On the ground, the Boeing B-52 has all the elegance of a Mack truck. As it lumbers toward the runway, its long wings struggling with the weight of eight engines, fuel, and often a deadly cargo of bombs or missiles, observers might feel safe placing bets that the plane will never leave the ground. But, accompanied by the roar of its massive engines, the plane gathers speed and pushes off the ground. And airborne, it acquires the elegance of a bird, soaring freely overhead.
And it is an old bird. A half century after first entering service, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, nicknamed BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fellow) by aircrews, is being flown by a new generation of pilots, young enough to be the grandchildren of the original pilots and often younger than the planes they are flying. Originally expected to serve for merely a decade, the B-52 remains the backbone strategic bombing plane for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and is often still the first weapon sent against a combatant nation. This is a rather impressive record for a plane whose development program was canceled four times.
An engineering study in the year 2001 predicted that the B-52 would be flying for the air force into the year 2045, almost a century after its development began. It has outlived not only its predecessors but also many of its successors such as the Convair B-58, Rockwell B-70 and B-1A, and perhaps even the B-1B. A USAF general called it a plane that is "not getting older, just getting better." Of the 744 B-52s built, fewer than 100 remain in service, all H-models. The Boeing engineers had built a plane that was strong enough to last and basic enough to be adaptable to the changing technology of air war.
