Belly flop

What happens when you do a wheels up landing of a B1B?

You close the base

Nice pics. Any word on if the accident was mechanical or pilot error?

IIRC it was a hydraulic failure that caused the gear to not be deployable.

Is that plane hashed now? It looks like a ton of damage, especially with the underslung engines which would have dragged the whole way down.

Nope, it's fixable. Replace the radome, NLG doors, engines, and any internal damage and it's flying again.

I agree they just lift it up and moved it...
I guess the structural integrity was ok

HowardRoark,

>>
You close the base
>>

Which is moronic to say the least. If there had been an active ops schedule they would have either:

1. Required the pilot to use the last half of the monster runway (12-15K I thinK?).
2. Ditched the aircraft over recoverable water or water too deep to recover.
3. Bulldozed the entire plane, defueled and with safed weapons, off the side of the runway.

DG _did not_ 'close for cause but rather convenience'.

What bugs me is that they didn't have options to blow the gear down with a high pressure accumulator bottle on a once-vented type basis. The nose gear looks like it should come down and lock on gravity and slipstream. I seem to recall the mains have a more complicated turn-and-extend process but should also have more than a single-circuit hydraulics backup.

Of course this isn't the first time either. I remember a certain scene with a Bone running down half of Eddies dry lakebed when they couldn't work out how to get the NLG to come down.

Yet after all, these were SIOP aircraft designed to 'make us safer' by dispersing to local runways with less than 10,000ft of length so that the Russians would also have to mushroom half of ruralia. Not to mention 'recovery to Turkey' or whatever, post multiple-EMP.

SURELY you would build some majory redundancy into such a 'primitive field' strategic nuclear operational capability?

Yeah, yeah, don't call you Shirley.


KPl.