Having your military bomb-carrying aircraft and your civilian passenger-carrying aircraft being distinguished from each other only by a paint job might cause unfortunate “accidents”...

So what? We have a bunch of them sitting in the desert for just that sort of eventuality. We have brought back and rebuilt/upgraded two in recent years to replaced badly damaged aircraft. There will always be attrition. And ultimately, because it was a slide-rule design, the B-52 is massively overbuilt to start with.…

Slap an Ipad on the dash and Ta-daaa!

yeah but aren’t there hundred and hundreds of B52s sitting in boneyards waiting to donate parts to the handful we having in active service?

As an engineer, I <3 that the designs from that era were often so robust, that they will continue on like this. 50's-60's NASA and other aerospace engineers were incredible. 

Neither the C-130 nor the 747 were designed to drop tons of bombs.  It would probably be cheaper to simply design a new bomber from scratch. 

The Tu-95 Bear has similar stories of pilots from multiple generations. 

Wooden ships have this problem with being made of wood. Unless maintenance is rather comprehensive, wood tends to have a limited lifespan when immersed in water. Probably worse than metal fatigue.

Well not with that attitude they don’t.

The B-21 isn’t a replacement for the B-52, it’s a replacement for the B-2 and B-1. Much cheaper (though not cheap, of course) thanks to the lessons learned in the decades since the B-2. The B-2 is was so crazy expensive we simply couldn’t build enough of them, and the B-1 is heinously expensive to fly, so it will…

just add in some touchscreen infotainment and apple carplay + android auto and you pretty much have a modern vehicle

B-52 has one of the most comprehensive track-and-inspect programs of any jet fleet. It, fundamentally, must be an under-stressed design.

wooden ships in general dont fly

And people say it was unrealistic for the Millennium Falcon for be around for 90 years. Once you have a platform that works...

I forgot the link, which you’ll see in there now. A. few months back I covered the. controversy surrounding “right to repair”issues faced by the military. Check it out here: https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/even-the-american-military-is-struggling-with-right-to-1841531517

Carpet bombing wasn’t because we loved to kill innocents. It was to put an end to an enemy’s fighting capacity quickly.

While a platform lifespan close to 150 years seems insane for an aircraft

USS Constitution. 226 years young, and still a commissioned warship of the US Navy. And like the B-52s, there is barely an original piece left in her. The remaining B-52s are only about 50 years old.

Imagine flying the same plane that your great-great-grandad once flew.

In troubled times, nothing lifts the national spirit like a good carpet bombing. Now, of course, it’s not PC.  Ahh, those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end....