operational losses won't suffice absent it going nuclear. ALL F-15s built
have a nasty problem with a structural defect, what was built was not what was
specified
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15#Structural_defects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15#Structural_defects))
... the F-35 looks like our generation's TFX....

Anyone want to bet the F/A-18F Super Hornet will play the same historical role
the F-4 Phantom II?

~~~
mikeash
I don't see a likelihood for any vaguely symmetrical hot war anytime soon. Who
would we fight? Russia probably doesn't need fighting, just cut off their
trade and wait. China and the US are far too dependent on each other. Europe
wants to be buddies with everyone. Nobody else has the capability. If those
situations change, by the time they do, I think sending manned aircraft into
war zones to get shot at will be an obsolete technique, akin to sending in
battleships to fight an enemy navy after the rise of the aircraft carrier.
Another couple decades of technological advances will change things a lot.

------
spiritplumber
The reason why aerospace stuff sometimes looks dated is that it goes through
an unholy amount of testing -- same for essential nautical equipment. Until a
few years ago, you'd get on the bridge of a cargo ship and see these big LORAN
navigation units built into the console, usually buried under GPS stuff on a
swivel mount... because they liked GPS but wanted to be able to quickly get
back to the system they KNEW worked in case the new stuff didn't.

~~~
omilu
My friend from college was a navigator on a 4 man crew aircraft called the A-6
I believe. Literally his only function in life was to be able to navigate the
plane back in case the GPS failed (using maps and a compass and what ever
else). So to combat boredom he would take his laptop up on every flight and
watch movies and bullshit with the rest of the crew.

~~~
vonmoltke
The P-3 Orion has a periscopic sextant for celestial navigation, in case the
GPS and inertial nav both fail. Granted, the former wasn't around when the
plane was designed, but the Navy keeps them on the aircraft and keeps the
navigators trained in their usage.

Your friend's bird, particularly if he was in recently, was an EA-6B Prowler,
the electronic warfare variant of the A-6.

------
arethuza
So not a CRM 114 then?

~~~
jevinskie
It clearly wasn't reliable enough. The Air Force was sick of starting World
War IIIs. =)

------
bobowzki
The system runs Windows...

~~~
jevinskie
I hope that the reality is that there are Windows PCs on the plane that the
crew can use for mundane things like mission reports (as the article
mentioned). I really hope nothing mission-critical is running on a consumer
OS.

Edit: Are there high-availability versions of Windows? If so, does that
version run Word?

~~~
ceejayoz
> Are there high-availability versions of Windows?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server)

> If so, does that version run Word?

Yes.

------
crististm
So the thing "runs Windows" so they can do "WORD"!? The amount of BS in
government contracts in unbelievable.

------
spacefight
Eternal war and war like capabilities for eternal freedom...

------
lawlessone
Independence day?

[http://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-C...](http://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-CONECT1.jpg)

