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Flight Of The Valkyrie

by Jim "Twitch" Tittle

Article Type: History
Article Date: May 02, 2001

Duck And Cover

The mission concept came from a time in history when the world was under the cloud of nuclear threat on a daily basis. Children in the 1950s had air raid drills and the familiar "duck and cover" of kids diving under their desks in the public service films of the time seem silly now. 10,000 nuclear warhead ICBMs did not yet exist and it was mainly the threat of manned bombers that was the problem at hand.

Dressed In Black

When Francis Gary Powers's U-2 went down over the then Soviet Union in 1960, the military and aircraft designers got a cold chill. Could the Soviet missiles really reach that high? In hindsight it was probably an unlucky hit and possibly Powers was not at maximum altitude of what was probably 78-80,000 feet. He insisted to his interrogators that he was at 68,000, and perhaps he was. The next logical step was an aircraft that could take things to the next level, literally. In 1958 U-2 designer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson mentioned it was a known fact that a U-2 would be shot down someday. "The U-2 could fly higher than any other plane, but was slow (500 mph). We needed a replacement that could fly higher, farther and fast as hell."
The Lockheed SR-71 development was moving along. Flying Mach 3 at 80,000 plus feet it would be part of the next level of aviation of high, fast flyers. Though it never over flew the Soviet Union, from altitude side-looking optics it could see pretty well into the border regions. It would later fly daily recon over North Vietnam and occasionally over Cuba without being touched. Realistically the Blackbird could attain heights on the order of 115,000 feet or more.

Making Boom Boom

But what if we had to go to war OVER the Soviet Union and do more than have a Kodak moment? B-52s would have been picked out of the sky like clay pigeons as they lumbered in at 45,000 feet going 575-600 mph with nuclear weapons. The range was there certainly at 7,500 miles with an internal load, but SU-7s, SU-9s, the MiG 19s and early 21s could have intercepted it.

The Convair B-58 Hustler was the only plane that had a chance, a one-way chance, of lighting off a nuke over the Soviet Union if we went to war. Eighty Hustlers were assigned to the 43rd and 305th Bomber Wings based in the US. Their range of 2,000 miles would require the massive task of in-flight refueling. Even then, targets deep in the Russian Motherland would probably not allow egress to a safe airfield for a large number of them. It could fly faster than any interceptor averaging 1,000 mph with Mach 2 bursts of 1,324 mph at 55,000 feet from its four GE-J79s with 15,600 lb. thrust engines. It could fly higher than the B-52s at 60,000 feet, but was that enough given that the U-2 had succumbed to SAMS?

New Attitude

Thinking outside the box conceived the North American XB-70 Valkyrie. It would be able to fly as high as the secret SR-71 and have a range as long as the B-52. But in 1959 that was sci-fi stuff. By the time the lunar space program got the go-ahead though, technology was tooling up for the task with exotic materials development—equipment and whole industries heretofore non-existent.

In 1960 artist concepts of the B-70 that later proved to be accurate to the real plane were published. We must remember that the SR-71 was UFO style secret. It wasn't until 1964 that any images or fragmentary information about it was released. It was the A-11 back then and one derivative would have been an internal nuclear bomb or missile carrier. The AIR-2A or 2B were the nuke air-to-ground fire-spears of the time. The YF-12 title stuck for a while when it was conceived that it would be armed with eight Hughes AIM-47A missiles in the air defense fighter role. Finally the SR-71 moniker was arrived upon as the designation for the Strategic Reconnaissance mission. But what if we had to make a nuclear retaliatory strike of large proportions? The obvious answer was the B-70.

The 1960 release of B-70 information was a deliberate effort to let the Soviets know that we weren't fooling around. Two prototypes were called for to evaluate the design. The first, number 62-0001, flew in 1964 with number 62-207 flying in 1965.

Bringing The Barbeque To Them

Its six 31,000 lb. thrust General Electric YN93-GE3 afterburning turbojets would each ingest nearly 100,000 cubic feet of air per second—the equivalent of six million humans drawing a breath at once. Only a portion would go to the combustion chamber. The balance would inject directly to the afterburners creating the ram effect with the burning fuel. This motive force would propel it at Mach 3. The XB-70 did attain 2,019 mph (Mach 3.08) in 1965. It could fly 7,600 miles un-refueled. It attained an altitude of 73,980 feet with an operational ceiling of 82,000 plus feet being logically attainable.

Weighing in at 551,150 lbs. maximum for takeoff the craft measured 196 feet in length with a 105 foot delta-shaped wingspan having an area of 6,297 sq. ft. Much of the structure employed the use of stainless steel and titanium to resist kinetic heat, save weight and increase strength. It stood 30 feet high resting on its tricycle undercarriage with ten wheels. A stubby canard wing of nearly 29 feet in span, just aft of the cockpit and 25 feet from the needle nose, assisted low speed control when the elevons in the delta tail had restricted airflow in high angles of attack.
The fuselage itself was shaped in the "coke bottle" design to increase speed and air flow efficiency. The wing tips were about the first of the variable geometric design with settings between 25 degrees at low speed to 65 degrees for high speeds. In the slow position the tips would angle downward ten feet below the main structure's surface. The delta wings, containing much of the fuel, were designed to create a shock wave with increased lift as the big bomber rode on that airflow. The 8.5 foot tall, twin vertical tail fins' forward edges were fixed but the rear portion could be adjusted and trimmed for best flight position. They were not angled as the SR-71's were.

The relatively slim forward fuselage runs back 50 feet where the two massive 6 foot high jet inlets begin below it. The central weapons bay behind it could house fourteen free-fall thermonuclear weapons or 50,000 lbs. of more conventional weapons.

