THE OPS DESK
BRINGING YOU THE LATEST TALK FROM AROUND THE SQUADRONS
THE ROCKWELL B-1B Lancer has always tugged at my heartstrings. The ‘Bone’ is just a very cool airplane. She’s huge, sleek, curvy, and has four powerful afterburning engines. Not only that, but the Lancer can carry the largest payload of either guided or unguided munitions in the entire US inventory, which it combines with fighter-like performance. In its class, the B-1 holds more than 50 world records for speed, range, time to climb, and payload.
Before we continue celebrating the overwhelming savagery of the B-1, we need to face a harsh reality — the ‘Bones’ are broken.
So broken in fact, that according to a US senator from South Dakota, only six of the aircraft in the entire fleet of more than 60 aircraft are combat mission ready. Six! That’s fewer than 10 per cent of the total.
B-1: the facts
According to a House Armed Services Committee (HASC) report, more than a dozen B-1s are currently undergoing depot-level maintenance at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma. Nearly 40 of them are not flying at all, for one reason or another. It speaks to an ongoing problem in combat air power circles: money and resources aplenty to allocate for development and…
