But at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, B-52 maintainers are hungry for new motors that will hopefully lessen the time it takes to diagnose and fix engine problems.

“If I was to prioritize the systems from a maintainer’s point of view, in my personal opinion — not the Air Force’s obviously — but [replacing] the engines first and foremost” would have the most positive impact on the maintenance community, said Lt. Col. Tiffany Arnold, 2nd Maintenance Squadron commander. Arnold spoke with journalist and Defense News contributor Jeff Bolton during a visit to Barksdale AFB.

Each B-52 uses eight TF33 engines to fly, which means maintainers spend a lot of time ensuring each engine functions properly. And when more than one engine needs repairs, that entails more work for the personnel that are already performing multiple assessments, Arnold said.

Click here for more from the special report on the U.S. nuclear enterprise.

The Air Force believes it can reduce fuel burn and cut down the number of hours needed to maintain the B-52 by swapping the TF33s with eight new, off-the-shelf engines.

It’s a discussion that’s been going on for more than 30 years, said Alan Williams, deputy B-52 program element monitor with Air Force Global Strike Command.

“The B-52 was going to be retired in 1996, and then the date slid to 2000, then it slid to 2003, then it went finally to 2040 and now it’s 2050,” he said in an August interview. “The extended life has finally given us the green light for upgrades we’ve been looking at for 20 or 30 years but could never get funded.”

The RFP, which was originally scheduled for release in March, has been pushed to the end of 2019, he added. A contract award to a single engine manufacturer is scheduled about a year later. Once that happens, the winning engine will move through a typical design and test phase, culminating in the integration of new engines on two B-52s for flight tests around 2023 or 2024.

Williams acknowledged the delay was partially caused by House lawmakers’ concerns about the Air Force’s acquisition strategy. At issue is the service’s decision to award contracts for prototyping work before requirements and cost estimates were finalized, and the House Armed Service Committee wants to require the Air Force to submit additional documentation on the schedule and cost of the effort.

“Right now they are working through the process, trying to answer all of the questions that both leadership in the Air Force have and Congress has,” Williams said. “There is no particular reason for the delay other than just getting through the wickets.”

B-52 prime contractor Boeing and the three potential engine providers — General Electric, Rolls Royce, and Pratt & Whitney — are under contract for the initial prototype phase of the competition, which will culminate in November with each manufacturer creating an initial digital design specifying how their respective engine would integrate with the B-52.

Incumbent Pratt & Whitney now plans to offer the PW815, but the company has also advocated a life extension for the existing TF33s as an alternative to buying new engines. Rolls-Royce will offer a version of its the F130 engine and has promised to build a manufacturing facility in Indianapolis, Indiana, if it wins the B-52 re-engine effort. Meanwhile, GE Aviation indicated it could put forward either the CF34-10 or its Passport engines.

The level of detail of the virtual prototypes won’t reach the level of a preliminary design, said Jim Kroening, Boeing’s B-52 modernization program manager, but it will provide the Air Force with a better idea of how the four candidate engines will mate with the cowling that surrounds the engine and the strut that attaches the engine to the wing.

“Using digital modeling, [we] also try to understand what the performance of the engine [is],” he said. “So understanding whether the missions can replicate what the B-52 can do today and also understand what the life cycle reliability, maintainability impacts are.”

Since the TF33 engines were developed in the late 1950s, they are not outfitted with the sensors of modern engines, which can monitor the health of the system or diagnose a problem before it occurs, Arnold said at Barksdale AFB.

“We may see an indicator of an issue, but we don’t know how long until it’s going to fail until it actually does. In my world, we would like to prevent the failure from interrupting scheduled training or a mission,” she said.

“I would like to know if I need to take that aircraft down out of the schedule and give it a new engine ahead of time,” she added. “We could prioritize, we could understand the patterns of the engines in a way that we could maintain them better. And hopefully the new motor, whoever designs it, will have a shorter mean time between failure, and we can fly them longer.”

Senior Airman Gregory Gatdula, a jet engine mechanic, said that the age of the TF33 makes working on the motors “very troublesome” despite the reliability of the B-52 as a whole.

“We’re usually able to pinpoint certain things, but most of the time it’s random,” he said. “These engines don’t have anything that can help us troubleshoot it besides our manual [technical orders]. So getting a new engine with something that can help us determine what might be right or wrong with the engine could definitely help us out a lot.”

New generators?

While most of the focus of the B-52 re-engine effort has been on the engines themselves, Kroening noted that the Air Force might also outfit each engine with new generators as part of the program — a change that would give the B-52 a boost of power needed for emerging technologies like hypersonic, laser or the long-range standoff weapons.

