New B-52 Low Flyby of Aircraft Carrier (very low-Good Lawd!)

[Are_grits_groceries]

View of flyby from the ship:


View of flyby from another plane:

http://gizmodo.com/5894077/b+52-low-pass-flyby-is-even-crazier-than-you-thought

The B-52 will fly low to avoid radar and air defenses. The carrier controllers didn't see it coming because they weren't looking down.

I know they train to fly like this, but I would s*** if I looked up and saw them this low overhead. Nerves of steel.......

[ChunderingTruth]

1. Nerves of steel...no so much....

Good Avionics, the people were just along for the ride.

[dems_rightnow]

4. Yeah, it's a wonder they put people in them at all.

They just fly themselves.

[longship]

2. "Jet exhaust frying chickens in the barnyard"

on edit: Actually, it looks like a photoshop job to me. I used to work at Boeing and the B-52 is a big airplane. I may be wrong but the scale on both these pics looks wrong.

[Nostradammit]

3. A B-52 would be 15% of the length of a Forrestal-class carrier

So it may be a big plane but the Ranger is a big boat!

[Are_grits_groceries]

5. It isn't the size so much

as it is the altitude. Any plane that low would probably startle people. A B-52? More so....

[Nostradammit]

8. Oh I get that - I was just trying to help "longship" understand the scale

I definitely don't think this was photoshopped.

A B-52 that low would probably scare the bejeezus out of Chuck Norris!

[CAPHAVOC]

13. B-52

In person is awesome. As a kid my Grandfather would take me to the road at the end of the runway at McCoy AFB in Orlando to wathch them take off. Amazing.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. The scale is fine

I reckon in the photo the plane is about one sixth of the length of the carrier; looking them up, the B 52 is 159 feet long, the USS Ranger 1056 ft - 6.6 times as long.

As far as how low it is - well, it's Dambusters level. They're not under anti-aircraft fire, or judging their height with converging spotlights, though.

[denbot]

7. I was in the Navy, and worked at NASA with it's B-52 parked outside, the scale looks right to me.

B-52 are big airplanes, but birdfarms (carriers) are HUGE ships.
BTW, we would have seen them coming.

[IMG][/IMG]

[MrScorpio]

9. Yep, nothing can stop the US Air Force

Don't I know it

[Paulie]

10. Except their own planes

B1, FB111, F22...

[man4allcats]

11. Shades of Dr. Strangelove

"Well, boys, we got three engines out, we got more holes in us than a horse trader's mule, the radio is gone and we're leaking fuel and if we was flying any lower why we'd need sleigh bells on this thing... but we got one little budge on them Rooskies. At this height why they might harpoon us but they dang sure ain't gonna spot us on no radar screen!" | Slim "Major Kong" Pickens from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes

[Demonaut]

12. old picture

cv61 mothballed

[carew97]

14. I was there on the flight deck

The description under the photo completely wrong. The Ranger wasn’t in the Gulf (never was in the 80s) and the closes the ship was in 1989 was in the Straits of Hormuz for a single mission for a couple of hours to photo graph the Iranian coast. Then the ship headed back to the Indian Ocean (Operation Earnest Will happened not long prior). The photo was taken around February 1989 during Rough Training which is the very last assessment before a carrier was deployed for a WESTPAC that is a six month deployment away from homeport. The ship was actually off the coast of Mexico hiding from the Air Force while play war games (The ship lunched an Alpha Strike on Hill Air Force Base during the same period that was the longest training carrier strike at that time). The carrier was preparing for the deployment preparing to crosses the time zone that triggered Russian bombers to locate and track the carrier before they were in range of Russia during the Cold War. A Russian surveillance ship would be off the coast of Hawaii waiting for the carrier to leave port on the journey to cross the Pacific Ocean and report back that the carrier was underway. Then Russian Bears and Badgers would locate the carriers and to take a photos and track the carrier until the ship was past Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam where they were stationed out of. The Air Force was playing the role of the Russians and the carrier’s goal was to intercept the bombers once they were in range to escort them through the carrier air space preparing for the “real life” mission that was soon to happen. F-14s would fly on both sides of the bomber and escort them through the carrier airspace. Unlike what was posted under the photo on the website, mostly on the crew on the fight deck saw the fly-by because the ship was in the middle of flight ops that prevented most the ship in seeing the planes (the photo that you have was taken from vulture’s row that is located along the upper section of the island). Plus, B-1s also did fly-bys along with the B-52s. The first B-1 was about 100 feet off the deck with two F-14s on both sides. TheB-1 bomber was probably going around 150-200mph then she kicked into afterburners and surprised the F-14s as they struggle to stay with the bomber. I was actually working on the bow (Fly 1) during the war games and took photos looking “down” at the same bomber that you have but I can’t find that photo right now. We actually flew for four days straight at the end of the exercise and finally pulled back into San Diego as we felt like zombies.