Originally Posted by
Sputnik
I'll chime in as a structural engineer: Huggy is right. It's not that big a deal.
Data point--BUFF is older, spent years flying a much harsher regime, still doing the job just fine. .
To qualify that statement, can you tell me what is rebuilt on the Buffs, approximately how many hours they have, approximately how many "rebuilds" they have on the sections, etc? Again, I kind of fail to believe these B52s have had nothing more than a few hot section replacements...