How America’s B-52 bombers will fly until the 2050s

America’s fleet of B-52 bombers is expected to keep flying into the 2050s because the long-range jets are seen as essential to keeping China and Russia in check and revamping the decades-old planes is cheaper than replacing them.  

The Boeing-made US Air Force workhorse first took to the skies in 1954 – meaning the 76 jets due to stay in service until the middle of the 21st century will be nearly 100 years old by then. 

The Air Force last year invited bids to supply 608 new engines to revamp the B-52 fleet, which can carry nuclear weapons, fly at 650mph and cost only around $6million per plane at the time they were built.

The decision came after Pentagon chiefs concluded the threat from beefed-up militaries in China and Russia meant long-range bombers were back in demand as a way of displaying America’s military reach, the Wall Street Journal reports.

While the bomber fleet will also be expanded with new B-21 bombers, other alternatives ‘did not work out’ and prolonging the life of the B-52 became the most attractive option. 

Within the last year, B-52s have flown on long-range missions in shows of force to China, Russia and Iran, including a trip to the Persian Gulf earlier this month. 

The bombers have been a key part of the rival shows of power in the South China Sea, where the US has long tried to prevent China asserting military dominance. 

On one occasion, a B-52 flew over airspace claimed by China and received a message warning it would be intercepted if it failed to turn around. 

But the aircraft, which had flown out of a US military base in Guam, continued over the Chinese ‘air identification zone’ which is not recognised by Washington.   

With tensions rising between the US and China on a whole range of issues, the durable B-52 has been seen as a key tool for the Pentagon to project its power.   

A 2020 Pentagon report noted that the Beijing-controlled People’s Liberation Army was developing a new long-range bomber likely to surface in the next decade. 

While China’s bomber force is also relatively old, having been based on Soviet jets, military chiefs have revamped their aircraft in recent years, the report said.  

It also warned that China’s construction of new military outposts on islands in the South China Sea gave its bombers a greater range and ‘loiter time’.  

In the meantime, the Pentagon has drawn up plans to buy hundreds of new B-52 engines over a 17-year period to keep the ageing aircraft in its arsenal. 

Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce and General Electric were among those expected to bid for the Air Force contract. 

The revamp means that the aircraft are expected to remain in service until at least 2050, some 98 years after they first took to the skies. 

‘It is like an old truck that was built when they actually built them tough,’ air force chief of staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown told the WSJ. 

‘The challenge you have with a platform like that now is how to bring in new technology and capability.’ 

The Pentagon is separately expanding its bomber fleet by developing a new aircraft called the B-21 or ‘Raider’ in an estimated $80billion programme. 

But various other efforts to develop a new bomber have run into difficulties, leaving a renovation of the -52s as the best way to maintain a large fleet. 

‘Part of the reason the Air Force is so dependent on B-52 modernization is that other proposed successors did not work out along the way,’ said Jeremiah Gertler of the Congressional Research Service. 

The B-1B long-range bomber, in service since 1985, is no longer nuclear-capable and is being phased out with the fleet due to be slashed from 62 to 45 by this summer. 

The Air Force had separately planned to keep its B-2s flying until 2058, but will instead retire them as the B-21 Raider arrives before the end of the 2020s. 

By contrast, the storied B-52s have proved so durable that the Air Force has twice in recent years brought one back from a desert ‘boneyard’ in Arizona. 

Known to crews as the Big Ugly Fat Fellow, the B-52 is equipped to drop or launch the widest array of weapons in the entire Air Force inventory. 

Although less nimble than the B-21, it will remain in service as a ‘stand off’ platform from which to launch cruise missiles and other weapons from beyond the reach of hostile air defences. 

It means the B-52 will continue a long history which saw it used to carpet-bomb the countryside in Vietnam and pound Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Gulf War. 

A total of 744 B-52s were built from their 1954 launch until 1962, and some of them were also used in the early-2000s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  

In the 1960s it even lent its name to a beehive hairstyle that resembled the plane’s distinctive nose, and featured in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove.     

‘There is an old joke that runs through the bomber fleet that when the B-1 and B-2 bombers are retired, the pilots will be flown home from the boneyard in the B-52,’ said a Pentagon paper last year.