on the news why dont we all ways see the B-52 and B-2 but they dont show the B-1b that often

From Wikipedia (gotta love it)

Partial retirement
A total of 100 front-line aircraft were produced at a cost of over $200 million each. After several write-offs, 93 remained by the turn of the century. In 2003 the USAF decided to retire 33 of the B-1Bs to concentrate its budget on maintaining availability of the remaining aircraft, although in 2004 a new appropriations bill called for some of the retired aircraft to return to service. In 2004, the USAF returned seven of the mothballed bombers to service, giving a total force of 67 aircraft, with the rest cannibalized for spares. Five of the seven that were brought back to service went to Dyess AFB in Texas, one to Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, and another to Edwards AFB in California. In 2005, The Pentagon announced the closing of Ellsworth AFB and the transfer of all operational B-1s to Dyess AFB. However, on August 26, 2005, it was announced that Ellsworth AFB would remain open thus no transfer of Ellsworth's B-1s would occur.

So. They are still around, but not in any large numbers.

B-1B = 67

B-52 = 85 active, 9 reserve

B-2 = 21

Youngiceman87,

The B-1 is (or was) a maintenance nightmare with more redball issues and harder maintenance than any other heavy in-inventory until the B-2 arrived with it's tape-and-putty issues.*

You can't hardly change and engine without jacking up the entire aircraft and installing jury struts into each bay.
You can't hardly /get at/ the majority of the DAS (may have changed since they stripped it down from 120 to about 15 LRUs)
The aircraft used to leak like an SOB.
It didn't have a civil ILS or indeed lot of FAA required IFF/TCAS related stuff.
It had hydraulic issues with the wings, the gear and one of the weapons bays.
They had tire issues with mainplies separating at high gross ramp weights.
Ten years on from the Penetrator Trials, OAS was still generating faults in the flyup software about once every 15-20 minutes and the APQ-164 was getting to be 'pretty unique' for parts.
One of the wing commanders decided to 'turn off' SMCS and cost his aircraft almost 5,000hrs in accumulated fatigue on the forwards fuselage frames and longerons before they figured out that was 'really not such a great idea'.

And then there are the terrible TSFC and flight performance issues inherent to too much weight on too little a wing and not enough goose for the moose. Which also effected the type's adaptability to large conventional stores loads at efficient profile altitudes for any real distance. I've heard 800 and 1,200nm radii at 14,000ft as being typical with all three bays fully loaded with Mk.82 CWMs.

Dumb Iron which /takes forever/ to recock because of the inherent flaws in the CWM, it's few numbers and the limited availability of reloader trailers to service it on the jet.

Of course (last I heard) the type was also not qualified with any of the main standoff weapons and indeed /would not be/ until JASSM cleared trials on tacair first. This means that one of the principle 'win-hold-win' justifications of strat-air is going to be very hard to justify once the BUFF goes as, without CM and only a partly functional DAS, the Bone is very much a _low threat_ area penetrator.

Obviously, the jet is not a SIOP contributor anymore which also means the residual AGM-86B and AGM-129 inventories are worthless without the BUFF.

It's just a very bad beast that was transmogrified so many times during development that what finally escaped Dr. Moreau's laboratory was not really worth the money thrown at it to achieve rapid standup of a SIOP penetrator replacement mission whose role justification was itself highly dubious at the time Reagan decided to out-spend the 'Evil Empire'.

As old as the B-52 is, it is a more flexible weapon carrier with more clubs in the bag and more useful mission profiles available to it. The B-1B is almost as decrepit and it's less than half the age.

It therefore is, and probably will remain, a ramp-umbrella for as long as we don't have the money to go to a single-type replacement for all three (monumentally expensive cost of ownership) strat-air types.


KPl.


* I /hear/ that they got the types spares pipe fully funded ONE year. And that readiness factors as a function of available utilization rates across the Dyess BW component squadrons went up to about 80-85%. But it was only at the 'request' of Congress for an ORI type proof of capability. And it required stripping Kansas and Snowville of every maintainer and part that they could canbird send south for the experiment. Or maybe it was North. I forget.

