Dork Jets

[Draginass]

The B-1 did indeed land at FRA with aft wing sweep. A remarkable piece of airmanship by the crew. Preferably, a landing on the lake bed at Edwards is indicated. Approach speed was probably 250 k. The brakes on the B-1 are outstanding (no thrust reverse) and the tires are good to 250k, but you can bet the fuse plugs went pretty quick. Now what do you do with a 200,000 lbs of aircraft with 8 blown fuse plugs, and no spare wheels on field and probably 8 in theatre. UGH. BTW, refueling the B-1 with aft wing sweep is no big problem. And also, BTW, when the airplane first came into the inventory, the design engineers told us it was impossible for the wings to get stuck back. Yea, right.

 

[FastCargo]

B-1 Landing...

Tried to post a reply once...but got lost in the system...grr...

Previous posts got most of the story correct on the Bone that landed at Frankfurt. I was in the squadron when it happened and the crew briefed us when they got back. I also have video of the landing and rollout, and subsequent MX... The aircrew actually did a emergency refueling (or had at least planned to, ,y memory goes slightly fuzzy) to give them more time to troubleshoot. They didn't blow the tires on the landing...actually they blew about 15 min later, along with the thermal plugs. After putting out the fire, the MX guys worked all night to replace the wheels/tires and got the aircraft off the runway just as FRA was about to accept the morning wave of landings...

Funny story, the AC does a practice low approach to check flying charactistics, and tells the CP to call out runway remaining markers once he lands. On the landing, upon touchdown, the CP says "Uh, there aren't ANY runway remaining markers...." DOH!

Yea, Rockwell had built the wing sweep units completely sealed saying they would NEVER need MX...go figure! The MX guys had to hand roll the wings forward to 20 sweep to shuttle the Bone back to Dyess, limiting it to about .7 mach...

FastCargo