aviation
Didn't know it could do that.
Discussion
Why can nobody on earth just make a normal video? Who put the mouse cursor in there? lol
It was me… sorry. I’m an instructor and I was showing this video to my students.
How hard is the aileron control in this scenario? I fly the 737 and we’re very conscious of banking in crossing landings because the engines sit so low, I can’t imagine what’s it like in an airplane like this with such a long wingspan and very flexible wings
The B-52 doesn't have ailerons, only spoilers; but to answer your question, it's pretty responsive in the landing configuration. You can scrape a pod pretty easily if you're not level, but there are outrigger gear on the wingtips that provide a little bit of protection. The wing flex actually works in your favor on landing, because the wing tips are up off the ground as long as they're producing lift. Once the plane settles in on the runway, they'll come back down.
The weirdest part about landing with a ton of crab in is looking out the side windows for your aimpoint.
Destination: Maryland-area restaurants.
Can you remind me what's your bank limitation? I remember the sim instructor said scimitar is actually first contact if equipped, but even with that the max bank was surprisingly high for what we expected. Like 15 or 18 degrees or something maybe?
Obviously still can't land it like a 172, managed to pull off a couple moderate crosswind landings without contact in ATP-CTP sims 😅
Edit: never mind, probably more like 8 or 10 degrees.
it depends on the attitude of the plane during the flare but its around 12 degrees, it may sound like a lot but in heavy weather a wing can suddenly drop and contact the ground
I remember seeing this when I was getting my octojet endorsement!
I’m just glad there wasn’t a guy wearing headphones eating chips doing a reaction too
The cursor is to distract from the crappy vertical format. It would be ok if my eyes were one above the other....
I saw a BUFF Capt who talked about how weird it is landing a plane looking out the side window.
I learned how to land that way in a 46 j3 cub. No flaps so you gotta throw your ass out to slow down
Sounds like fun to fly. How long did it take to get comfortable in it?
About an hour of circuits and you’re good to fly a cub. They fly themselves
The video is accelerated. Looks like more than twice the actual speed
It also looks weird, as if it’s a model plane
I wondered if it was taken with a very long focal length leading to compression?
Ah the plane that was to be retired 30 years ago and is presently in the middle of an upgrade to make it last another 30.
Being flown by the grandsons of the original pilots.
Great-grandsons at this point.
It is the year 3027 and B52s flying from Ceres have just glassed the science station on Phobos to contain an outbreak of Martian Influenza.
[the MCRN disliked that.]
As they say, the first buff pilots are no longer with us, the last buff pilots haven't been born yet.
Don't you worry. We will later on just drop in some ion engines and Buff will be making new craters in Mars. Showing those aliens what's up.
We're only going to keep until 2050. We swear this time!
What is that wagging out of the right-hand window? I want to believe it's the pilot waving at the camera, but it just looks too stupid haha
You're right, I didn't notice at first. Watching on my mobile and magnified it, right seat is waving away.
This is an air show demonstration at RIAT, and it is a pilot waving, but the video is sped up for brain rot.
Combined with the soundtrack it’s hilarious.
Captain’s dog
If you watch the full aspect video they wipe out a ton of runway lights.
i like how he's waving while taking out a ton of runway lights lol
Ahh they had it coming
That it could do this was a secret originally btw.
They see me fl.. rolling they hating
I knew they could do that but I didn’t know they could do it to that extreme!
747 Pilot: I had a crosswind landing that got me going sideways
BUFF Pilot: Hold my beer
Some mad skilz...
Gas gas gas, I'm gonna step on the gas tonight!
The BUFF is immortal.
Looks like one of those fishing wagons, with wings.
Lol! It does!
This was classified once upon a time.
Do you want to try and tell the BUFF that it doesn't own the tarmac?
Suddenly having 4x4 landing gear starts making sense!👍 I wonder what the pilot is listening
“Stayin Alive” by the Bee Gee’s
Is that a reference?!