The B-1 was actually one of the easiest engine changes I ever worked on. That was about the ONLY good thing about the plane when it came to maintenance. The biggest problem with them is that they had a serious electrical shortage. They should have had four generators, but to save weight on them they took out one generator. This caused a problem where they had to choose systems to run. Like on takeoff and landing, they had to choose between nav and icing. Most of the time this wasn't a problem but in bad weather conditions they would end up with a serious icing problem along the intakes and you'd get ice going down the engine.

The B-1B turned out to be the ultimate maintnence nightmare for the Air Force. With the B-2 achieveing operational capibility, the Air Force has cut the B-1 fleet and grounded many planes, with the whole fleet grounded on several occasion due to problems with the wings and engines. As KPI said, The B-1 no longer flies SIOP, so it has lost most of it's role. In fact they are moving the B-1 to the reserve fleet because they are no longer mission tasked to support STRATCOM (Post cold war sucessor to SAC). The B-1 lack of reliability is one of the main reason why the Air Force is looking for a new bomber.

Tim

[edit on 1-5-2006 by ghost]

well at least the US has 67 B-1B's. russia only has 16 blackjacks and I would be interested in just how often those are flyable.

Originally posted by Canada_EH
well at least the US has 67 B-1B's. russia only has 16 blackjacks and I would be interested in just how often those are flyable.

their are 5 I think

All this talk about the B-1 being a maintenance nightmare and that it's a piece of crap comes from a bunch of uninformed fools. First off it is a very complicated jet which does mean that it requires a lot of maintenance. Partly due to it having 4 afterburning engines, swing wings and probably the most advanced defensive systems in the inventory, but at ellsworth we recently saw a 93% mission capable rate, and when we have gone to war with this jet I doubt that it's missed more than 1 or 2 vul periods in all the recent wars/conflicts whatever you want to call them. I have also been to a red flag and watched maintainers change out an entire engine and have the jet ready to fly in one hour.

As far as the B-52 being a more capable and flexible jet YOU ARE WAY OFF! The B-1 carries more guided and unguided weapons than the B-52 and we have a better bombing system. As far as the CALCM/ALCM and not being qualified for it we are not currently, but that is due to the START treaty, we were originally qualified to carry everything internally and externally. And yes we do have external hard points on the b-1 that we can carry munitions on but again due to the START treaty we are not allowed to use them. Besides why do we need those old weapons when we have JASSM and JASSM ER?

By the way we are not going to be moved to the reserve fleet, right now we are the platform of choice for most conflicts. This is due to our long loiter times, high speeds, low level (Terrain Following) even at night or bad weather, large payload of guided weapons (24 gbu-31's), our ability to defeat enemy defenses, and many other reasons.

Yes the B-1 flight has been grounded a couple of times due to some one time oddities on single jets, that required them to do a maintenance review of the entire fleet which showed that the problem was only on that single jet. The Jet just like any other had it's growing pains when it first came out, but it's a solid platform now. As far as the generator thing we don't need 4 we do fine with three in fact we are fine with 2 generators, when we only have one generator it gets a little hairy but the jet will fly just fine.

Also this rhetoric about the B-1 having no countermeasures and a partially working DAS and only a low threat penetrator is just straight up B.S.. I personally know dudes that have flown this jet into some pretty serious threat environments and come back to tell about it. This was due to the jets defensive capabilities and aircrew abilities.

Any other questions or clarifications that you need let me know!

I am FAR from uninformed. I've helped work on them, and I have much experience working with the crew chiefs. The CREW CHIEFS are the ones that told me what a nightmare they can be, and that there is no such thing as a Fully Mission Capable B-1B. We had FIVE broken parked on Hickam one night. Two with engine changes, and three with blade changes. Four were the result of taking off out of Singapore in bad weather and not having deicing available, and one had been flying with the HIANG in early December, and had an egine go down before they left to go home for Christmas so they left it and came back in January to fix it.

The B-1 could have been a great plane, and isn't a BAD plane. But it's NOT an easy plane to work on, and it still has a bunch of issues to deal with.

