The B-1B: High-Flying Plane Has Sharp Critics on the Ground

When the B-1B flies, it handles more like a fighter than a bomber, dancing across the sky and below the ridge lines along the arid Texas plains to practice high-speed, low-level bombing.

During a recent 4 1/2-hour training flight, Lt. Col. Bob Davis, an instructor pilot, and Capt. Gary J. Martin, a student pilot, wheeled the plane in 30-degree turns at 600-plus m.p.h., holding an altitude of 500 feet while “prosecuting” their attack runs.

At times, only the plane’s shadow racing across the countryside gave an indication of how fast it was moving. The sensation was not unlike that of a race car skewing around curves, but without the noise. The pilots, used to lumbering around in aging B-52s, were clearly enjoying themselves.

A Plane With Problems

The B-1B is a beautiful airplane in a distinctly sinister way, with movable “swept” wings and more on-board computers than the space shuttle. With its needle-nosed, slim silhouette and four jet engines slung below the fuselage, it is smaller than a B-52 yet capable of carrying more bombs.

It also is carrying some extra baggage.

To its critics on Capitol Hill, the B-1B is the plane whose capabilities were oversold by the Air Force and one that might someday live up to its original design specifications, but only at a cost of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

It is a plane with problems that have been fixed--like fuel leaks--and one big problem that hasn’t--the electronic gear needed to fool or jam enemy radar.

Congress Is ‘Upset’

“The fact that it can get off the ground doesn’t prove anything,” says Rep. Barbara Boxer(D-Calif.), a critic and member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“The Air Force has serious problems with the plane. And the Air Force tried to hide them because they didn’t want Congress to get upset. Well, we’re upset.”

The men who are bringing the B-1B to life at this isolated west Texas air base acknowledge problems. They believe Congress has gone too far with its criticism.

That attitude perhaps should be expected.

This is a base now populated by some of the “hottest” bomber pilots in the Air Force. Along with the bordering city of Abilene, it glories in its patriotism. Civic leaders are honorary “wing commanders,” and a letter to the editor complaining about aircraft noise is followed by another praising the noise as “the sound of freedom.”

Potent Machine

If the B-1B has yet to live up to expectation, it remains a potent machine. The question that a flight demonstration can’t answer is whether it is capable of sneaking across Soviet borders and surviving to drop bombs.

The Air Force has ordered 100 B-1Bs, of which 48 have been delivered. The plane is designed to restore the Air Force’s ability to attack “high priority” targets in the event of war; the type of targets that require precision accuracy--beyond that even of today’s missiles--such as movable missile batteries.

Today, B-52s would attempt that mission. Their chances of success have been reduced by improvements to the Soviet Union’s air-defense system, including new radars and fighters.

Besides the fuel leaks, the B-1B’s problems have included a maintenance diagnostic system that still gives false reports and automatic “terrain-following” radar and flight-control systems that are only now nearing final checkout.

Faulty Equipment

Col. Donald J. Moody, the assistant deputy commander for maintenance here, also acknowledges delays in obtaining spare parts. Those problems have been, or will soon be, solved, say Moody and Col. Albert (Don) Jensen, the newly designated commander of the 96th Bombardment Wing.

The bigger problem, and the one that has raised the most congressional ire, involves the B-1B’s electronic countermeasures equipment.

For all of its maneuverability, the B-1B needs that equipment to accomplish its wartime mission. The equipment is supposed to allow the bomber to detect enemy radar units so that it can avoid flying near them and, if need be, to jam or “trick” them to protect the plane against missiles.

The Air Force stresses the problem with the gear is not that it doesn’t provide any protection, but that it doesn’t yet provide all the protection that was expected.

$600-Million Solution

How serious is the problem? Serious enough that the Air Force now estimates that it will take most of two years and $600 million to solve.

The equipment is made by the Eaton Corp.’s AIL Division and consists of 118 “black boxes” of electronic equipment. By comparison, a B-52 carries an electronic countermeasures system consisting of 23 black boxes.

Congress appears willing to provide the money to fix the problems--in part because the Air Force is still below its original cost estimate for B-1B production--although there are dissenting voices.

Boxer offered an amendment to the Pentagon’s fiscal 1988 budget bill that would force the Air Force to absorb the cost of correcting the B-1B’s problems, but her amendment was rejected.

Accountability Stressed

She said the message she wanted to get across to the Air Force was “that if you make major mistakes . . . you better watch out because we’re going to hold you accountable.”

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, complains that the B-1B’s tortuous birth has raised anew questions about the process by which the Pentagon develops and builds weapons.

Designed in the 1960s, approved and then killed in the 1970s and resurrected in 1981, the B-1B became one of the centerpieces of President Reagan’s drive to re-arm America--on a par with the 600-ship Navy.

Although the word “interim” hardly seems applicable to a program that will cost more than $28 billion for 100 planes, the B-1B was pushed through Congress as an interim bridge between the B-52, which first flew in 1954, and the “Stealth” bomber, which isn’t expected to enter production until the early-to-mid-1990s.

High-Risk Approach

To meet the ambitious goal of deploying the first B-1Bs by the fall of 1986, the Air Force practiced “concurrency.” Development and production were pursued simultaneously, using B-1A prototypes built in the 1970s as the starting point.

Concurrency is a high-risk approach for a complicated weapon. Although it offers the prospect of saving huge amounts of money by saving time--the Air Force claims that it saved at least $3 billion on the B-1--it carries with it the risk of unanticipated problems that can be corrected only at great expense because production has already begun.

The result, Aspin says, is that “the B-1 can penetrate and hit some targets in the Soviet Union, more than the B-52, but it can’t hit all the targets it was designed to.”

Back at Dyess, where B-1Bs have now flown 1,000 times, Davis and Martin are flying figure 8s for a reporter while Moody is insisting that the plane “is going in the right direction.”

Right now, “you indeed (would) have a lot of things going for you” in the B-1B if the nation went to war, he says.

The problems that do exist do not lend themselves to “a fast type of solution,” he adds. “It does take a little bit of patience. But we’re very pleased with the aircraft.”

The AP’s military writer recently became the first reporter to fly on the B-1B.