Visiting the B-2 Bomber Wing: A look at weapons loading

For those curious about the nuts and bolts of weapons that might be employed over Syria if the US intervenes, following is information I gleaned during a recent visit to Whiteman AFB at Knob Noster, MO, for Air&Space/Smithsonian Magazine.

The article as printed in August, "Stealth Bomber Elite," is here; this is bonus material.

(USAF / Senior Airman Nick Wilson )

Having heard of the sophisticated rotary launcher available to B-2 mission planners, I had the mistaken idea that such a high-tech bomber must take on its cargo automatically: perhaps a launcher preloaded with munitions elsewhere in the base, then hustled to the aircraft on a trailer and plugged into a B-2 bomb bay a half-dozen bombs at a time … fast and easy, like ramming a clip into the 9mm pistol issued to pilots before each combat mission.

Time with a bomb-loading crew in Whiteman AFB's Weapons Load Trainer straightened me out: While machines substitute for some of the muscle-power, it's very much a hands-on task, from bomb assembly in the weapons depot to loading the plane behind the closed doors of a dock. That goes for the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator to the smallest, a 500-pounder: all are individually loaded.

Conventional bombs can go on board with no more than tail fins and fuses, or they can be enlightened with JDAM guidance packages. The JDAM unit (short for Joint Direct Attack Munition) relies on satellite signals and inertial navigation to steer the bomb with swiveling tail fins and strakes. Because each JDAM-guided bomb is individually cabled to the plane's targeting computer, the crew can reassign targets over enemy territory. Boeing recently announced manufacture of the 250,000th JDAM kit.

On display when I visited the training facility, which is about the size of a high-school gymnasium, were a full range of conventional bombs. That included green-painted free-fallers, and gray glide bombs with wings that swung out, along with a powered version like a small cruise missile. All were practice models, for loaders to use during initial training and recertification.

The demonstration that morning featured a 5,000-pound bunker buster called the EGBU-28: taking it from its perch on a trailer and loading it into a practice version of the B-2, which featured a rotary launcher in the right bay and Smart Bomb Racks in the left.

According to the pair of sergeants giving me the tour, the combination of GPS and inertial guidance on this bomb's JDAM kit would be accurate enough to put the first bomb in the top of a steel drum, then a second bomb in the hole made by the first.

The loaders had a diesel-powered truck with a hydraulic arm designed for bomb loading, a rugged and bulky remote control, hand tools, and a checklist with grease pencil. And a good deal of elbow grease, as shown by the first job: moving the bomb-bay door from a vertical position and pinning it back so that it's out of the way, against the wing.

The green bomb was long and slim, with a rod-like nose.

(USAF / Airman First Class Shelby Orozco)

The driver edged the loading arm under the bomb's midpoint, then raised and rotate it to line up with the truck's direction of travel. A few turns of the steering wheel and it was lined up under the left-hand bomb bay. Each step was called out and repeated. Watched carefully by an airman on an orange ladder wearing a headlamp, the lift arm edged around obstructions to snug the bomb against an open slot on the rotary launcher, called a station.

For a brief moment, as the loading crew released temporary fastenings in preparation for shifting the deadweight to the aircraft, the 2 ½ ton bomb lay neatly balanced on the tip of the loading arm. Now it was time to make all connections and verify that nothing would come loose: a sway brace to hold it in place, a data cable to provide updates from the aircraft, and an explosive cartridge to separate the mechanical fastenings during the run. Loading the bomb took about five minutes. After each bomb goes aboard, a control panel at the stairway to the cockpit activates hydraulic power that swivels the launcher to take on the next weapon.

While the noncoms had good words for the efficacy of this particular bunker-buster, what I didn't expect was their enthusiasm for a lowly 500-pound non-bunker GBU-38 bomb with a MK-82 warhead ... if JDAM-equipped. The B-2 can haul 80 of these in the Smart Bomb Rack, totaling 20 tons, compared to a maximum of 16 one-ton bombs using both rotary launchers.

“With these you can destroy all the facilities on an airfield and leave the daycare center standing,” said one of the non-coms. Because a 500-pound bomb can demolish most targets as well as a one-ton bomb can, having such a big swarm of bombs in the belly might allow a single B-2 trip to take the place of three, or even four, B-2 sorties carrying one-ton bombs. Hard or buried targets could be left for a separate mission carrying bunker-busters.

That's if people and computers can rise to the opportunity without errors along the way. The 80-bomb load hasn't yet been tried in wartime, even in the most recent engagement, the 2011 attack on Libyan airfields. There's a risk that, along with the more sophisticated situational-awareness tools now available to the pilots, the extra capability could over-tax pilots and mission planners back at Whiteman.