I'm not sure that you are that informed because it was my squadron that was in guam and they never flew with the HIANG. And true we don't have deicing in the B-1 but we do have anti-ice. Also the reason that they left the jet there was we were swapping out squadrons and we leave the jets there for our sister squadron.

As far as the never been a fully mission capable B-1, not one bit if truth to it. We've had fully mission capable B-1's flying in every conflict for the last 8 years and they have performed outstanding, in part because of our outstanding maintainers. It's true that in every day training flying that we won't take jets for certain maintenance issues because there's no reason to take a chance just for training, but when it comes to war all bets are off.

The B-1 is a great plane and I guess if the only exposure you've had to it is around Guam then I guess I can see why you think it is a nightmare, because Guam is like the blackhole of the B-1. Every time we fly into Guam we break I don't know why, but we do. In fact I've spent 45 days on Guam with a jet that was broke, now granted the 45 days was not all due to the jet being broken, 2 typhoons came through and tankers cancelled on us multiple times, but Guam is a nightmare for the B-1. It fly's great out of everywhere else.

As far as other issues to deal with not sure what you are talking about. It's a great jet that fly's all the time and brings more payload and flexibility than any other jet to the fight. look at some of the statistics about how we flew one or two percent of the missions in conflicts and dropped close to 50 percent of the munitions. No other jet out there can carry 24 2000lb bombs or 84 500 pound bombs and still go super sonic for more than a couple of minutes. You may think that it's a nightmare but with the payload I just listed you would have to get at least 12 F-16's, 6 F-15E's, or 2 B-52's mission capable to carry the same amount of munitions that a single B-1 can employ. Think about it 1 B-1 has 4 F-16's strapped on to it's wings so yes it's tougher maintenance wise. How hard is it to keep one f-16 flying let alone one jet with 4 f-16 engines and systems strapped to it?

Since when is Hickam on Guam? Last time I checked it was in Hawaii, and Hawaii ain't anywhere NEAR Guam.

Not to mention 25 years on a flightline, turning wrenches with crew chiefs, and them telling me all sorts of things about the planes. (Not all 25 on B-1s obviously, but a pretty good bit of time on them when they came through.)

As far as the no FMC B-1s, you can have a Partially Mission Capable plane with something seriously minor wrong with it. I've seen PMCM planes put on the board, because the IFR lights didn't work. But since they didn't they were still PMCM. Or the third backup radio didn't work, etc.

As far as the one left at HICKAM (might wanna double check where that is btw), it was a Kansas ANG bird. They had been in for three weeks or a month flying with HiANG, with 5 jets, took four home, left one there over Christmas and came back in Jan when the other four came in broke, with an engine to change it. I know because I was in the cockpit with them when they did the engine run.

[edit on 5/16/2006 by Zaphod58]

Originally posted by B1 WSO
The B-1 is a great plane and I guess if the only exposure you've had to it is around Guam then I guess I can see why you think it is a nightmare, because Guam is like the blackhole of the B-1. Every time we fly into Guam we break I don't know why, but we do. In fact I've spent 45 days on Guam with a jet that was broke, now granted the 45 days was not all due to the jet being broken, 2 typhoons came through and tankers cancelled on us multiple times, but Guam is a nightmare for the B-1. It fly's great out of everywhere else.

You're quite the comedian. So does that mean that the reason the F-15 will go out of service soon is because it can't fly to Brazil or something?

I take it you're also going to say that the original reasons for the F-4 going out was because it can't fly to Tokyo.

B1 WSO,

>>
All this talk about the B-1 being a maintenance nightmare and that it's a piece of crap comes from a bunch of uninformed fools. First off it is a very complicated jet which does mean that it requires a lot of maintenance.
>>

Yeeeeap, when those engines fall on farmer Brown's North 40 it generally does hurt public relations.

>>
Partly due to it having 4 afterburning engines,
>>

Which have been breaking their fans since 1989. Still doing 100hr swirl tests? Of course then there's the B-52 with eight, none of which have had a major upgrade done to them as the F101-GE-102 has required. Or the B-2 which flies almost twice as high and has an /ungodly/ compression mixing and AOA factor on it's daggerlets. But god knows, you'd better have burning, you use the supersonics /so/ often and you wouldn't be able to match either the predecessor or the followon for _short runway_ capability (the original 'dispersal so they have to nuke half the country' municipal airport justification back in the LRSA days) if you didn't.

