Have You Ever Seen THAT Much Smoke From A B-52

Annnnnd You Can’t See Anything.

Ahhhh, the B-52 Stratofortress. After over 60 years, it’s still the primary bomber of the United States. Yes, it had a lot of upgrades over the years, but the airframes are still flying although out of 744 planes built, the last on left the assembly line in 1962.

The design is timeless too. Looking at it from afar, it’s incredible to think that these things came out only seven years after World War II ended. Before that, we had the B-29 Superfortress. Yes, these planes were beautiful unto themselves, but there’s a significant shift in design just a few years later.

As for this video, we were a bit surprised. We’ve seen a few B-52s taking off in our day, but none smoked THAT much. We did some digging around, and it seems like this is due to water being injected to increase thrust on takeoff. We’re not mechanics, so if you guys have any info on this, let us know.

Maybe the original engineers thought that if the bombers ran out of bombs, they could do a low flyby and suffocate them. Just a thought.