Clive Irving, Daily Beast: The Air Force Plans to Fly 100-Year-Old Planes
Behind the front-line warplanes is a fleet of aging jets, including one designed over a single weekend in a hotel room during the Cold War.
Since we have an administration with a proclivity to drop bombs, very big bombs, this seems like a good time to talk about bombs, and how they are dropped.
The United States Air Force has a lot of bombs, of many kinds. On the face of it, they are a modern force, conveying fearsome power. Look behind that impression, however, and there is an astonishing story of aging airplanes and a very expensive effort to keep them flying for as long as 100 years—in fact, the first ever warplanes to be in service for a whole century.
This only-in-America story really begins in a suite at the Van Cleve Hotel in Dayton, Ohio, on a weekend in October 1948. The Boeing company faced a crisis. For two years they had been trying unsuccessfully to meet a demand from the U.S. Air Force for a new strategic bomber.
It was a dangerous time in the Cold War.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Flying a bomber that is 100 years old .... that is something that I am sure the original designers never dreamed was possible.
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