>>
Swing wings
>>

Snicker. Hit any pelicans recently? Overtorqued the spline shaft and driven one through the intermediate aft tank? Had a fuel line cut loose and burn for 20 minutes because there were no fire warning sensors in that part of the jet? Failed to sweep altogether so you had to use Eddie's Patch to slam down on?

Of course the REAL laugh is the 10-14,000ft refuel altitude at anything /like/ useful mission weight.

>>
And probably the most advanced defensive systems in the inventory
>>

Bwuahahaahhahahahahah! Ohoho, please, my ribs! Having gone from 120 LRUs down to 34. And another 15 on the chopping block for Blk.F? Having strapon'd a /F-16/ generalist RWR with about half the bandwidth coverage and NONE of the ELS capabilities that the ALQ-161 was supposed to have native? With the SPO itself admitting that the ALQ-161 was not up to spec for the original 1980's mission spectrum and likely /never would/ be capable of matching the 1990's spec? Tell, oh wise sir, does the TWF now see through the jet to provide forward quarter warning? Can it see passives or hojam threats? Can you even /hear/ Bands 1-3 without the 'new and improved' (ALQ-135 mod) lowband system that isn't yet paid for? The ALE-50 is basically a dumb repeater which radiates to every putz who cares to listen. Yet it takes upwards of 200 sends to prime the bird because the aeroacoustics off the back of the jet are -so violent- (witness the number of VGens you constantly replace). The ALE-55 'smart' jammer cannot even be MOUNTED because the snake whipping sheers the tether. Heck, even when it was 'all there' the ALQ-161 antenna system was rumored to have serious problems getting adequate beam steer from altitude (once we came up out of the weeds where only SIOP could live) that was part of what Mod-2 was going to fix. No Money=All-Vapor. So that now you are a flying lighthouse or...nothing. So much for the DSUP eh?

>>
But at ellsworth we recently saw a 93% mission capable rate, and when we have gone to war with this jet I doubt that it's missed more than 1 or 2 vul periods in all the recent wars/conflicts whatever you want to call them.
>>

How many jets? How many months? Was it a Surge-Ex and how long did you spend replenishing the parts lockers once you were done playwarring? How many of those GTW scenarios had you dropping more than dumb 82s? How many of those were against REAL threats? How many tankers did you suck dry making the run to /Kosovo/ from _Blightey_?

>>
As far as the B-52 being a more capable and flexible jet YOU ARE WAY OFF! The B-1 carries more guided and unguided weapons than the B-52 and we have a better bombing system.
>>

More as in more numbers or types? Over what radius? With something like 80,000lbs of penetration gas, you are looking at 2 bays with CWM and an aux tank. That's 52-56 Mk.82. Or about 16 JDAM. Depending on whether they still have the MER rail or are all HSAB'd, a BUFF can match that. A B-2 can beat it.

Can you mount an EO aperture? Oops, there goes your LGB. Do you have a DL capable standoff missile (i.e. Has JASSM with datalink even been cleared from a Bone?)? Can you carry Harpoon? Can you carry mines? Can you carry ANY weapon externally in that 165 decibel slip stream? How many jets was it that had the pylon wiring and DR units? Oh, /that's right/, TWO! How many even RAN with the AGM-86 configured bay? ONE! As bad as the Bone's airfoil AOA and power limitations are there is no reason to kid around about it EVER being an external carriage machine, you just cannot afford the drag and L@D hits. Similarly, the AGM-129 is so damn fat that you can't even load more than four per CRM and guess what? NONE WERE EVER BOUGHT FOR THE FLEET. This makes sense given as the total clearance program was 2 internal shots for the ALCM and about 20 carriage-only trials for the ACM.

