The WSO on the right side handles the offensive weapons (dropping of bombs) while the WSO on the left side is the defensive specialist, defending against all threats. In fact, the two WSO’s only have a very small window to their right and left, respectively, to see outside, leaving them to rely almost solely on their instrument panel to know their location. A ladder stretches from the belly of the plane to the ground, and that’s the only avenue in or out of the plane other than the ejection seats.įour airmen sit in the cockpit, but the two in the back – the two Weapons Systems Officers – can’t see the two pilots up front because they have a large panel of screens, dials and buttons in front of them that blocks their view of anything up front.
When it’s flying at lower levels – sometimes as low as just 200 feet off the deck – it can move at an astonishing rate of 940 feet per second.Ĭompared to the outer shell of the plane, the men and women controlling it sit in a rather confined, even claustrophobic, space. What it carries most of the time, however, are 24 2,000-pound GBU-31 guided bombs. The plane can carry up to as many 84 500-pound bombs, or “dumb bombs” as they’re called because they have no guidance system and are simply dropped out of one of the plane’s three bomb bays. Four engines ignite one of the most powerful long-range bombers the world has ever seen with each pushing out 30,000 pounds of thrust, enough to make the plane reach Mach 1.2, or somewhere in the vicinity of 800-900 mph.
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