Dressed to Kill

by Phil Rowe
When our B-52 Stratofortresses were new and shiny they were a sight to behold. The white paint on the engine pods, the emblazoned Strategic Air Command (SAC) logo, blue band with stars across the fuselage, and the crisply polished aluminum wings and skin all made that creation of engineering and manufacturing something to behold. But it didn't last.

No, all it took was to fly that 500 mile per hour bird through a rain storm or clouds with icing to transform the image to one of a shabbily treated machine. In just one flight that proud bird came home looking like something the cat might have dragged in. The paint on the leading edges of the engines was peeled away in a gruesome manner which made the Stratofortress look like it had been through a war.

It was the ground crews and the paint shop folks who had the job of keeping the proud B-52's looking their best. And it was a never-ending chore. At least that was the case in the early days, before someone decided a change of color would be nice.

It wasn't long before those "scientific guys" ( or was it those headquarters "weenies"? ) decided that black was the "IN" color that year. Soon most of the fleet was painted a fashionable black. Basic black is always chic, I guess. But then those who decided such things never had to perform a preflight in a B-52 painted black. They probably never considered that cockpit temperatures on a warm sunny day would be 20 degrees hotter than in the shiny aluminum and white birds.

Before long basic black was out of style. Camouflage was now the "IN" thing. B-52's headed for garden spots like Guam and Vietnam had to dress for the part. Unfortunately, for the flight crews, the new camouflage paint scheme didn't much improve comfort in those hot planes baked by the sunshine.

I guess that no matter what you color them, the BUFF's were pretty much the same, always impressive and always enormous.