The APQ-164 has lousy range resolution (about what an F-15E can achieve at 40nm) and 'minor antenna control software' upgrades asside, this led the folks doing the OIF attacks to do their LAR calcs and runin timings with the Fujitsu PDAs strapped to their legs rather than trust the mighty OAS systems for dropping JDAM. Indeed, you couldn't have even live-folder boot strapped that well except for the BLOS datalink. Which B-52s took into OAF in 1999.

They sent 28 B-52Hs to Diego, 4 B-2As and 11 B-1s. Reason? The B-52 could stay longer with more gas, fly higher and cost about half as much to maintain per flight hour.

CONCLUSION:
Assuming you are a B-1 WSO (only because the DSO is now a monkey-flips-switch position) you would know all of the above. Don't snowjob these poor people. They get enough crap dumped on them by their ever loving federal government as is. Stratcom is a joke. Our bomber fleet is a joke. Even so, the only reason the B-1 is even mentioned is because it looks sexy.

Supersonic jet bombers


1) maximum speed

XB-70 Valkyrie 3309 km/h
Suhoi T-4 3200 km/h
BAC TSR2 2390 km/h
Mirage IVA 2340 km/h
B-1A Excalibur 2333 km/h
Tu-22M "Backfire" 2327 km/h
B-58 Hustler 2230 km/h
Tu-160 "Blackjack" 2220 km/h
M-50 "Bounder" 1950 km/h
Tu-22 "Blinder" 1510 km/h
Tu-98 "Backfin" 1365 km/h
B-1B Lancer 1330 km/h


2) rate of climb

BAC TSR2 15240 m/min
B-58 Hustler 5280 m/min
Tu-160 "Blackjack" 4200 m/min
B-1B Lancer 3600 m/min
Tu-22M "Backfire" 900 m/min


3) ceiling

XB-70 Valkyrie 23575 m
Mirage IVA 20000 m
Suhoi T-4 20000 m
B-58 Hustler 19300 m
B-1A Excalibur 18000 m
B-1B Lancer 18000 m
M-50 "Bounder" 16500 m
BAC TSR2 16459 m
Tu-160 "Blackjack" 16000 m
Tu-22M "Backfire" 13300 m
Tu-22 "Blinder" 13300 m
Tu-98 "Backfin" 12750 m


4) engine thrust

Tu-160 "Blackjack" 980 kN
XB-70 Valkyrie 800.71 kN
Suhoi T-4 628 kN
B-1B Lancer 547.69 kN
B-1A Excalibur 535.44 kN
M-50 "Bounder" 498.04 kN
Tu-22M "Backfire" 490 kN
Tu-22 "Blinder" 323.8 kN
B-58 Hustler 277.2 kN
BAC TSR2 273.4 kN
Tu-98 "Backfin" 186.4 kN
Mirage IVA 141.22 kN


5) weapons payload

B-1B Lancer 56700 kg
B-1A Excalibur 52050 kg
Tu-160 "Blackjack" 40000 kg
M-50 "Bounder" 30000 kg
Tu-22M "Backfire" 21000 kg
Suhoi T-4 20900 kg
XB-70 Valkyrie 9070 kg
BAC TSR2 9000 kg
Tu-22 "Blinder" 9000 kg
B-58 Hustler 8820 kg
Mirage IVA 7250 kg
Tu-98 "Backfin" 5000 kg


6) maximum range

Tu-160 "Blackjack" 12300 km
B-1B Lancer 11998 km
B-1A Excalibur 9810 km
B-58 Hustler 7600 km
M-50 "Bounder" 7400 km
Suhoi T-4 7000 km
Tu-22M "Backfire" 7000 km
XB-70 Valkyrie 6925 km
Tu-22 "Blinder" 4900 km
Mirage IVA 4000 km
Tu-98 "Backfin" 2440 km
BAC TSR2 1850 km


7) production

Tu-22M "Backfire" 497
Tu-22 "Blinder" 311
B-58 Hustler 116
B-1B Lancer 100
Mirage IV 66
Tu-160 "Blackjack" 35
B-1A Excalibur 4
Suhoi T-4 4
XB-70 Valkyrie 2
BAC TSR2 2
M-50 "Bounder" 2
Tu-98 "Backfin" 1