Tacking into the wind
Well, it DOES own the tarmac! 😁😁
Very fashionable. Grandpa still got game 😆
That mouse cursor spun me LMFAO
Michael Mouse ahh cursor
Buff does in fact know how they live in Tokyo.
I wonder why this feature isn’t used on more planes?
They not like us.
That curser threw me off so bad
*Ohhhhhhhhhhh MY!!
Runway swag 😎
I know its just an odd perspective but this looks like an RC plane haha
Is it trying to do that bat break dancing meme?
"Roy, we're on the ground. You can take it out of the forward slip now." 😆
I wonder if this would ever become a luxury feature on other planes
Oh yeah! Grandpa’s got the rizz!
The pilot’s call sign is “Lipizzaner”. So that makes sense
Just cruising’ with my ‘52 Escalade
A B52 do this in England and broke some lights
some next level drifting right there
LOL Buff can handle a cross wind component of 20 degrees without crabbing the wheels
Eurobeat intensifies
Saw a few land that way at Fairchild AFB back when it was a SAC base. Stunning to watch.
This looks like a Michael Jackson video
Why does it look so small? Also I would have expected it to have more tires?
Planes can drift too? Sick
why did you speed up the clip?
It does own the tarmac, though.
I love that. Just staring down.
Tbh he does kinda own the tarmac after pulling this off
Oh thats a scene from Fast 35 where Dom and the gang do one last job for the family, but this time Dom has to sacrifice his Dodge Charger for a plane. Things you do for family
Waving out the window like its a street takeover 😂
This seems like an entire clusterfuck to think about as a pilot, but I guess the principles are the same as landing a passenger jet, and you don't actually need to straighten the jet out and just let it wheel along.
You actually can't (or certainly shouldn't) straighten it out. That adjustment so close to the ground would almost guarantee a wing and/or pod strike with the obscene wingspan of that thing.
Also IIRC the BUFF especially has pretty low clearance and more flexible wings
🤣🤣🤣🤣 This has made my day. I needed that.
I wonder about this every time I go past Minot. I had pretty much convinced myself that they had a giant concrete disk instead of traditional runways because that was the only way to run air operations 24/7 with that wind. Guess I was wrong.
Just imagine the expanse of concrete that would be. 13,200’ main runway. That would be 4.9 square mile. Pavement to support the aircraft is at least 12” thick. Maybe 16, I’ve only dealt with civilian airports with 747 being largest aircraft that would be many boatloads of concrete!!!!!
And it would have to be government grade concrete that costs three times as much per yard.
Because it's bl...
Okay I'll stop. Sigh... Generation these days, too sensitive.
The ability to counter-crab the landing gear (up to 20° in either direction) is the only way the B-52 can land in any kind of crosswind (without a massive wing/pod strike)
Edit: tidbit of info - the system works by the crew inputting the heading of the runway, and then tracking that heading (within those 20°of steering authority in either direction) compared to the compass heading of the plane
The crabbing feature was considered so Top Secret that photographs of the first public rollout either covered up the landing gear or used angles that didn’t show the interesting bits.
I just realized that before this video I've never seen a B-52 with its landing gear down.
Wait until you realize it's staggered so it can retract in that narrow body and also leave room for the bomb bay!
da fuq
Here's a cool video showing most of the gear retraction sequence https://youtu.be/riEmAvlrynk
When i saw that for the first time at the Museum in Dayton it was a real mindfuck.
bro...
Walked under at Osh 24 and was shocked at the complexity and simultaneous simple elegance of the staggered, diagonally folding gear. Crazy cool shit.
It's been used as a joke in a few movies where you see a passenger jet take off, and then an underside shot of the very distinctive B-52 gear retracting.
So much crab glider pilots are jealous lol
Do you know in which way the nose is pointed?
Is it pointed towards/in line with the wind so the wind can more easily pass around the plane body?
