North American Xb-70 Valkyrie

The B-70 was the logical follow-on to existing American strategic bomber designs of the 1950's and represents a typical product of what is now known as "the Golden Age of Aviation". During those cold-war days, no idea or design seemed too crazy to merit attention, money, and the lives of test-pilots. Of these, the B-70 stands out - a plane as big as a large jet liner with a top speed over 3 times the speed of sound and the ability to sustain altitudes of over 70,000 feet (in the days when commercial aviation had received its first jets) - if only because the B-70 actually delivered. Two prototypes were built and ably demonstrated their ability to attain the lofty goals of their designers. Instead, it was the age that doomed the triple-sonic bomber. The concept of high-altitude level bombing, already proven outdated in the Korean skies, seemed medeival by the days when Robert Mcnamara ruled the Defense Dept., and the Valkyrie's huge price-tag couldn't have helped. While the Valkyrie program would have been doomed by the proliferation of Russian air defense missile technology (which had claimed at least 2 high altitude U-2 spy planes by the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis) and the development of a Russian fighter fast enough to catch the bomber, these factors had less to do with cancelling the program than justifying its demise in hindsight. While the U-2 shootdowns traumatized American planners, latter experiences of American aviators over Vietnam shows how little attention planners gave to Russian desgned SAM's in terms of equipment, training and tactics. One would have to attribute to Mr. Mcnamara and military planners, two widely divergent opinions regarding Russian missiles relating to both the B-70 and Vietnam. American aircrews had to leanr from scratch in Vietnam the complicated science of air combat in the missile age. For existing bombers like the B-52, high-altitude level bombing remained the rule. Neither can rumors of the mystery Russian figher with a Mach-3 top speed be taken as a serious factor in the B-70's cancellation - that plane, the MiG-25, hadn't even flown by 1964, when the Valkyrie was already a lame duck. Until then, the MiG was merely a collection of unsubstantiated rumors unlikely to merit attention in Washington (and certainly too insignificant to save from cancellation the Mach-3 fighter program). Most likely, the B-70 fell victim to a general aversion to all manned bomber in favor of ICBM's. Besides the apathy towards SAM's demosntrated in Vietnam and the obscure (at best) threat of the MiG-25, consider the fact that once the Valkyrie was cancelled, the military made no efforts to find a replacement. (In contrast, the gap left by cancellation of the F-111B was immediately filed by the F-14). as a result, B-52's were still flying combat missions nearly two decades after our pullout from Vietnam. More overt antipathy to manned bombers helped kibbosh the B-70's purported successor, the B-1A, and nearly do

This book, and it's followup volume in the Aero series, is an excellent historical and technical chronicle of this amazing 200 ton, Mach 3 airplane. The author covers the earliest roots of it's conception, through development and flight test, concluding with the tragic loss of the second craft and the retirement of the first to the USAFM. It contains an interesting selection of rarely seen photographs of the airplane and the pilots who flew her. It also contains a chronology of all flights of both craft, the pilots involved in each, and the specific performance objectives and achievements. This book is highly recommended to every enthusiast of jet powered flight and particularly to those interested in flight test history of the fifties and sixties.