ARMED FORCES: Ride of the Valkyries

While the missilemen get the headlines, hypnotize the comic books and plan the nation’s pushbutton defenses, a sizable band of Air Force planners are quietly at work developing that oldfashioned, tried and true device, the manned airplane. By their reckoning, the nation will need the manned bomber through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Their promising candidate to succeed today’s B-52 bombers: the B70 Valkyrie, an airplane that makes Buck Rogers’ spaceship look like a model T.

The Valkyrie is revolutionary, from its stainless steel skin (withstanding 600° temperatures) to its configuration (vast delta wings aft; short, duck-winged “canard” control surfaces in the nose*).

It is 190 ft. long—40 ft. more than the 6-52—has six General Electric J-93 engines (better than 150,000 Ibs. thrust) in its peacocklike tail; they can be simultaneously hot-started for takeoff in less than five minutes. The plane will cruise above 70,000 ft. at 1,700 knots, three times the speed of sound. Its range, without refueling, is more than 6,000 miles; it could carry 80 passengers or a load of Honest John missiles from Maine to Cairo in less than three hours. Its four-man crew sits in a “shirtsleeve environment,” wears no helmets, chutes or pressure suits; in emergency, crewmen will be ejected into the subfreezing near-vacuum sealed in capsules that parachute down to gentle landings.

Like other bombers, the B70 has an advantage over missiles: it can be recalled, recovered and redirected, can seek out mobile ground targets, and if it misses them, come back to fight again. But the Valkyrie’s futuristic design embraces qualities far beyond the capabilities of a mere manned weapon. At its Mach 3 speeds and ultra-high altitudes, it makes an inexpensive, i.e., retrievable, launching platform for earth satellites: it could give the space-probing Xi$ a flashing running start, or fire a 9,500-lb. payload into a 300-mile orbit, or even substitute as a first-stage launching vehicle for the man-carrying Mercury capsule. Even beyond its military capabilities, the Valkyrie could well become the answer for commercial-transport operators, who already visualize Mach 3 passenger service in the future.

Though the B-70, designed by North American, is still in development stages, the first tactical wing of B-70s (45 aircraft) is scheduled to become operational in only five years. It will be costly: prototypes will run upwards of $150 million apiece, and the whole program will run to $3.5 billion by 1965. A Defense Department budget slash last week killed off plans for the last far-out supersonic interceptor, the Mach3 North American F-108. Air Force flyboys trust and hope that the $2.4 billion savings will help support the B70 project when it comes under the budget fire of the pushbutton corps.

*A modern application of the early-day pusher-type plane, in which the engine was placed aft of the pilot.