Fresh Start 2002: Nonstop Flight

That judicious mix of original and updated equipment is one element of the B-52's longevity. Another is a simple stroke of luck: The remaining B-52s are all H-models, the most advanced of the eight versions that the Air Force bought. None of the H-models saw service in Vietnam; instead, they were standing "nuclear-alert" duty on runways in places like South Dakota. So the current fleet is old by the calendar, but young in terms of something more important: flying hours. What's more, today's B-52s average only 300 flight hours a year, about what an ordinary passenger jet does in a month. "At Boeing," says Scot Oathout, the company's B-52 project manager, "we like to say, 'The only thing old about the B-52 is the name.' "

But that's not only not quite true, it's also a disservice to Boeing's plane. Most of the airplane -- ribs, fuselage, wings -- is original equipment. It's the systems, from air-conditioning to weapons, that are new. In fact, the B-52's survival would be less impressive if the plane had simply been rebuilt, chunk by chunk, into a modern version of itself. But it hasn't.

The physical division of the crew compartment in the B-52 represents the balance of stability and adaptation in the plane. The crew area has two decks. The pilots sit on the upper one. Behind them, facing backwards, sits a defensive-weapons operator. Down a metal ladder, in a windowless chamber located directly below the pilots (nicknamed "the hellhole"), sit two more crew members: the navigator and the bombardier.

Any pilot from 1968, settling into the left seat of the cockpit, would have no trouble firing up and flying the same plane that he used to fly. He would find a few new toys, but nothing fundamental would have changed. Even the engines are the same. A defensive-weapons officer, a navigator, or a bombardier from that era, on the other hand, would very likely have no idea how to operate the equipment at his old station.

Indeed, during the 1980s, in one of the B-52's major upgrades, all of the original bomb and navigation equipment was pulled out of each plane and replaced with advanced computers and avionics. "When it was empty, it was as big as a dance hall down there," says Mike T. enthusiastically of the closet-sized space. "There were so many wires, I thought that we'd never get it back together." The Air Force is preparing a similar upgrade that will replace the plane's Commodore 64-era computers with those from the 400 MHz era.

Find a Flaw and Fix It

The Air Force has been relentless about taking care of the B-52. Every four years, each plane gets stripped down to bare metal and inspected for corrosion and fatigue. Engines, tails, landing gear, bomb-bay doors, wing flaps, and dozens of skin panels are removed. Mike's technicians typically have six B-52s in indoor docks and another two or three outside. Work is planned two years in advance. The current cycle requires 30,000 work hours per plane; the one-page work orders for a single plane fill 21 loose-leaf notebooks. The work gets done in 180 days or less.

The Air Force has also been obsessive about keeping records of B-52 usage. Air Force fliers have a saying: "When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, you can go fly." The B-52, which weighs nearly half a million pounds when fully loaded, is an extreme example. During every B-52 flight, crew members must keep track of everything they do. Take-off weight, weapons carried and released, changes in altitude and speed, and every ascent, descent, in-flight refueling, and landing must be recorded. For years, the records were kept on bubble-in pages like those used for standardized tests. Now crews keep track of the information and record it on a PC after the flight.

The result of such patient accumulation of information is a priceless database, going back 30 years, of the performance of each plane. That database is a critical tool for analyzing what individual planes need and for spotting trends across the fleet. One group of engineers does nothing but try to see into the future of the B-52, imagine ways that individual elements might fail, and develop fixes. These engineers use hundreds of decommissioned B-52s, parked at an Air Force "boneyard" in Tucson, Arizona, as a lab, autopsying old planes to confirm theories about wear and to test new repair methods.

The B-52's original design was forward-looking enough to give the plane adaptability. In 1946, the military's original request specified a plane that could carry enormous atomic bombs from the United States deep into Europe and then back. The result: The B-52 has a bomb bay that is almost as spacious as a boxcar. Each wing is 2,000 square feet -- the area of a three-bedroom house -- and has enormous lifting power. Fully loaded, the plane carries enough fuel to go 8,800 miles.