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Old 10-06-2010, 10:31 AM
  #4  
Cubdriver
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Joined APC: May 2006
Position: ATP, CFI etc.
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Nice reply, Wollac- you must be a BUFF pilot. There are several on these forums, so hopefully another can add a more using what they know about the B-52. Hindsight2020 is another one, he has a strong background in aeronautical science. Reasoned speculation is the limit without introducing CFD analysis or some other high-tech methodogoly. Generally what happens with these investigations is a team makes a model of the aircraft, applies blackbox data set to what the plane did near or at the time of the crash, and then use a fancy simulator to determine a plausible chain of events. You can use a desktop sim like X-Plane to do some of these calculations. That is what I do although the simulation is heavily simplifed by the limitations on my computing power and the simplicity of the model. So it is not much better than flying a toy model for the most part, but at least it shows what a simplified airplane would do.

What is your preliminary plan of attack? If you wanted some food for thought, you could study the NASA wind tunnel videos of similar wings available on YouTube. I would examine the oil streaks at lower q's and higher AoA's to geta rough idea of what happens in a 1-g stall. The same aerodynamic behavior should extend to higher gs. The music is a bit out of date (kidding).

NASA video 1 (YouTube)

NASA video 2 (YouTube)

NASA video 3 (YouTube)
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