B-52 CRASHES After Takeoff During Test Flight | Captain Steeeve Reacts

Tonight, officials say beneath this thick black smoke is the remains of a B -52 bomber.It crashed shortly after takeoff during a test mission just northeast of Los Angeles.

We're just coming in from Edwards Air Base that there were eight people on board and all indications are that nobody survived.

Edwards Air Force Base just north of Los Angeles, California is the scene of a horrific B -52 accident.Eight crew members confirmed dead now by the United States Air Force after this crash just about two -thirds of the way down the runway.It's unclear what caused the crash.There's no videos.It's questionable whether we're even going to get any flight data records from this crash scene.I'll show you a picture here in just a second of the crash site.

Let's take a look at this.This is the close -up of the crash site after the burn is done.As you can see, there's basically nothing left.on this scene.This is about two -thirds of the way down a 15 ,000 -foot runway at about the 10 ,000 -foot mark.Here's what Edwards Air Force Base looks like.

Here's the schematic or the diagram of the airport.There's two main runways.There's a 12 ,000 -foot runway.That's the shorter one up to the top.The longer one at the bottom is 15 ,000 feet.That's a long runway, I'm here to tell you.

Most of the runways that I land on in a 777 are eight to maybe the 12 ,000 feet.in length.15 ,000 feet is a huge runway.This is 2 -3 left at Edwards Air Force Base, which is out in the desert.I want to talk a little bit about the post -accident investigation.The Air Force is not the NTSB.

The NTSB doesn't get called in on these when they're strictly military.The NTSB would get called in if there was a civilian component to this.In other words, a civilian airplane was involved or civilian casualties or so forth.but there aren't.This is strictly on a military base.Edwards is out in the desert.

Like I said, just north of California.Usually the weather is fantastic, and there was no exception yesterday when this crash took place.The weather was CAVU.That means clear and visibility unlimited.Winds were out of the southeast, which is normal for Edwards at 10 to 15 knots.So again, it couldn't have been a better day for going flying.

They were, according to the Air Force, going out on a routine testing mission, something that the B -52 does apparently out of Edwards fairly often.The B -52, interesting airplane, was first flown in 1952, April 15th, 1952, all right, which predates me, which predates most of you.And it was pressed into service in 1955.And it was expected to serve, and now it's expected to serve until the 2050s.Over a hundred years, this aircraft will be in service.And here's a little trivia about the B -52.

Most of the ones that are flying today were built in the 1960s.built in the 1960s.They're over 60 years old.This airplane was no exception to that.Let me show you the overhead now of Edwards Air Force Base.You can see, based on the diagram I just showed you, that most of the infrastructure is over here.

That's where the airplanes would be housed.Then they would taxi out along this taxiway to the end of runway 23L, which is the long runway.Then they would take off And right about here, just short of that little access road or that little taxiway there, right about here is where the airplane crashed.Hopefully, we're going to get some details on whether they even got airborne or if they just went off the side of the runway.But as you've seen from the news reports, there was that the big black smoke that is characteristic of the kerosene type fuel that a B -52 would carry on it.And it just burned out.

disintegrated the airplane.The Air Force was pretty quick to say, based on the wreckage from the site, that there was going to be no survivors.Now, the B -52, as I said, first flew in 1952.President's Service 1955.Here are some particular dimensions of the B -52.It has 159 foot, it's 159 feet long from nose to tail.

It's 185 feet wide in the wingspan, so a very unusual airplane.It's wider, its wingspan is wider than the airplane is long.That increased wingspan allows the airplane to carry a great load of weapons.And that's what it was designed for back in the 1950s.It was designed to be a nuclear delivery system in the very beginning years of the Cold War.It was designed also to have that long range and carry a variety of different weapons in addition to the nuclear weapons.

The max weight of the B -52 is 488 ,000 pounds.That's equivalent to probably, I don't know, 787 today, something in that range.It's 8 ,800 mile range without weapons.With weapons, the combat range is 4 ,500 miles.That's a long ways, folks, to be carrying weapons.The ceiling is 50 ,000 feet plus.

I've heard B -52s check in above 50 ,000 feet, so I know it goes higher than that.And it was designed, again, to fly above enemy radar.And back in the 50s now, this is not today, but back in the 50s, above missiles and all those things, right?The weapons load is about 70 ,000 pounds.And so back in the day, it would either be nuclear or it would be conventional weapons.Now it carries a whole variety of different types of weapons.

Why was it built?Why was the B -52 built?It was built in the early Cold War era to be a bomber tobasically deliver weapons deep within the old Soviet Union.If you're old enough to remember the Soviet Union, Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, 1989, early 1990, when you saw the Berlin Wall come down.Ronald Reagan was still president back then.

And the Soviet Union just kind of collapsed under their own pressure, the economic mismanagement of communism.eventually caused them to fall, along with pressure from the West, sanctions and everything else, military pressure.They spent more money on their military than they should have.They didn't pay enough attention to their economy and the whole thing came collapsing down.But during those years that preceded it, the decades that preceded it, it was really widely accepted that the Soviet Union was this economic powerhouse and that they had, and they did, have the nuclear capability to destroy the West.And so the The doctrine at the time was called MAD or Mutual Assured Destruction.