Thoroughly Modern Fantasy: Europa Report

Have been working on a wide variety of projects over the summer (the history of DEFCON alerts, a kids' book, and an article on helicopters for a luxury magazine called The Private Journey) but now it's time to catch up on the blog.

Some buzz in the last week in reviews about Europa Report, about the movie rising to an accurate depiction of space exploration.

Hmm - certainly compared to Armageddon, which was lucky to get even a 39% rating in Rotten Tomatoes.

Once the premise is accepted -- that a company would send people out to look for life by landing on the surface of the Jovian  moon Europa -- the procedures are  fine enough. But the plot line isn't accurate in the sense that any such human-led plan will be organized and carried out, now that robots and remote sensing are so capable and offer so much value. The JPL advisers were polite about this, referring in interviews to the importance of robots in planetary exploration.

For an article in Air&Space about "Humans or robots -- who's driving the spacecraft?" I asked former astronaut Story Musgrave his thoughts on the issue. He sees it as a partnership, but with robots touching down first.

"There's a robotics program and a human program, and we've kept them separate," he said. "True exploration of space is not happening. We need to integrate humans with robots." He illustrated with a Mars scenario. "The way to do this is to sent robots first – design and operate so that they lead the way for humans. As opposed to just doing the robot thing."

Strand Jacks, Pulling for You

One thing that makes the job of freelance writer interesting is the sheer diversity. In the last year I've written about drones, strategic bombers, astronauts vs. automated spacecraft, and crisis teams. Right now I'm working on war alerts, the validity of computer models, and a children's book.

Which brings me to yet another unconnected topic, the strand jack. Back when I worked in construction with my brothers, one tool that we greatly admired was the railroad jack, a heavy duty (and also very heavy) manually-operated jack sturdy enough to lift a bridge beam.

Railroad jacks push; strand jacks pull (more on that below). Here's a big strand jack, from mammoet.com:

(For those who might wonder what heavy riggers do, Mammoet does stuff like this, delivering coking units:)

Now about strand jacks, which will be critical to the success of salvage work coming up at Costa Concordia. First, the big picture, from Corriere Etrusco:

As animated in the Parbuckling Project, salvors will be pulling the cruise ship upright (that is, rotating the ship so that the superstructure moves to the left, in this photo), refloating the ship, and towing it to a drydock for scrapping.

While that may not sound too difficult, it is, for many reasons. And it's why the insurers' cost estimates are now edging $400 million.

Here's one reason for the high cost: Concordia is huge and its hull came to rest sideways on two subsea promontories, one fore and one aft. So that means the midships is sagging. While a gang of strand jacks can move any artificial object that mankind cares to build, however large, they can also tear it apart. If salvors were to just start using them to drag the ship upright, the tension on that unsupported midsection would break the hull in half.

So they've been laying down 20,000 tons of cement grout in big bags, filling in the valley (temporarily) to give the hull a sturdier foundation before the hydraulics do their stuff.

Recently Salvors have started the next phase, attaching big steel boxes called caissons to the port side. These caissons will be filled with water, and then it's time for the strand jacks. Here are a couple of the big blue machines, hanging from a formidable crane hook (Photo, Parbuckling Project):

Setting aside the caissons, here's a Parbuckling Project illustration showing how the strand jacks will be lined up along the port side, working in unison to drag the ship upright. 

The term strand jack comes from the fact that it exerts force on strands, commonly steel cables. Think of how you'd lift a bucket on a rope, hand over hand: one of your hands pulls on the rope, as the other shifts to get a new grip.

It's the same with strand jacks, which use hydraulic grips to pull cables a few inches at a time. Commonly the jacks work in groups under computer control.

Strand jacks are slow but very powerful. In 2004, strand jacks raised a 2,000-ton section of roof at the Wembley Soccer Stadium (Photo, Engineering News-Record):

 

Fertilizer-Plant Explosion in West, Texas

A little about the explosion at West, Texas. A Chemical Safety Board go-team is at the site, along with investigators from the Texas State Chemist . This news report says experts have identified the epicenter of the explosion, but aren't releasing that info yet. Later, we'll get the official word about exactly what exploded and why.

But the center is pretty clear from this photo in the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, given streaks and the location of debris (Tony Gutierrez, Associated Press):

Note, for example, where the company's big ammonia tank sat (the round yellow foundation at upper right) and where the walls of that tank ended up. A line connecting those two locations leads to the center point of the explosion. While I haven't seen an official diagram of the plant, the epicenter looks like the north end of the dry barn mentioned in some news reports.

