Guide Note

The Boeing B-52 Bomber is a long-range, subsonic, jet-powered, strategic bomber. It was built to replace the Convair B-36 as part of a United States Cold War-era deterrence strategy. The plane has the longest range of any contemporary bomber and is capable of carrying up to 70,000 pounds of conventional or nuclear weapons.^{1 2 3}

Fast Facts

1. AKA: B-52 Stratofortress³
2. First flight: April 15, 1952¹
3. Introduction: February 1955¹
4. Type: Strategic bomber¹
5. Manufacturer: Boeing³
6. Primary user: United States Air Force¹
7. Unit Cost: $53.4 million in 1998 dollars¹
8. Responsible for 40% of the ordnance dropped during Operation Desert Storm

The original B-52, designed in 1946, was planned to be a six-engine propeller plane. On October 21, 1948, the U.S. Air Force instructed the design team to redesign the plane as a jet. They reportedly closeted themselves in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio over the next weekend and produced a balsa model of an eight-engine jet, which became the basis for the production model of the B-52.⁴

A B-52 participating in Guam's Liberation Day celebration crashed in the Pacific on Monday, July 21, 2008.⁵ The search switched from rescue to recovery on July 23, when the U.S. military recovered two bodies, and announced that they did not expect that any of the six crew members had survived.⁶