We had to keep pace with their nuclear capability.And if we had as many or more nukes than they did, this is the thought.Now, I understand there's problems with this, that we would be a deterrent to them ever nuking us and us nuking them, because we knew that we could mutually destroy the other person.Arguably, it worked.It was successful.And part of that strategy was the B -52 bomber, an airplane capable of long range, 8 ,800 miles, or with a weapon on board, if it just was one weapon or just two, it could go almost a full 8 ,800 miles deep within the Soviet Union.

And the other idea was that it would be able to operate exclusively from U .S.bases.We wouldn't be dependent on any foreign bases.The design now of the B -52 is fascinating.I flew airplanes with one engine.

I flewairplanes with two, I've flown airplanes with three, and I've flown airplanes with four.Never flown an airplane with eight engines.The B -52 has eight engines.Now, from a distance, it looks like four, But it's four pods of two engines.So it's got eight engines all together.

And it's got a bicycle style landing gear.They're kind of tandem, one in front of the other.And it's also got tires or wheels out at the end of the wings.Because remember, those wings are so wide, they droop down.And I'll show you here in just a second the amount of droop in these wings.Well, in fact, let's go to that now, all right?

I want to show you.This airplane was designed to fly.be very, very flexible at the end of the wings.Look at this diagram.It shows you the flex amount on the wings.The limit up is about 14 feet, just a little bit more than 14 feet.

And the flex down is right around 5 feet, 4 .52 feet.And it carries great aerodynamic loads, depending on how much you've got in the bomb bay of this aircraft and how much the airplane is carrying.unbelievable the amount of flex in those wings.Now, that bicycle -style landing gear I was talking about, here's what that's about.You can also can't those wheels in one direction.They can go up to 20 degrees.

You can move them.The pilots can move them so that they can land in a crosswind.So take a look at this picture right here.That's a classic example of how you can move the tires into the wind, even though the aircraft, because of the wing down, fighting that crosswind, can land in a very heavy crosswind.And look out at the end of the wings right here and right there.See those wheels?

That's the wheel to keep the wingtip from touching down.an unbelievable design.It was designed again back in the 50s and it's still very pertinent today.All of it works and it's going to work for almost 100 years.So you get the two maintrucks in the fuselage that you can turn.

The small outrigger wheels are at the end of each wing, so you don't strike a wing in those severe crosswind landings.And again, the flexibility of the wings to me is just absolutely incredible.Now, the combat history of the B -52 is also fascinating.This thing was designed, as we said several times back in the 1950s for the Cold War, but it quickly morphed into something more than that.So during the Vietnam era, it was used and there's lots of video and pictures filmed from back in the day of it, carpet bombing, Southeast Asia.And regardless of how you feel about that, it was how the B -52 was used back in those days was to deliver conventional weapons from bases far away from Southeast Asia and Vietnam.

But it was able to carry up to 70 ,000 pounds of those bombs.Then, getting more into the modern era, I would say 1991 was Desert Storm.There were thousands of sorties flown, many of them, most of them, from Louisiana all the way over to Kuwait.And I said thousands, it was more like hundreds of sorties flown during that war, but that was the first Gulf War back in 1991.I was still on active duty back then.And I watched it like you did from a distance, but the B -52 still in service.

And in the 1990s, everybody thought that B -52 had reached the end of its service limit.You know, the airplane was, what, almost 40 years old at that point.And we thought, well, this airplane is going to get retired pretty soon.It didn't.It did not get retired.In fact, it's not going to get retired for some time.

It's probably going to outlive me and it might is going to outlive most of you.Then it got pressed into service in the Afghanistan -Iraq War.The aircraft evolved from a nuclear bomber back in the day.Now, it still has that capability, but that's really not its primary mission anymore, into a precision strike platform and a long endurance comm platform.So what are the difference between those two?Well, if it can go

a long distance and carry, you know, basically, cruise missiles and deliver them from a distance, then you've got much more range than you would have from a ship or maybe a fighter that would carry one of those.It just doesn't have the legs of a B -52 or the endurance of a B -52.A B -52 can stay airborne for a very, very long time.And that's why it turned into such a really nice comm platform.So they've retrofitted all these airplanes with modern radars, modern comm equipment.And if this airplane can stay airborne for 14 hours at a time, it's a great platform for other there.

aircraft to use to relay communications, and it can be an on -scene commander for a long mission.And so the folks on the ground, the soldiers on the ground, really appreciate having a B -52 that can do that and provide that mission for them with a single comm platform.Now back to the nuclear mission, I mentioned that a couple of times.It was called the U .S.Nuclear Triad, and it's still there to this day, but there were three major components to the U .

S.Nuclear Triad.Number one was land -based ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.We still have a fair amount of those that are U .S.based and those are the big missiles that would go into outer space and land, you know, wherever we point them.

