Still eight engines, though, huh? I guess they couldn’t just the additional work needed to move to four. It’d be more fuel efficient to move to four big engines instead of eight smaller ones, but it’d require strengthening the wing and doing something to increase the steering forces. If you loose an engine when you only have four engines, you loose twice as much thrust as you would have in an eight engine layout, so the remaining three need to work harder, and you have more unbalanced thrust then you would have with 7/8, especially if you loose one of the outboard engines.
Yeah, I thought that was odd as well. The thing is, the military doesn’t really care about how much fuel it uses. With mid air refueling, these things already have insane endurance anyway. I worked in command and control at a B-52 base and remember monitoring 18 hour missions. I remember being deployed to Qatar and the base commander bragging about that base using the most jet fuel of any base.
They’re doing it right now. They are re-engining the B-52 and giving it a new designation, B-52J.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/re-engined-b-52-b-52j/
Pff. Putting lipstick on a pig.
It’s a pretty good looking pig though. It maintains a better combat readiness than the B-1, so they keep it around.
Still eight engines, though, huh? I guess they couldn’t just the additional work needed to move to four. It’d be more fuel efficient to move to four big engines instead of eight smaller ones, but it’d require strengthening the wing and doing something to increase the steering forces. If you loose an engine when you only have four engines, you loose twice as much thrust as you would have in an eight engine layout, so the remaining three need to work harder, and you have more unbalanced thrust then you would have with 7/8, especially if you loose one of the outboard engines.
Yeah, I thought that was odd as well. The thing is, the military doesn’t really care about how much fuel it uses. With mid air refueling, these things already have insane endurance anyway. I worked in command and control at a B-52 base and remember monitoring 18 hour missions. I remember being deployed to Qatar and the base commander bragging about that base using the most jet fuel of any base.