Here's a labeled photogram of the blast site, along with an aerial posted on Bing.com from last year. (Kudos to Bing and Pictometry for having recent aerial photographs on line):

We're told that West stored a large quantity of dry ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the dry barn, perhaps 270 tons at times. From a good piece in Chemistry World about ammonium nitrate, here's a snip:

"It is an intriguing feature of ammonium nitrate is that it should not, according to thermodynamics, even exist. It is a compound that contains nitrogen in two forms - surrounded by oxygen in one and by hydrogen in the other. In chemical parlance the nitrogen is, side-by-side, in oxidised and reduced forms. Normally one would expect them to react together, combining to form the more stable dinitrogen, dioxygen and water in a complicated partner swapping process called comproportionation. But in ammonium nitrate, this process does not happen at room temperature, making it a metastable compound, like a lake of water trapped behind a dam. Even if you are careful, ammonium nitrate is an accident waiting to happen."

When heated in a fire, ammonium nitrate doesn't always blow up but it might. If the smoke changes color to some shade of orange, that may mean the material is in a runaway reaction generating oxides of nitrogen. I interviewed a worker at a dynamite plant who once saw fumes from an overheating vat of metriol trinitrate change color in such a fashion, and he ran fast enough and far enough to survive the blast.

And one witness in West mentioned that the smoke from the fire at West Fertilizer changed color shortly before the blast.

Nightmare Range, South Korea

I'm a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. In our POW (plain old world) one doesn't often come across geographical names that measure up to Lovecraftian standards, along the lines of his Mountains of Madness. 

But here's a real one that comes close: Nightmare Range, a target-practice area in far north South Korea. It's just a hop-skip-and-a-ricochet from the DMZ, certainly reachable by shell from the DPRK's dug-in heavy artillery just north of the border.

Here's a map, from a recent naval survey of training sites, with the label for Nightmare Range highlighted at upper left, with its location to the side:

 

 

The border with North Korea is the gray line on the map just above Nightmare Range. On an island in the Yellow Sea south-southwest of Nightmare is Chik Do Range -- see the other label. Chik Do is where US bombers did practice runs last month. So we haven't been as provocative as some commentators are saying; practice bombing runs at Nightmare Range would have pushed tensions up a lot more.

Here's an aerial photo of Nightmare, from the Wikimapia site:  

This obscure location came up briefly during an August 18, 1976, meeting of the Washington Special Action Group (WASAG), a small but very influential foreign-policy advisory group in the Ford Administration and, previously, the Nixon White House.

The subject that day was what to do about a murderous attack in which a squad of North Korean soldiers jumped a small American-ROK team that was attempting to trim a poplar tree for better sightlines between observation posts in the DMZ.

Among the many response concepts bounced around by WASAG (not all of which have been declassified) was having American aircraft do practice bombing runs all the way up to Nightmare Range. That was scrubbed as too provocative, and more modest measures were taken when finishing the tree-trimming two days later ... but with a great deal of firepower waiting just over the nearest hill. Call it armed arboreal diplomacy.

For those interested in knowing more about what North Korea itself called an "ultra-tense" situation, I'm researching it as part of an article on military alerts to be published in Air&Space.

Dances with Lone Wolf: What's a History Channel production like?

Tackling this question raised by my blogpost during the Titanic centennial, on the four corners of a wreck: What's it like to participate in a History production?

The short answers: Fun! Long days!

I've appeared in a dozen-odd shows for History, CBS, and National Geographic, but the production Titanic at 100 that aired last year on the day of the wreck's centennial had a bigger budget (since it was part of an international marketing push for the network) so I'll concentrate on that one. The production company was Lone Wolf Documentary Group of South Portland, Maine.

My bit started in June 2011, when Lone Wolf flew me out to their location for a day of interior shots that would serve as a screen test for History's executive on the project (called the showrunner), and, if acceptable, would be part of the show.

 

The cameras at that setup were digital single-lens-reflex cameras, aka DSLRs, which produce broadcast-quality HD video. The setup also included pro-quality sound gear recording on a separate chip, professional lighting and a miniature dolly to move the camera across the room.

 

The equipment filled the back of a van and to set it up all the way to mic checks required more than an hour. I wore a lavalier mic and wireless set, and there was a sound man wielding a boom and watching the levels. Audio quality is very important!

That was one shooting day.

After History okayed me to be a participant in the virtual hangar segment (along with long-time Titanic experts Ken Marschall and Parks Stephenson), in October I flew back to Maine for two more shooting days. The setups the first day were two more interior shots (one against a green-screen, one at a desk by a window in an old building); an exterior shot where I walked along the harborfront; and an exterior shot as I drove around Portland.

