The ride was part of my search for the Air Force's new insights into war and sleep. I saw one there recently as I buckled myself in for a 20-hour ride to nowhere. If you strolled through the locker room today, you would find no chaises among the oxygen masks.īut you would find one across the street, in the B-2 simulator, because the effective use of a horizontal surface in mid-mission is considered essential these days to the training of a B-2 pilot. Of course, the Yugoslavia campaign lasted only 11 weeks, and the 509th hasn't been on a war footing since June 1999. Bob Duncan, 37, strolled the locker room of the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman and noticed, among the standard-issue olive-green flight jackets, gray helmets and oxygen masks and black visors, that each one of the doorless lockers also had a flimsy chaise longue. A week into the air campaign in Yugoslavia, Maj. But Single's $8.88 special quickly became the most popular accessory on the $2.2 billion B-2 bomber. When people think about war, they rarely think about sleep. The cashier gave him a receipt for $8.88. Atop the roar and rumble of 80,000 pounds of thrust.Īfter he paid all his bills, answered all his mail, said all his goodbyes, Single added one more task to his preflight list: He stopped at the nearest Wal-Mart and bought a blue vinyl chaise longue. In a 4-by-10-foot space behind the B-2's two ejection seat rails. He and his copilot would have to be in the air for nearly 30 hours straight.Īs he sat in the vault, Single opened an Excel spreadsheet labeled "Sleep Cycle for Pilot" and studied the one-hour blocks when Air Force sleep doctors figured it would be best for him to catch a nap. To do so, he would fly over the eastern half of the United States, then over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Italy, then over the Adriatic and into Yugoslavian airspace after dropping his bombs, he would reverse course all the way back to Whiteman. Single would be the first pilot to fly the B-2 - America's stealth bomber, the result of $45 billion worth of research and development - into a war zone.
So secret was his mission that the other pilots would not be told that he was there.
He learned by heart the tiny window of time and space in which he had to squeeze among dozens of allied aircraft. He painted a mental picture of the bend in the small river that would signal the target's approach.
#Interior b2 bomber cockpit bed code#
He reviewed code names, moonlight charts, grid coordinates for the 16 spots his bombs were supposed to hit. There, 15 feet under the rolling plains of central Missouri, Single memorized the silhouette of every combat plane in the enemy's inventory and the location of all its known surface-to-air missile sites. Single lived in the basement of a top-secret vault on Whiteman Air Force Base. In the days leading to the air attacks against Yugoslavia last year, Lt.
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