Pilot: I Flew a B-52 Bomber. Here's What It Was Like.

Dario Leone

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Amazing? 

I trained as a crewmember on a specific student crew as the copilot. My pilot was a pipe-smoking major who could fly well enough but had a hell of a time refueling. Had I known then what I knew much later, I could have explained it to him, but instead I had to watch him thrash and curse trying to accomplish this required task. He finally got minimally satisfactory on our check ride, but I hope he got much better, because the time might have come where his wing’s ORI score, or his own butt, would depend upon getting the gas.

We flew our first training sortie with a senior renowned B-52 pilot, Lucky Luciano, a Lt. Col. with long B-52 experience. He had Italian movie star good looks and a mild, confident manner that made him a valued senior member of the B-52 community. Regrettably, I tested that mild confident manner on my first landing attempt. Lucky had explained extensively how, because of the structure of the B-52, the pilot must trim the horizontal stabilizer throughout the landing flare. This was necessary because the length of the fuselage compared to the relatively small and ineffective elevators on the tail required that the entire horizontal tail section be moved to provide enough aerodynamic authority to rotate the aircraft into the nose-up landing configuration. As I later explained to students when I was a Castle instructor, you must fly “into the tunnel”; that is, get right down to the runway at the approach end and then hold the plane just above the runway as the aircraft slows and you trim to rotate it to a nose-up lauding attitude.