B-52 bomber crashed at more than a kilometre per minute at US Air Force base
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-17/us-b52-bomber-crash-at-edwards-air-force-base-killed-eight/106806420Open linkView original on quokk.auSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on quokk.auhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-17/us-b52-bomber-crash-at-edwards-air-force-base-killed-eight/106806420Open linkView original on quokk.au
22 replies
90 km/h, for those who use metric in sane ways
Or around 150,000 furlongs per fortnight
Uh is it not 60? Am I having a stroke?
60 km/h = 60 kilometers in 60 minutes = 1 kilometer in 1 minute
And assuming the fundamentals of mathematics haven't actually changed, that is ungodly slow for pretty much any modern jet aircraft.....
Edit: WHY DOES THE HEADLINE SAY THAT
That is correct. But the headline also says "more than", making it even more useless.
From the article:
92.46 km/h
But still, that’s indeed very slow for an aircraft like that. I’m sure they just worded it that way because it sounds faster.
90kph is very slow for a flight speed, but stupidly fast for a decent speed. That is about half the speed of a skydiver free falling. That, added on to the airspeed, would be a very bad situation for any plane.
Wtf abc. Australia uses metric, we shouldn't have any issues using metric...
What’s that in fast food drive-through lengths?
Oh I get it: you mean 1.5km per minute. Easy mistake to make.
So basically a suicide crash…
Soldier of conscience.
Damn, I thought it was one crash per minute in a 1km radius. I'm stupid af.
Bouncing bomber!
Article is written confusingly as the author does not seem to understand that the speed quoted, ~1500m/min, is the descent rate and does not include airspeed.
The plane's actual impact velocity was certainly much higher than that.
If we translate the bizarre unit of 1500 meters/minute out of anti-intellectual "I'm too stupid to divide by anything other than 10" units and into the figures the ship's instruments are calibrated in.
1500m/min works out to 4921 ft/min, which is what your typical VSI is calibrated in. For context, that's about where a 737 pilot would stop calling it a "descent" and start calling it a "dive." A 5,000 foot a minute descent is pretty quick, that's loss of cabin pressure descent territory. A more typical descent-from-cruise will be done at 3000 ft/min or so, which would take you from cruising at 30,000 feet to sea level in 10 minutes.
1500m/min works out to about 48 knots or so, that's what your typical ASI is calibrated in. I would be very surprised if you could get a B-52 moving that slow off the ground. That just happens to be the V
SOspeed of a post-1980 Cessna 172. You can't get a Skyhawk going that slow, let alone a Stratofortress.So yeah, the BUFF hit the dirt going faster than that.
I guess AI has replaced journalists already. That escalated quickly.
I miss the good ol days when we used to use proper Rods and wear an onion on our belt, which was the style at the time.
Look out! We're approaching speeds not seen since the interstate!
That was just their vertical speed at the time of impact. In normal flight, it's usually zero or close to it. This thing was falling fast, possibly faster than just a freefall.
At American, I’m getting really tired of rooting for the opposition
Because?