Hi. I'm Matthew Burchette, curator at Wings Over the Rockies,
and this is Behind the Wings.
Hi, my name is Matthew Burchette. I'm the curator at Wings Over the Rockies Air
and Space Museum, and I thought I'd take a little bit of time just to give you a
very quick background about Wings Over the Rockies.
We're located on the old Lowry Air Force Base.
Lowry Air Force Base was just outside of Denver in 1938,
when the base began, and it closed down in 1994. In 1995, Wings inherited two of
the original hangars here on Lowry, and acquired a large collection of aircraft,
which has now grown to over 50 different aircraft. So, there are a couple of really
cool things about Wings Over the Rockies in Lowry Air Force Base, but, as we get
into this series, you're going to learn a whole lot more about what goes on
Behind the Wings at Wings.
Welcome to the first episode of Behind the Wings. Today, we're
checking out the B-1A Lancer. BAM! This guy: a hundred and fifty feet long.
That's amazing! Let's go check it out
The B-1A was actually designed with three separate bomb bays. You can see the
open doors right here. Within each bomb bay was actually a rotary unit that carried
short-range attack missiles. So, as the aircraft flew along, and was going to
deploy its weapons, it would literally turn the rotating rocket launcher, drop a
couple of rockets, turn, drop, turn, drop.
Now, it could also carry conventional nuclear weapons.
The idea was that the B-1 was actually going to replace the
B-52 by 1980. Well, if you're an airplane geek, like me, you know that hasn't
happened yet. We still got B-52s flying. We still got B-1s flying. The idea was
that the B-1 could actually carry way more nuclear weapons than a B-52 could,
but with a lower gross weight and a much shorter takeoff roll. Now, what does that
mean to the average Joe? Well, it means that a higher gross weight aircraft can
get off the ground in a much shorter length of space. B-52 was a big plane.
This is no small plane either, but it also had a heck of a lot more power.
So let's go check out those engines.
Alright, so we're at the business end of the of the Lancer. Now, what normally
would be here would be the turkey feathers, or the afterburner cans of the
big GE F-101 engines. Now, these monstrosities, there were four of them,
each produced 30,000 pounds of thrust apiece with afterburner. That was able to
propel this guy, like we said before, to nearly 1,600 miles an hour. Now, one of
the things that you guys probably don't know is that the Air Force Museum
doesn't allow engines to be left in their aircraft, when they go on display.
So, that's why you see this giant red meatball behind me.
It's actually just covering up a giant hole.
I'll let you in on a secret. There are rumors in the
museum, and with some of its volunteers that have been here long enough to know,
that this thing is actually filled with sand. Now, I don't know if that's true.
We've never seen any sand pouring out of it, but the idea was that the Air
Force actually filled this thing with sand to get it to sit right, when they
were using it as a training bird for loading nuclear weapons. Eh, we don't
know. Maybe we'll never know. I'm not going to try to find out,
because I don't want to clean up the mess.
Okay, enough with the outside.
Let's go check out the inside, where the good stuff is.
Okay, so here we are in the cockpit of the B-1A Lancer. How cool is this!
Now, you can probably see behind me there's not a lot left. I mean, there's not even really
a stick. There's a good reason for that. The government was actually building
only four B-1As to serve as test beds, before they really got going on the B-1
project. Now, what happened is, President Carter felt that the cost
overruns of this particular aircraft were so immense that they said "let's get
rid of this thing," and they shut the program down. But, in the meantime, here
are flight engineers and pilots, and they are trying everything they can to get
this aircraft to do exactly what they want. They're putting in instruments,
they're taking them out. We're talking navigation instruments, terrain-following
radar instruments, electronic warfare instruments to keep the aircraft safe
from Soviet missiles. So they would put an instrument in, they test fly it, see
how it worked. Hey, that didn't work. Alright, let's try something else. They put
one back in. So that's why there's all these empty spaces in this aircraft,
because they used it as a test bed. Now, one of the things you may notice is that
it looks like I'm sitting in an ejection seat.
I'm really not. I'm sitting in an ejection capsule.
One of the things that made the B-1A so interesting was the fact that, of the
four that they built, two had regular ejection seats, but two had an ejection
capsule. So, if you look up here, you can see the yellow dots that we've placed
along the edge of the fuselage that actually shows where the ejection
capsule was. And the idea the engineers had was to actually eject all four crew
members at once in a capsule. So, if you're going down, you got to get out.
Whoever pulls the ejection lever first sends all four guys right out of the
plane, not in an individual seat, but in the capsule. And the idea was that
these guys were traveling sometimes close to 1600 miles an hour. You're not
going to survive in an ejection seat. You're actually going to have a much better
chance of survival in the capsule.
Alright, now we're at the main landing gear of the B-1 and I'm going to let you in
on a secret that nobody else knows, because I haven't told anybody about it.
About five years ago, I got an email from the Air Force, and they wanted me to come
out and find out if there were particular parts still on the landing
gear that they could strip off and use for operational B-1s in Afghanistan.
They sent me some photographs. I came out here, checked and quickly figured out
everything good had already been stripped off. Now, I had to go back and
tell the Air Force that they couldn't keep one of their birds in the air.
Not something you want to do.
So there you go. More than you ever wanted to know about the B-1A Lancer.
Thanks for tuning in for our very first episode of Behind the Wings. Next month,
we're actually going to be giving you some information on the history of Lowry
Air Force Base. You're not going to want to miss that, because there's stuff in
there that I guarantee you, you don't know.
Thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you next month.