One thing Lone Wolf is good about is feeding the cast! There must be some ex-Navy submariners on the staff. We commentators met one or both directors for breakfast before a shooting day started (thumbs up for Becky's Cafe on the Portland waterfront) and dinner afterward, and lunches for all shooting days were catered.

The third shooting day started with driving an hour to the former Brunswick Naval Air Station, where we took over a big building to shoot the “virtual hangar” part of the show. This setup lasted the entire day because it was unusually elaborate for a documentary.

 

Readers probably know about blue-screens or green-screens (aka Chroma-Key), in which TV meteorologists or actors perform in front of a solid color background. It's easy for electronics to remove the background color, so that other images can be inserted behind the talent. The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was shot entirely in front of a screen.

But it's no longer necessary to use a green-screen to place people into a digital world, though the alternatives are harder to use. One of those is called difference keying, and it's how Lone Wolf put us in a virtual hangar.

The elements:

1) During each shot, the Red camera began the take by shooting the hangar without us in the frame, and then we walked into the frame.

That way, each shot held a record of what the background looked like, before people arrived and started walking around. We also ended each shot by walking out of the frame.

2) In post-production, computer processing pulled away the hangar background imagery and replaced it with a transparent layer, which left Ken, Parks and me walking around in a void -- like villains in Superman's Phantom Zone. Computers can cut away the background, frame by frame, because we humans were moving around, but the hangar wasn't. That created a difference between us and the background, sufficient for difference-keying. No color difference is necessary, though it doesn't hurt. Here's a video demonstration of difference keying.

3) What to use for the new background? Drawing on imagery of the real hangar, the special effects company in New York built a 3-D model of the interior space, which closely resembled the real hangar (as in, it had pipes, a floor, doors, lights, and a ceiling with girders) but was somewhat bigger so as to fit the Titanic.

4) Our images were composited into the computer-generated hangar, along with the ghostly Titanic.

Why go to all this trouble? To put real humans and a digital ship in the same three-dimensional space. For example, when Ken waved his arms, the special effects guys in post-production could make the hulk spin, shrink, or rise off the floor. When Ken and I were walking around with a flashlight near the hangar door, all we could see was a concrete floor. Digital magic inserted the rusty boilers later.

One more footnote for special effects buffs who have seen the History show. Normally difference-keying requires a camera to be locked down (meaning, the camera doesn't move at all during the take), but Lone Wolf gave the shots a little fluidity, this way:  Whenever the camera moved during a take, it was looking down at us from a height, which silhouetted us against a uniformly gray floor. Such a background is easy to correct, so it was possible to give a little motion to the shot without making difference-keying impossible.

ICD-10 Medical Codes: All the modern mishaps

 It would be a rare person who didn't find something to squeam about (meaning, to act squeamish) when looking over the "ICD-10-CM External Causes of Injuries List" mentioned in this PBS blog.

It's a list for use by those who keep medical records, effective 2014. Some very obscure accidents are coded in ICD-10, like burns from flaming water-skis (see category V91.07) or injuries due to accidental contact with non-poisonous frogs.  We're told ICD-10 makes some medical people squeamish about the extra time it will take to find the right codes next year, compared to today's shorter list.

If you'd like to know more, from Findacode.com here's a draft list of externally-caused injuries, as of late 2012, and here's an addendum with updates.

 

While I support the idea of cataloguing the full range of threats, the list still needs some work. For one, I didn't see a category for burns due to high-oxygen atmospheres. (While the list offers many entries for flammable materials, high-oxygen settings allow stuff to catch fire that normally aren't very flammable but will burn in pure oxygen.) Nor did I see a category covering projectile injuries due to unsecured metal objects near very high magnetic fields.

But in general the list is spine-chillingly thorough, covering hundreds of contingencies that have not yet sent hordes to the emergency room. Such as:

• Spacecraft crashing into each other, causing injury to spacemen and spacewomen: V95.43
• Injuries due to nuclear weapons in armed conflict, aka World War III: Y37.50 through Y37.59
• Injury following contact with flying horses: W31.81 *
• Immersion in cryogenic liquids: W93.11
• Injuries due to falling out of an airplane, eg from an airliner at cruise altitude: V97.0 **

===


* This isn't the danger of being struck by a falling, antique Mobil Oil sign. Apparently it refers to a broader category of accidents in amusement park rides, because W31.81 also covers bumper-car-related injuries.

** A few such lucky people have made it to the ER, so I suppose a code is needed. One flight attendant survived after falling 33,000 feet from a DC-9 in 1972. I mention a couple of cases in Inviting Disaster.