A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1953: Vae Victis

 

I am not going to apologise for using this wonderful picture of a B-37 taking off with RATO assist again. Newsweek, "the magazine of news significance," has/had two reasons for existing: It was less louche than Time, and it had good pictures. And, yes, I miss Time's back pages, and might well bring it back after Army-McCarthy. The reason I'm using it again is that the B-47 was kind of a goofy plane, and the B-52 is an upsized B-47.
 

On Christmas Eve, 1952, the "Handley Page 80," now christened the Handley Page Victor, was released from the Secret List. And doesn't Correlli Barnett look pretty much how you imagined him? That is the face of a Tory lout. For all that he has been the bete noire of my literary life, today is the first time I have ever looked at his Wikipedia page, and so it is news to me that he did his national service as a sergeant in the Intelligence during the Palestine Emergency. 

It figures. (On the other hand, he was right, and I was wrong, about the Gulf War, and I have warmed to his description of the invidious role of coal mining in the history of the British economy.) Today, we are on about the shots so blatantly fired by E. S. Stafford against the B-52, as he explains that the advantage of the Victor's crescent sweep wing is that straight swept wings "cannot be used except at very low aspect ratio owing to poor stalling qualities, [and] would look like a Christmas tree with engines and fuel tanks hanging from the wing, and the undercarriage, like a child's scooter, taking up all the useful space in the fuselage. Such a design would be impossibly heavy and out of the running as a long range bomber. As the figures show, practicable wing thickness at a high Mach number can be achieved if combined with [compound, or crescent] sweep." (The Engineer, 9 January 1953 [Vol. 195, N. 5059], 57.)

  

For a British aircraft designer of the halcyon days of yore, E. S. Stafford has not left much of a mark, and I nearly fell out of my chair when I read those pungent words about the Big Ugly Fat Fucker, a plane for which the modern aviation community has unalloyed good feelings in spite of its brutal later career as the hammer of third world freedom fighters. A job which I had no idea that it is actually not very good at doing. (At least compared with the completely hypothetical alternative of the Handley Page Victor, a plane withdrawn from service as a bomber almost sixty years ago, and as a tanker more than thirty.) The scraped picture doesn't do a very good job of showing the planform, but it does capture the way that varying the angle of sweep with the distance out along the wing, Stafford has given the aircraft a thick and wide wing root with room for the engines and undercarriage, and for flaps with the authority to stabilise and manoeuvre the plane. 

All of these things are things which have been said, and very negatively, about the B-52, which might be why it is said to be in trouble in the House as the 83rd Congress prepares to take its seat. The programme will be saved, General LeMay will see to that, but not without difficulties. those references to steerable undercarriage wheel trials on the B-47 are testing the concept for the B-52, where they will be necessary for the BUFF to even take off in a crosswind. As it turns out, Boeing engineers will only be able to implement it as pre-settings prior to takeoff based on calculated wind speeds, not very surprising given how much weight they're supporting. The BUFF will also be rated to fly only straight and steady courses on the grounds that it is a stratospheric jet bomber and will slop around up there at high altitudes anyway, and who needs manoeuvre when your job is to fly over the Greater Moscow Area at 55,000ft and unload a 5 (12? 100?) megaton bomb on it? Does it matter that that turned out to not be its job, at least for very long, given that B-52s have a reasonably good record, Vietnam apart, of not falling out of the sky whilst doing their not very demanding bomb truck job? I guess the question is whether the taxpayer is getting a good return on its 185,000lb empty, 265,000lb gross weight, 488,000lb maximum weight bomber. That's some seriously thick runways we're talking about! 

If some of this seems a bit jejune, you've heard nothing yet. The Boeing story of the origins of the B-52, as it currently exists, begins with the June 1946 requirement for a straight-wing, six-turboprop intercontinental bomber. It was Bob Taft's dream ship, able to exterminate Communism worldwide without the entangling involvement of foreign runways and corrupting European ways. (Or possibly not. Usually in these scenarios, Europe collapses into internal decadence without America even noticing, much less contributing with a sprinkling of atom bombs. To give Taft his due, maybe "Fortress America" is defending itself.)

