[MilCom] B-1 bomber crashes at base in Middle East
Duane Mantick
wb9omc at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 4 16:45:30 EST 2008
With Concorde, it served as a convenient excuse to
terminate a service that was a perpetual money loser.
The loss of life was, of course, NOT convenient. I do
not know if there were hoards of lawsuits over that
like there would have been here in the US. But at any
rate, Concorde was a wonderful airplane that was
expensive to operate and both Air France and British
Airways wanted to end it - but how do you do that on
an aircraft with an exemplary safety record that also
happens to be a symbol of national pride in the
technology?
You don't.
And so she kept flying and then that accident
happened. Bingo - perfect excuse. It didn't matter
that the accident was NOT the fault of the aircraft,
the design, the maintenance - but rather (apparently)
by kicking up a piece of debris from some other
aircraft that poked a hole and created a fuel-fed fire
(paraphrasing from the accounts that I read).
As for the B-1B.......USAF could very easily pull the
same move. And in this case, there have been some
other "incidents" with landing gear failures, etc.
The Lancer really has not had a particularly visible
role in much of anything and most of the public I
doubt even remembers what it is!
As for simply grounding them - that's a lot easier to
do when mission requirements are minimal as they seem
to be for the B-1B. Even though military aviation is
considered "inherently dangerous" there is a certain
sensible prudence to investigating problems IFFFF it
is reasonable to suspect that the problem could be
spread through the entire extant fleet. So then we're
back to the "excuse" factor.
The ONE thing that could save the B-1B: even though
the B-52's are clearly STILL a more capable aircraft
for the current missions, they're O-L-D....and gotta
run outta useable airframe hours eventually. How many
"boneyard spares" are useful for life extensions
depends on what ages on the airframes. (and, we're
only operating "H" models AFAIK so how many of the
"boneyard spares" are even *compatible* is another
question - "G" models, probably. Before that? Hard to
say.) The B-1B airframes are less numerous and thus
have fewer spares but probably have nowhere NEAR the
number of hours on them.
It will be interesting to see how USAF plays this one.
Duane
--- Joe Cobb <gunslinger37217 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ok, so now lets ground all the B-1B's. Oh dear, i
> fear it will happen. One mishap and all of a sudden
> it's a catastrophie waiting to happen.
>
> Joe
> Nashville, Tn.
>
> Off topic: This was my feeling after the Concorde
> accident, all these years only ONE mishap and all of
> a
> sudden it was a dangerous airplane.
>
>
> --- Jack Nesmith <jnesmith2 at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >
>
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/04/04/b1crash.html?cxntnid=bn_2008-04-04_15_53_id123_e
> >
> > Jack
> > Deltona FL
> >
> >
>
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