BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, La. — Because the B-52H Stratofortress tops greater than six many years in service, it’s grown increasingly temperamental — and for the U.S. Air Force, a challenge to maintain within the air.
Its original Nineteen Sixties-era engines keep finding “recent and artistic” ways to interrupt, as an Air Force Global Strike Command leader put it. Stocks of spare parts are limited, and the commercial base needed to repair broken components or make recent ones is drying up.
The Air Force is scrambling to maintain the B-52 bomber operational and is resorting to an array of options to accomplish that — as much as and including a process called cannibalization. Up to now, three out of each five B-52s are in a position to perform their missions at any given time.
Airmen across the spectrum at Barksdale Air Force Base — from the flight line and provide shop to leadership — describe a situation where maintainers must often “cannibalize” parts, meaning take them off one B-52 to be installed on one other so the second aircraft can fly.
It’s a lengthy process that may create further problems, and it’s meant to be a final resort. However the B-52 community is increasingly turning to that method. Tech. Sgt. Bonny Carter, the noncommissioned officer in control of the B-52′s decentralized maintenance support section at Barksdale, said the speed of cannibalization has gone up 200% since 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic snarled supply chains worldwide.
Global Strike Command disputed that figure, though it acknowledged cannibalization rose over the past five years mainly on account of obsolete parts. The command didn’t provide statistics on cannibalization rates, as requested by Defense News.
The Air Force is using other fallback options first, similar to pulling parts out of the “Boneyard,” the Air Force’s airplane cemetery in Arizona where many retired B-52s rest. The service also combs the commercial base for brand new sources of fresh parts, and taps its own back shops and sustainment center to repair parts or make recent ones. Back shops are rooms where specialized repair and maintenance is finished on smaller components.
A large-ranging series of modernizations for the B-52 — all the things from recent Rolls-Royce engines to recent wheels and brakes — is on the way in which, and the Air Force hopes these upgrades will end in a more reliable airplane, with a fresh supply of spare parts that relieves some pressure on maintainers.
But until that happens, Global Strike Command might want to keep the B-52H flying, even when it’s increasingly daunting, said Col. David Miller, the organization’s director of logistics and engineering.
Vendors, pool of parts dwindling
The largest maintenance challenge facing the B-52 is the “slow atrophy” of the defense-industrial base that supplies it, in response to Miller.
“The seller base is just drying up,” he said. “Attempting to entice vendors to proceed to make very old, very difficult parts in small numbers is a challenge,” particularly in the case of specialized parts with little, if any, value to business aviation.
The reduction of the B-52 fleet over time — from a high of 744 to 76 today — also shrunk the marketplace for spare parts, further limiting firms’ opportunities to become profitable on this business. Some firms, particularly small mom-and-pop shops, have either decided to stop making parts the B-52 relies upon, or gone out of business entirely.
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It could actually take months and even years to get some crucial parts for a B-52. One part, a valve, has a 900-day lead time, Miller’s office said, and his directorate is working to switch that rare piece with a more available valve.
Global Strike Command said it sometimes takes those valves off B-52s entering depot maintenance so as to install them on bombers preparing to fly.
The parts supply problem is especially acute for the B-52′s TF33 engines, which Pratt & Whitney made within the Nineteen Sixties, Miller said. Parts from those engines — or whole engines entirely — are the component most frequently cannibalized for B-52s, he said.
Miller noted the bomber depot on the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex used to often remove engines from B-52s as they entered their lengthy heavy maintenance process, then reinstall those components on other B-52s that were nearly finished with their overhauls. But with more spare parts on the depot shelves, the service now not does that.
The Rolls-Royce F130 engines are to return with recent parts that last more before they break or require maintenance, in addition to a fresh supply chain making available replacements when parts do break, he explained.
“What we’re buying into is an aircraft that’s not going to must undergo core maintenance fairly often, if in any respect,” Miller said. “Versus the TF33 — that goes through a number of maintenance right away.”
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The Pentagon in November moved to shore up the B-52′s engines, awarding Pratt & Whitney a contract price as much as $870 million to sustain nearly 1,000 TF33s. Those engines also power the E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft, and the sustainment contract could run through spring 2034.
In an interview with Defense News on the time of the contract’s award, Pratt & Whitney executive Caroline Cooper said the sustainment contract would help address the spare parts shortages exacerbated by the decline of firms making area of interest, low-volume parts for the B-52. Cooper said this deal provides funding for the firm to either make those parts itself or find other firms to tackle the work.
“We’re … the operational tempo of the aircraft, after which the inherent risks in the availability chain, and wanted to construct that upper limit in order that we will move quickly and expeditiously to get the lads and ladies within the Air Force what they need,” Cooper said in November.
Master Sgt. Dylan Drake, a production superintendent at Barksdale’s 2nd Maintenance Squadron, said maintainers are “excited” for the brand new engines to return online. In the event that they’re as reliable as promised, he said, maintainers will have the option to show their attention to other parts of the B-52.
“If we don’t must worry in regards to the engines, that’ll allow us to deal with other systems,” Drake said.
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When maintainers remove faulty parts from the B-52, Miller said, sometimes they will be overhauled or repaired — but they generally have to be replaced entirely. And that’s growing harder and harder.
Carter, of the 2nd Logistics Readiness Squadron, said when a maintainer needs a spare part, step one is to look in her supply shop’s own stocks, then reach out to other supply shops elsewhere if it’s not on the shelf. The decentralized maintenance support section Carter oversees stores and organizes spare parts for maintainers to repair Barksdale’s B-52s.
In the event that they’re still striking out, the Air Force has workarounds, Miller and Carter said in separate interviews. That might include turning to an Air Force back shop to make a brand new part or the Air Force Sustainment Center at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.
Miller said the components undergoing production or overhaul on the sustainment center range from wire harnesses to larger, modular components often called line replaceable units.
The advantage of keeping the Air Force’s own industrial base for B-52 parts humming, Miller noted, is that the service knows it’s going to be available if a war breaks out.
“You never know once we’re going to be called upon, perhaps in a wartime environment, to have the option to supply that [maintenance in] real time,” he said. “That’s not the time to exit and find we’ve got to cold start [the production line], and [with] an 18-month delay, having a brand new vendor produce something for us.”
However the work can also be stretching the service further. Carter said back shop airmen are working longer hours to repair broken parts — even people who previously weren’t their responsibility to repair.
It could mean pulling an element out of a retired B-52 within the Boneyard, officially often called the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. But there are a finite variety of B-52s there the service can scavenge, Carter said, in order that solution will only work for therefore long.
It could mean hunting down a business company that does similar sorts of work and hiring them to make an element.
And if all else fails, airmen pull parts from one aircraft for installation on one other. But that solution could make more problems.
“Once we do the cannibalization, it downs one other aircraft so we will make this aircraft flyable to conduct its mission, to get training hours,” Carter said. “After which we’ve got to swap again. We’re continually swapping parts.”
“But we’re learning to work with what we got,” she added. “You recognize, more with less.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.