Tinkering with B-1 bombers at air base in Oklahoma

TINKER AIR FORCE BASE — After spending more than a decade prowling the skies above southwest Asia, the U.S. Air Force's fleet of B-1 Lancers is coming off the front lines to Oklahoma for much-needed upgrades.

Department of Defense officials announced plans last month to pull the B-1 from its current fight, against the Islamic State, and replacing it with other bombers, including the B-52 Stratofortress.

Meanwhile, the fleet of more than 60 B-1s is coming to Tinker Air Force Base for upgrades that officials say will make the four-engine supersonic bomber deadlier when they return to the battlefield.

The move also gives the crews that keep the B-1 in the air their first break from high-intensity combat operation in 11 years.

“We've been working them pretty hard,” said Col. Timothy Dickinson, the B-1 and B-52 system program manager at Tinker.

Although its official nickname is the Lancer, the B-1 is known lovingly as the Bone — a mashup of “B One.” Originally designed as a nuclear strike plane, the B-1 has spent the last decade bombarding enemy targets in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Jeff Vaughan, the B-1 chief engineer at Tinker, said the upgrades represent the largest modification the plane has undergone since it was introduced in the 1980s.

The biggest piece of the upgrade is a so-called Integrated Battle Station, a display system that features moving maps and a new diagnostics system. The new system allows all members of the crew to see the same image on their display screens, Vaughan said, making it easier to communicate with one another.

The upgrade also includes a data link to the plane, allowing the B-1 crew to communicate more easily with troops on the ground and to receive target coordinates automatically. Before the upgrade, airmen received those coordinates over an intercom and entered them into the plane's weapons system manually.

That upgrade is designed to shorten what airmen call the “kill chain” — the number of steps between identifying a target and destroying it, Dickinson said.

The plane's new automated systems will make the B-1 a quicker, deadlier weapon, allowing it to destroy targets that previously might have had time to escape, Dickinson said.

Deployment break

The B-1s current mission is a far cry from its original purpose. The plane was designed in the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, as a replacement for the B-52. Although it originally was meant to carry nuclear weapons into the heart of the Soviet Union, the B-1 was converted into a conventional bomber in the 1990s. It wasn't used in combat until Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1998. The following year, the bomber played a role in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

While the planes are being upgraded at Tinker, flight crews at South Dakota's Ellsworth Air Force Base and elsewhere are training on simulators designed to familiarize them with the tools they'll be using once the upgrades are complete. Col. Gentry Boswell, commander of Ellsworth's 28th Bomb Wing, said the upgrade represents one of only a few times in Air Force history when airmen have been able to train on simulators before the unit's planes arrive on base.

Although the upgrade program began in late 2012, last month's announcement allows crews at Tinker's 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group to upgrade every plane in the fleet, rather than refitting each one as it returns from deployment.

Since 2005, B-1 Lancer units have been deployed continuously to a 20-nation region in southwestern and south-central Asia, including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. As B-1 units returned home, they were replaced by other B-1 units.

That continuous deployment has taken its toll, both on the planes themselves and the crews that fly and maintain them, Dickinson said. By pulling them out of combat temporarily, the Air Force can do more thorough maintenance and upgrades, he said.

“We can do some more extensive repairs here than we can when we're deployed,” Dickinson said.