The first B-52 reflects the postwar fad for turboprop or turbocompound engines with their impressive theoretical fuel economies, and the apparent American need to keep the domestic concrete industry in business. The closest they actually came to existing is the Boeing Stratocruiser, which probably says everything that needs to be said right there, except in the next few months we're going to be seeing the publicity push for the engine that Napier sank its nest egg into in the sad hope of capitalising on all of this ephemeral enthusiasm. By the end of 1947, the Air Force was losing enthusiasm for the 480,000lb (all up), 400mph bomber with the four imaginary engines. Boeing briefly considered a flying wing, which was apparently unpossible and continued to fart around with a "B-29 only bigger" model until, in May of 1948, Air Materiel Command allowed it to experiment with jet engines, because of, according to Wikipedia so that you know I'm not making it up, "improvements in fuel efficiency." Boeing accordingly substituted a new imaginary engine, the Westinghouse J-40, for the original imaginary engine, and submitted the new proposal, which was promptly rejected by Major-General Howard Craig, Deputy CoS, Materiel, for being silly.

"On Thursday, 21 October, 1948, Boeing engineers . . . presented the design of a four-engine turboprop bomber to the chief of bomber development, Colonel Peter Warden." Warden punctured Boeing's turboprop balloon, and, it says in Wikipedia, asked the Boeing team to throw a turbojet bomber  project together. This key moment in the history of Boeing, and thus the modern world, is important enough to have a stylised history of its own. Four engineers and Boeing VP Ed Wells holed up in the Hotel Van Cleve in Dayton, Ohio, which has a Wikipedia article of its own on the strength of this episode,  and, on Monday morning, presented their proposal: An eight turbojet, 180,000lb (empty weight) ship with a 35 degree swept wing to achieve performance requirements, with Stafford's "Christmas tree" of dangling features and "scooter" undercarriage (and outrigger wheels that tend to be cut out of the advertising.) The speed of the proposal had much to do with the fact that the design started with a scaled up B-47. 

Like the Hotel Van Cleve, Colonel Warden gets a Wiki biography largely on the strength of this episode and an excellent obituary courtesy of the Jackson Clarion Ledger, because, apart from pushing the B-52 across the start line, he did not do very much with his life, which is frankly just a bit incredible. The son of an Army general, a considerable leg up in old Army culture, Warden was born had a chequered educational career that culminated with him leaving MIT in 1941 to join the USAAF with an ABD Master's in engineering after three years at MIT, a hectic wartime career on the technical side of the USAAF in the Pacific, promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 1947 at the tender age of 32, and appointment as "Chief of Bombardment Branch, Engineering Division," at Air Materiel Command in Dayton. It was thus newly minted Lieutenant-Colonel Warden who went off script to solicit and approve this gigantic programme, and he would have had to have been an extraordinary individual not to have felt the consequences of this, as in any case he received his next promotion at the eight-year deadline and left the Air Force sixteen years later as a full Colonel at the age of 49 in 1964. 

Corporate historians are going to strenuously ignore the role of elections and wars in all of this, but the fact is that the B-52 reached its next milestone under the pre-Korea Truman Administration, which had at least to cater to resurgent Isolationism, and was finally approved over its Convair rival under the Eisenhower Administration, which also saw off the resurgent threat of the non-intercontinental medium bomber. 

And now it's time for Wikipedia fight: B-52H vs Handley Page Victor!

• Crew: 5; 5
• Length: 159 ft 4"; 114 ft 11"
• Wingspan: 185 ft 0"; 110ft
• Height: 40 ft 8"; 28ft 1.5"
• Wing area: 4,000 sq ft; 2406 sq ft
• Empty weight: 185,000 lb; 89,030lb
• Gross weight: 265,000 lb; 
• Max takeoff weight: 488,000 lb; 205,000lb
• Fuel capacity: 47,975 U.S. gal (39,948 imp gal; 181,610 L)
• Zero-lift drag coefficient: 0.0119 (estimated)
• Drag area: 47.60 sq ft (4.42 m²)
• Aspect ratio: 8.56
• Powerplant: 8 × Pratt & Whitney TF33-P-3/103 turbofans, 17,000 lbf (76 kN) thrust each; 4 × Armstrong Siddeley A.S.Sa.7 Sapphire turbojet engines, 11,050 lbf (49.2 kN) thrust each

