How Low can you go? Insane Low B-52 Flyby

March 18, 2012   Aron   1 Comment

You are not looking at a jet fighter… this is in fact a B-52 Stratofortress flying so low next to the USS Ranger aircraft carrier, that the pilot could probably reach out and touch the ocean.

Fighters are fun, but bombers make national policy…that’s probably because the behemoth weights 265,000-pounds and has 185-foot wingspan.

This image was taken in 1990 in the Persian Gulf. US carriers and B-52s were conducting joint exercises when two of the bombers requested permission for a low pass. While it’s a high altitude bomber, the B-52s also fly at low altitudes to avoid enemy radar and air defenses. When the B-52s approached the carrier, they announced they were six miles away but the carrier controllers couldn’t see them because they weren’t looking down.

[Cheers gizmodo]

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One Response to How Low can you go? Insane Low B-52 Flyby

  1. Mike says:
    November 15, 2012 at 6:36 am

    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.

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