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Mighty Heavy Bomber Looks Puny in Orange Sky Over Red Sea

I’m not entirely sure what hardware they use to snap at times incredible photos of airborne machines, but the people working for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) seem to be always equipped for such tasks. And proof to that is the literal flood of incredible images the military branch keeps releasing each week.
B-1B Lancer over the Red Sea 10 photos
Photo: USAF
B-1B Lancer taking off from UK baseB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B LancerB-1B Lancer at Edwards Air Force Base
We’ve featured constantly some of these images in our Photo of the Day section over the past few months, most of the time on account of them revealing something about the airplanes being shown, or about the units they belong to, or about the exercises they take part in.

From time to time, a USAF photo surfaces and it’s worth its time under the spotlight only because of the scenery it reveals, beautiful vistas of our planet not many of us get to experience. And the one we have here is part of that small, but restricted group.

The image shows an ablaze-like sky, lit orange by the setting (or rising, we’re not being told what time of day it is) of the Sun over the Red Sea. It also shows a B-1B Lancer on a presence patrol mission, seeming completely tiny, lost and out of place in the wonderful surroundings.

Probably for reasons that have to do with nascent military hotspots around the globe, the USAF has stepped up the rate at which it published images of the Lancer in various poses.

Designed by a company called Rockwell back in the 1970s, the B-1 Lancer is one of those deterrent aircraft, a machine capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons against its enemies.

The B-1B variant we have here is part of the revised-design batch that came to be about a decade after the model was born, and it is the one presently being fielded by the USAF.

It can carry a crew of four at speeds of Mach 1.25 and for as far as 3,400 miles (5,500 km), ready to drop 75,000 lbs (34,000 kg) of bombs onto the enemies’ heads. And it did so several times during its existence. In the war in Yugoslavia back in the 1990s, for instance, the plane released 20 percent of all the bombs used, despite flying just 2 percent of the missions.

Let’s hope it won’t have to do it again.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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