Performance

• Maximum speed: 650 mph (1,050 km/h, 560 kn); 627mph at 36,000ft
• Cruise speed: 509 mph (819 km/h, 442 kn)
• Combat range: 8,800 mi (14,200 km, 7,600 nmi); 6004 miles
• Ferry range: 10,145 mi (16,327 km, 8,816 nmi)
• Service ceiling: 50,000 ft (15,000 m); 56,000ft
• Rate of climb: 6,270 ft/min (31.85 m/s)
• Wing loading: 120 lb/sq ft (586 kg/m²)
• Thrust/weight: 0.31
• Lift-to-drag ratio: 21.5 (estimated)

Armament

• Guns: 1× 20 mm (0.787 in) M61 Vulcan cannon originally mounted in a remote-controlled tail turret on the H-model, removed in 1991 from all operational aircraft; And a singing cowboy but seriously a tail gunner was still shooting 4x.50 as late as Vietnam 
• Bombs: Approximately 70,000 pounds (32,000 kg) mixed ordnance; bombs, mines, missiles, in various configurations; Up to 35 × 1,000 lb (450 kg) bombs or 1× Yellow Sun free-fall nuclear bomb

This is actually a comparison of a modified B-52H with the Victor 1; The B52B, C, and D flew with the Pratt and Whitney J57, rated at 10,500lbs, while the B-52Hs, which was first produced in 1961, introduced turbofan power with the Pratt and Whitney JT3D, usually rated at 17,000lb, but with water injection.The Victor 2 entered service in 1962, swappoing the Sapphires for 4 17,000lb Rolls Royce Conway turbofans. Not surprisingly, a turbofan hurriedly cludged out of a turbojet when news of the Conway broke, is not going to compete with a purpose-designed machine.  Perhaps more importantly, the Victor's gigantic bomb bay was configured to take a range of loads, including 48 100lb bombs or 39 2000lb sea mines. Underwing panniers, similar to the ones fitted to the B-52H to give it its celebrated "carpet bombing" capability, would have increased the Victor's load to 73 1000lb bombs, but this modification was never made, since the Defence Ministry never found an appropriate recipient for quite so much "To sir with love." My point here being that Stafford is quite right to boast about the larger bomb bay. The Victor could have performed the B-52's one actual combat mission on less than half the weight.

 I feel awful for scraping from the Scribd free trial here, but Roger Brook's Handley Page Victor, Volume 2 is only available used in hard copy for $101 Canadian and I am not springing for just the second part of his study to assuage my guilt:  

(The author has decided to compare the Victor 2 with the Vulcan 2, which is why you are getting the free Avro Vulcan 2 figures of merit.) The Victor 2 was not an intercontinental bomber, but, then, neither was the B-52H without aerial refuelling. The fuel economy of the turbofan makes a difference, but the main reason that the B-52H achieved such impressive range performances was the enormous amount of gas that ended up being hung off the wings, with a resulting performance penalty that ruled out the bombing mission in either the obsolete high altitude or the dubious low altitude missions. 

I have heard the crescent wing described as a "passing fad," but these figures are pretty stark, and Stafford is right. The B-52 is an abortion. If there was talk about replacing the B-47 with a license-built Valiant, the argument is far stronger for replacing the B-52 with a license-built version of the Handley Page ship. There's just nothing that the B-52 can accomplish that the Victor can't on half the weight, and the hypothetical Victor 3 would have been a better intercontinental bomber than the B-52H. It's not a secret why that it; the B-52's wing was stupid, and considering that it was directly lifted from the B-47 over the course of a weekend, not surprisingly. The circa 1945--50 cuts in American defence spending, and the lack of a plan for letting the industry down, seems to have really cut a swathe through the nascent American military industrial complex. The importance of that in the eyes of the reader is going to depend on how much value is placed in the modern aviation industry (travel good; global warming, bad), but it seems like it was a mistake.

And yet it is the B-52 that is still flying, and the V-bombers who are looked at as some kind of weird Cold War deviancy. Sometimes, there's just no justice --and let's not even get started with the proposed crescent-winged Valiant 2, V-1000 and VC-7. Someone is to blame, and, grind my gears, Correlli Barnett is probably 100% right to blame British public schoolboys. Certain schoolboys, anyway.

(CBC North had no time, or more likely, no money, for Thunderbirds, so it's not actually part of my childhood, but whatever.)