“Right now, on the B-52, there are four generators — one on every other engine,” he said. “Our design intent is to attach a generator to each engine, perhaps a smaller generator, that will overall increase the capacity.”

But Williams said the Air Force is still working to understand future electronic needs and there is no firm decision on the generator topic.

“As you pull power from the engine to run a generator — or alternator or any other accessory that goes on the engine — you have to take some percentage of the power of the engine away from it producing thrust to fly the aircraft,” he said. “All of those are trade-offs.”

The Boeing-built B-52 — colloquially known as the Big Ugly Fat Fellow, or BUFF — is one of the Air Force’s oldest airframes, but that isn’t stopping the service from constantly deploying its fleet, most recently in September to RAF Fairford in England. The legendary bomber will continue operations into the 2050s, Air Force leaders said.

“The aircraft was built in 1960. If you walk in the cockpit it looks like a 1960 cockpit. It flies like a 1960 airplane,” said Col. Robert Burgess, 307th Operations Group commander. Burgess spoke with journalist and Defense News contributor Jeff Bolton during a visit to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. “However, the avionics, the software, the weapon systems have to upgrade to meet the demands of the world.”

Click here for more from the special report on the U.S. nuclear enterprise.

The Air Force is considering re-designating the BUFF as the B-52J after modifications. Here are some of the major changes coming to the bomber over the next few years:

A new radar

In July, Boeing announced it selected Raytheon to produce a new radar to replace its current Northrop Grumman AN/APQ-166 system, beating Northrop’s pitch for the AN/APG-83 scalable agile beam radar.

The new active electronically scanned array radar, which will be based on Raytheon’s APG-79 and APG-82, will increase the range at which the B-52 can detect targets, and it’ll increase the number of targets the bomber can locate, according to Raytheon.

“When we have ancient technology downstairs, it makes our life a little bit more difficult — especially with the weapon systems that require us to use a radar,” said Lt. Rebecca Halla, a B-52 weapons system operator at Barksdale. “Getting that upgrade not only is going to allow us to be better at that, but it gives us new capabilities with new weapons.”

As part of the contract, Raytheon will work with prime contractor Boeing to replace the radar and radome, as well as putting in new displays, said Michael Riggs, Boeing’s B-52 radar modernization program manager. The initial contract funds the program through its critical design review, which will wrap up in 2021. The first ground and flight tests could occur as early as 2023.

New computers and communications

Full-color LCD displays, updated computers and several new communications links are also on the way through the Combat Network Communication Technology, or CONECT, program. The upgrade will allow the B-52 to stream a real-time feed that provides intelligence and updates to the mission plan.

So far, 60 of the 76 aircraft have received modifications, said Alan Williams, deputy B-52 program element monitor at Air Force Global Strike Command.

The Air Force is also adding Link 16 to the B-52, which is one of the last of the service’s aircraft to get that NATO-standard communications link, said Scot Oathout, Boeing’s bombers program director. The company is currently designing that modification, with flight tests scheduled for mid-2020. Adding a data link for the Navy’s Mobile User Objective System will follow.

Capt. Eric Nelson, a B-52 instructor pilot and weapons officer, pointed to the communications upgrades as especially important to the B-52’s ability to connect to other platforms.

“No fight is a self-contained fight,” he said. “The B-52 interoperates with many aircraft across the platform; and even in the nuclear mission, it still [does] not go it alone. You have requirements, and the new upgrades are going to allow us to better communicate in a digital world where before we were heavily relying upon line-of-sight analog communication.”

New weapons

The B-52 can be armed with an array of nuclear and conventional weaponry, and it’s set to take on some of the Air Force’s most advanced munitions.

This June, the service disclosed that the B-52 had carried a hypersonic missile on flight tests. The weapon, known as the AGM-183A Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, did not contain explosives and was not launched. Instead, the service used the flight to gather data about its impact on the B-52’s flight envelope.

The B-52 is also slated to get the Long Range Standoff Missile currently in development. LRSO will replace the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, which can be outfitted with either a nuclear or conventional warhead.

Along with new weapons, the B-52 is getting upgrades to its conventional rotary launcher that will double the number of weapons the aircraft can launch from its internal bay. The Air Force began testing modifications to the launcher earlier this year, according to information released by the service in February.

“The Conventional Rotary Launcher has a high power draw, so an aircrew could only power up four munitions at a time without risking blowing circuit breakers in mid-flight,” Maj. Jason McCargar, a 49th Test and Evaluation Squadron unit project officer, said in a news release. “With this upgrade, it can now have eight ready at once.”