The second was the ballistic missile submarines.And we have a lot of those and they're very stealth and very secretive about where those, you know, those ballistic submarines are.That's the second leg of this triad.The third was the strategic bomber platforms that not just the B -52, but the B -1 and the B -2 could both carry nuclear weapons.The B -52, though, was the oldest.It's the grandpa, right?

It's the patriarch of the family that was designed again back in the 1950s to carry that and it still can today.Today's B -52 now is a little bit different.the same, it's old, it's aged, but it's been retrofitted.Modern avionics, GPS navigation, guided weapons, GPS guided weapons, it can carry.It has advanced communications, which I just mentioned.It has new radar systems and it has cruise missile capability, which makes our stretch or our reach around the world much more effective than it used to be.

And it's with an older platform, the B -52.A B -52 can carry conventional weapons.It can carry nuclear bombs.It can carry nuclear cruise missiles.It can carry maritime strike weapons.That was something that's near and dear to my heart as a former P -3 pilot.

And in the future, it's going to be able to carry hypersonic weapons.So that's the future in the next, they're saying 30, maybe more years of the lifespan of this airplane.The B -52 just keeps getting better.as a platform.They're retrofitting now the airplanes with new Rolls -Royce engines.I've flown many airliners with Rolls -Royce engines.

They're very reliable, very nice engines, new radars, and new missions for the future of this airplane.What happened here at Edwards, we're just not clear about, you know, taking a look at the weather.The weather was okay.The weather was fine.That doesn't seem to be a factor.The like the NTSB, the military investigators will look at three things.

They will look at the pilots of the aircraft, they will look at the plane itself, and then they'll look at the environment.What was the weather like that day?What were some contributing factors?Was there a history with this airplane?Was it well maintained?Was there you know, a history of a bad engine on it or something along those lines.

Those are the dots that they'll try to connect.They'll take a look at the pilots, their experience level, you know, the fatigue and all of those type of things.What's curious to me about this craftsite, let me show it to you again.I'll show you another picture here.Let me show you the close -up.

That's the burn site as we see it close up.This now is another picture from a little farther distance.You can see the runway.that they were coming down, and you can see that little access road right over here.They crashed just short of that.Let's pan out just a little bit more and take a look at this photo.

It's hard to see the crash site, but it's right over here, right?You can see a little bit of smoke still coming up from it, and you can see that they're about The runway that they came from was down off this side.They came down about two thirds and maybe they got airborne right about here.They crashed right about here.And again, we don't know why, but that's the scene.They weren't far off the runway.

In fact, part of the aircraft, part of the burn pattern is still on that runway.It's a real head scratcher as to what happened.Maybe could the airplane have somehow come apart?I don't know.There's just no way of telling at this point.anything that happened with this beautiful airplane.

There's a picture of one airborne, just absolutely a gorgeous airplane.You can see from this photo how much wider the wingspan is than the length of the airplane, just kind of a gawky look at in one sense.But to me as a pilot, I just look at that and I see just a beautiful airplane that's a very capable and it was designed for a particular mission.Here's some trivia about the B -52.744 total B -52s were built.The youngest, not the oldest, but the youngest B -52 was built back in the 1960s.

So that means that this airframe that just crashed here was probably somewhere around 60 years old.Most of them are over 60 years old and it served under every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to today.That's a long lifespan.Andgot a few more presidents yet to come in the lifespan of this airplane, according to the Air Force, if this thing flies into the 2050s.If we get any more information, any more updates, certainly any video of the short flight of this aircraft, we will let you know.

But what we know up to this point is that the airplane crashed on the takeoff roll shortly after probably rotate the aircraft.Tragic accident.Eight fatalities.All eight crew members on board were killed.Typically, this airplane carries a crew of five.There were eight on board this mission just the other day.

Why were there eight?It was a training mission.They carry extra instructors and so forth on the airplane.There are a lot of families impacted by this, my friends.I lost a friend back in early 1990.We had been squadron mates in the 1980s.

We had all kind of left our first tour of duty to go back to the training command and train pilots coming behind us.Bruce, Bruce Wolfe was his name.Bruce was in flying T -34s, a little single engine trainer where all new pilots start their career.I started my career in T -34s.Bruce had gone to be a T -34 instructor.He was killed in a tragic training accident when his airplane collided with another airplane while they were out doing touch and go landings at an outlying field.

I know Bruce's widow, Julie, she's a lovely lady.She was pregnant at the time with their first and only child.Bruce never got to see his child.Those are the real stories that go on with something like this.When you look at it at the news and you see the burning hulk of an airplane and you think, wow, that's a tragedy.Just remember that there are families right now that are grieving over the loss of loved ones because of this.

They give the ultimate measure of devotion.to their country by serving, whether it's in wartime or peacetime.We're reminded by this crash of this B -52 out of Edwards that this is a very, very dangerous occupation.Please pray for those families.Now you know.I'm Captain Steve.

Fly safe.