With new radar and engines in sight, the B-52 gets ready for ‘largest modification in its history’
“There's a lot that can go wrong on the program management side,” Col. Louis Ruscetta, senior materiel leader of the B-52 division, said of the bomber's upcoming modernization. “We have to try to manage and reduce what can go wrong."
By VALERIE INSINNA
on August 26, 2022 at 10:05 AM
WASHINGTON — At 70 years old, the venerable B-52 Stratofortress is getting a major facelift, what one Air Force official recently called the “largest modification program in its history,” that the service hopes will keep the plane relevant to 2050 at least. That’s if the service can juggle two major upgrades simultaneously — an ambitious goal for which the Air Force is still formulating a strategy.
In the middle of the decade, the service will begin outfitting the B-52 with the Raytheon AN/APG-79 radar used by the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. At roughly the same time, it will embark on an ambitious engine replacement program, swapping the bomber’s aging Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines with a version of the Rolls-Royce F130.
Col. Louis Ruscetta, the Air Force’s senior materiel leader of the B-52 division, told reporters at the Air Force’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference earlier this month that the Air Force was looking to “identify those friction areas” in terms of ensuring the B-52 has the space, power and cooling necessary to support all of those modifications and to guarantee that changes on one modification program don’t have a ripple effect across the B-52 fleet.
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/08/with-new-radar-and-engines-in-sight-the-b-52-gets-ready-for-largest-modification-in-its-history/
