Popular Mechanics and the B52

Hi,
A lot less tech post than you guys usually do.

Pop Mech has had a few pretty good aviation related articles, but all magazine websites seem to be suffering these days.

So, they had an article showing a B52 using its wheel steering to take off in a heavy crosswind.

Even had the vid, but then the author speculated that you could probably just wait until the wind died down. ( That sound you hear is General LeMay spinning)

Also did not seem to occur to this guy that the wind might be blowing when you had to land.

Please return to more serious issues.

hj

Salute!

Thanks, Ford. Good review.

I guess the reporter never saw a "flush" exercise we used to do when the cold war was at its height. The horn blared asnd the Buffs across the rwy from our alert pad tried to get into the air fast as they could. They had a pad or button or something they could hit when climbing aboard. Our five-minute alert birds were moving withina minute, but the ones with the nuke Genies had to go thru a buncha crapola. We often thot the buffs would beat us to the rwy.

Then their takeoff, which we saw one time in an ORI. Whew! Crosswind or not, those big things rolled one after another, like 10 or 15 second interval, and would alternately bank away from the rwy heading to reduce the jetwash for next guy. Gotta hand it to them.

Gums recalls....

Grand Forks 66 - 67, 18th FIS Blue Foxes

Even more fun is when you are living in a tent near the end of a runway at a certain SAC dispersal base in the midwest during a Global Shield exercise in 1984 and 6 B-52's scramble at 30 second intervals at 4:30 am. Good times...