And maybe more …

The Air Force is brainstorming how it should modernize the BUFF’s defensive systems, particularly its electronic warfare system. The service is in the process of a “form, fit, function replacement” for its current ALQ-172 electronic countermeasures system, or ECM, which will help solve problems with obsolescence and increase reliability without providing a capability upgrade, said Williams.

“That will allow us to then sustain the existing capability with modern computers, modern backplanes, modern computer boards inside the box,” he said. “That leaves us with some empty space that if, at some future time, Global Strike Command wishes to upgrade the ECM capability of the B-52, they would have space to do it in.”

The Air Force is on contract for the first two of about 10 boxes that comprise the electronic countermeasures system, and another two boxes will likely go under contract in September, he said.

Although the Air Force has discussed a full-scale replacement for the ALQ-172, Williams said the cost could amount to billions of dollars and may not be worth it, depending on how the aircraft will operate in the future.

“The B-52 is considered to be a standoff platform,” he said. “Current thinking is it would not go into a high-density threat area, and therefore the need for upgrading the electronic warfare system is not as demanding as some of the other demands to upgrade the B-52.”

The B-52’s nuclear option of choice is the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, commonly referred to as the ALCM. Fully loaded, the B-52 can carry 20 of the weapons. But like the plane that launches them, the weapons are on the older side, having been produced in the early to mid-1980s.

“A lot of this stuff predates the airmen I have working on ’em,” said Senior Master Sgt. Daniel Abrams-Trust, the cruise missile flight chief for the 2nd Munitions Squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Interviews at Barksdale were conducted by journalist and Defense News contributor Jeff Bolton.

“So while it was extremely sophisticated at the time, it’s fallen out of favor. Some of that technology’s requiring service-life extensions where we identify maybe some high-failure areas, things that we need to replace,” Abrams-Trust said.

Click here for videos and more coverage of the B-52 and the B-2.

The ALCM “had an initial service life of 10 years,” Abrams-Trust added. “It was really only meant to go to early to mid-’90s, be replaced by the advanced cruise missile. And while we fielded that, advanced cruise missile had some challenges logistically, maintenance was difficult. So we’ve pushed through the ALCM even further.”

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are currently on contract for $900 million as part of a four-and-a-half-year technology-maturation and risk-reduction phase to design the new weapon (the full cost of the heavily classified program is unknown). In fiscal 2022, the Air Force plans to choose between the designs. The service intends to integrate the weapon with its nuclear-capable bombers — the B-52, B-2 and B-21 — with initial fielding slated for the late 2020s.

Along with the newly designed ALCM is a newly designed warhead, known as the W80-4, currently in the early design stages with the National Nuclear Security Administration. Because the warhead is being designed at the same time as the delivery system — the first time in 30 years the two projects have been done in parallel — the program faces “unique” risks, according to NNSA’s most recent annual report to Congress.

The first production unit of the W80-4 is expected to be delivered in FY25, with completion of the production run by FY31. Costs are expected to range between $6.7 billion and $10.3 billion between FY18 and FY32; however, the warhead program experienced “a loss of $120 million in productivity due to delays associated with Continuing Resolutions since the beginning of FY 2016,” according to the NNSA report.

For a few years, it looked like the LRSO program might be in for a rough ride from congressional Democrats. But the introduction of even newer nuclear weapon systems through the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review appears to have taken the heat off the new cruise missile. And for advocates of the air-based leg of the nuclear triad, keeping the B-52 as up to date as possible is a good thing.

“When we say nuclear modernization, we are merely replacing the current triad. We are not expanding our capabilities, we’re not violating a treaty, we’re not developing a new capability. It’s a very reasonable response to the threat,” Robert Soofer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, said during the 2019 Defense News Conference.

With Russia and China modernizing their nuclear arsenals, and the U.S. engaged in what the Pentagon has termed as a renewal of “great power competition,” Soofer described the overall nuclear modernization efforts as “sensible,” “reasonable” and “affordable.”

But keeping the nuclear deterrent viable doesn’t just involve technology, noted Lt. Col. James Daily, deputy commander of the 2nd Operations Group at Barksdale.

“The bomber is that flexible, visible and recallable arm of the triad, and one of the things that we’re looking at is how do we do [operations] better everyday based on the environment,” Daily said.

“Back in the day, it was a two-player game during the Cold War. Now you’ve got multiple players, different environments and different considerations to include. We talk about extended deterrents for allies and things like that, so how do we better posture the force, is what we’re look at everyday.”