Or is it pointed the opposite direction to the wind hits the angled side of the body of the plane so the windWhile writing and rethinking this i realised my second question makes no sense. Would still love some affirmation/deeper explanation tho! :D
The BUFF has such poor rudder authority that it has to compensate for crosswind in other ways. Like the comment above you says, there would be great risk of a wingtip hitting the ground if it tried to make up for having no rudder with ailerons or body roll, etc. plus not having the landing gear pointing under you anymore. The most practical solution was to make the gear swivel so pilots could land the fucker sideways while using engine thrust to counteract the force of the crosswind.
Its also the reason it has eight engines and not four big ones... If one of four goes out on takeoff the rudder cant compensate.
Ah, the dreaded seven-engine approach.
That's so sick, thank you a lot for the infos!
Edit: "alot" is wrong grammar
Another fun fact, that itsy bitsy rudder is also why the upgrade to B-52J has to keep the 8 engines in the doubled up pods. The plane has to stay steerable through engine failure scenarios—but if the plane had four modern engines (like the configuration on a 747 or A380) the rudder is too small to compensate for a power loss on one of the outboard engines. The differential thrust would be too great for the rudder to stop the plane from yawing to that side!
That's very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge on this!
Do you know why it has such poor rudder authority?
Rudder small to reduce drag. Increasing drag would slow the plane and reduce range and increase fuel consumption both bad for a long-range bomber.
Thank you.
It's "a lot" btw, "allot" is a different word. Knowledge moving forward 🤓
Hey, thx for the correction and clarification. I have absolutely 0 hate to people correcting me on little things like that. And i honestly dont understand why so many people do. Knowledge is knowledge and i rather learn from mistakes instead of not knowing they are there.
So ye, and honest and way to long thank you! :D
Thanks for the explanation - genuine question - what would it have taken to improve rudder authority though?
That I don’t know. The airframe has such a huge vertical stabilizer, but the actual rudder paddle itself is minuscule. I assume it wasn’t that big of a showstopper in the late ‘40s when the designs were made. My best guesses are the hydraulics couldn’t move a larger rudder paddle as well, or it would be too much stress on the airframe during high speed maneuvers, or something like that.
The B-52 doesn't have a big vertical stabilizer compared to aircraft of similar size. And for the more modern models (G and H) it's positively tiny.
The B-52 is the product of literally dozens of design compromises and is fundamentally a 60-year-old aircraft, so it has a lot of weird design features. They had to make the vertical stabilizer shorter for the newer versions so that it stopped tearing off the aircraft at low altitude.
The design was mostly finalized by 1949 (including the steerable bogies landing gear) so that makes it a few years shy of being an 80-year-old design by now!
60 year old? The youngest planes themselves are 60 years old. The design and engineering is more like 80.
Hmm. So that's why there's no talk about a bit more right rudder here.
Asking as an outsider, but is it theoretically possible to use thrust vectoring to counter this problem instead?
Vectored thrust at the wings would not provide much leverage for turning the aircraft as opposed to the rear mounted engines on a typical fighter jet.
I also imagine the side load calculations meant at max landing weight it can't handle just smashing it down like a 747.
You turn the nose into the wind to compensate for drifting off course with the wind.
Thx very much
You turn into the wind so the engines pull you that way, counteracting being blown the other way.
I see, thank you very much
Is it because the wings are so long relative to their height?
Long flexible wings drooping low to the ground with engine pods hanging even lower!
Did the B-47 have a similar system?
It did not, it had a pretty simple bicycle main gear with outriggers under each wing, but it was also a much smaller aircraft
The gear doesn't automatically track the runway heading. The crew put in a predetermined angle based on wind speed and relative direction. There's a little chart in the cockpit for it.
Several sources seem to indicate that it's a semi-automated process in the latest modernized BUFFs https://theaviationist.com/2024/05/05/the-b-52-landing-gear-explained/
And that source is wrong.
Here's one pilot explaining it. And another.
A better look at the chart
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Definitely not