The four-man crew consisted of pilot, co-pilot, navigator/ bombardier and an ECM/ flight engineer. The whole crew compartment would eject in an emergency, a vital necessity at the planned altitudes.

The Plane That Never Was

Testing was undertaken at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave dessert of California. The test program was well along when on June 8, 1966 a publicity photo shoot was planned featuring the theme of aircraft powered by GE engines. XB-70 62-207 took to the air along with an F-5B, a F4, an F-104 and another unknown to this author.

NASA pilot, Joe Walker, in the F-104 was flying at about 4 o'clock to the XB-70 when he got too close to the huge vortex generated by the Valkyrie's down-turned wingtip. The F-104 sheered off the starboard vertical stabilizer, hit the port fin and exploded on the wing. The tail-less bomber flew straight and level for several second before it commenced a death spiral to the desert floor. F-104 pilot Joseph A. Walker and Valkyrie co-pilot Carl Cross died in the accident.

Although this tragic event was not the sole reason for its demise, the incident effectively rang out the death knoll for this genre of super bomber. Number 62-001 continued flight-testing until February 1969. It was decided that since cost overruns had spiraled and that allegedly Soviet defense SAMs were sophisticated enough to reach the proposed flight altitude, the project would be terminated. 62-001 is now an exhibit at the USAF Museum.
But was the B-70 a museum piece in 1969 when many thought the role of the manned bomber was obsolete? Probably not. Certainly the success of the SR-71 proves the high and fast idea works. Many years after it would out-speed missiles fired at it on numerous "classified" occasions. With cruise missile technology forthcoming the B-70 could have launched them high and outside the borders of a hostile nation exposing the crew to no danger. As demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War, ordnance guided by several means was extremely effective.

Carrying 50,000 lbs. of assorted "smart weapons" a B-70 could loiter unmolested in a battle area for hours at 15.5 miles altitude launching devices and confounding the enemy with ECM. Certainly the B-70 was not stealthy as it paints a huge radar signature, but it could have been a useful addition to the Air Force's inventory then and now considering we still have upgraded B-52s on duty that were designed in the 1940s!

Part of the fear was the MiG 25. It turned out to be a paper tiger, but in 1964 when it first flew, and throughout the 1970s, it was feared. When Lt. Viktor Belenko was debriefed after flying his MiG 25 to Japan in 1976 the truth came out.

The MiG 25 could fly fast at Mach 3.2 but Mach 2.5 was the official redline since above that speed the engines would burn up. Belenko stated, ". . . at high speed the engines have a very strong tendency to accelerate out of control . . . above Mach 2.8 they will overheat and burn up." The engines were originally used on target drones for missile intercept testing.

In 1973 an Egyptian MiG 25 was clocked at Mach 3.2 over Israel so the Americans thought this was a normal operating scenario. Belenko relates how that fighter, ". . . landed back in Egypt with its engines totally wrecked." He mentions how anyone flying that abusively was lucky to return in one piece due to the possibility of catastrophic engine failure. To add to the insult Lt. Belenko stated that his range was only 558 miles absolute maximum with a combat radius of but 186 miles! This was certainly no interceptor as we know it, unless the enemy was obligingly right over your base.

The B-70 would have been safe at 82,00 feet since Belenko mentioned, "If you carry only two missiles you can reach 78,000 feet for a minute or two. With four missiles 69,000 feet is the maximum. And it gets better. He stated that the missiles WOULD NOT FUNCTION above 88,500 feet, an altitude that he stated he knew the SR-71 operated well ABOVE, and that they were not fast enough to over take the Blackbird if they could. Plus, head-on, the missiles could not adjust their guidance with those types of closing speeds.

Just Maybe . . .

Basically we could have had a better plane than 1974's B-1 which was a low altitude penetrator, a job that the F-111 and others could well accomplish. 1989's B-2 unveiled a whole different concept in a manned bomber but a mere thirty exist due the outlandishly astronomical costs running tens of billions of dollars per copy. And they thought the B-70 was expensive when only 500 million dollars had been spent by 1969.

B-70 production could have commenced by 1971-73 with a total of a probable 100-200 aircraft. All of the expensive development costs were already done. For the most part only production remained. By comparison, a hundred and two B-52Hs and one hundred (two hundred and twenty four were originally planned) B-1s were built. Since we constantly upgrade our winged stable of warriors it is not unrealistic to imagine the B-70 having retired the B-52H, the B-1 never seeing production and the B-70 equipped with 2001 technology.

The B-70 Valkyrie would have been a bargain.

Web Sites:

• FAS.org: Images and info on the B-70
• For MiG 25 stats and images
• For SR-71 images and movie
• More Blackbird images and links
• NASA's site about the SR-71
• Air Force Museum web site
• Steven Levin's awesome 001--Flight of the Valkyrie site

Bibliography:

Barron, John
MiG Pilot
Avon Books, N.Y.,1981

Colby, C.B.
Bomber Parade
Coward-McCann, Inc., N.Y., 1960

Green, William
The Observer's Book of Basic Aircraft
Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, London, 1967

Gunston, William
The Encyclopedia of Modern Warplanes
Aerospace Publishing Ltd., London, 1995

Hartz, Joe
"Alone, Unarmed, Untouchable: The Amazing SR-71"
Reader's Digest, January 1980

International Masters Publishers Staff
Aircraft of the World
International Masters Publishers, N.Y., 1997

Morgan, Terry
Bomber Aircraft of the United States
Arco Publishing, N.Y., 1967

Munson, Kenneth
Bombers
The Macmillian Co., N.Y.,1966

Powers, Francis Gary
Operation Overflight
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, N.Y.,1970

Taylor, John W.R. & Swanborough, Gordon
Military Aircraft of the World
Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y. 1979

"Anatomy of Speed"
Time Magazine
Science Section, March 20, 1964



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