Bomber Hits Its Target With Speed Record : Aviation: B-52 flies from Edwards Air Force Base to Alaska and back in less than 11 1/2 hours in a peaceful demonstration of power.

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE —  You might say the airmen and women of Barksdale Air Force Base are brimming with the Wright stuff. Just don’t accuse them of taking flights of fancy.

For the second time in a year, a B-52 Stratofortress from the Louisiana air base has rumbled into the aviation record books. Last August, a crew flew one of the 488,000-pound jets around the world without stopping, a 48-hour flight that required six midair refuelings along the way.

On Friday, a different crew, headed by one of the first men to fly missions over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, flew 6,200 miles from here to Alaska and back without refueling.

“I love to fly this aircraft,” said Capt. Dan Manuel, the 26-year-old co-pilot, standing on the Edwards Air Force Base Tarmac on Friday night as he and other crew members sprayed each other with champagne. “It’s one of the greatest planes ever built.”

But whether its record speed was a landmark or an aeronautical footnote was a subject of good-natured debate.

“As far as I’m concerned, it is a record,” said Ray Lutz, an observer with the National Aeronautic Assn.

The association is a subsidiary of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in Paris, which is the world’s sanctioning body for aviation records. The record, which won’t be official for eight weeks, is for top speed over a 10,000-kilometer (6,200-mile) course on a plane weighing 440,000 to 550,000 pounds.

The plane averaged 556 m.p.h. during the 11-hour, 23-minute flight. It’s a rarefied distinction. Until now, there was no record-holder, and some Air Force personnel said the only country in the world capable of challenging it is Russia, which also has an arsenal of bombers able to fly long distances without refueling. (Lutz speculated some commercial airliners might also fit in the weight class.)

“It’s a fairly exclusive club,” said John Haire, chief of media relations at Edwards.

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Despite the unusual nature of the record, Air Force officials say it would be wrong to chalk up the mission as evidence that the collapse of the Soviet Union has left U.S. warriors with such a dearth of opponents that they have to seek out obscure records.

Capt. Russell Mathers, 30, said the flight will show potential enemies what the B-52 bomber, a 33-year-old warhorse that was used in Vietnam and the Gulf War, is still capable of.

Manuel said the flight was not much different from a normal training mission. “Our mission is to fly long-distance,” he said. “This is a perfect example of what we do.”

The only major differences between this flight and any other training mission were that it lasted a couple of hours longer, that the plane did not refuel in midair and that the mission started at Edwards rather than at Barksdale.

The reason was because Edwards has the precision scales necessary to weigh the aircraft, and because a bombing range is near the runway. As part of normal training, the plane dropped a load of 500-pound dummy bombs before setting down.

Officials at Edwards and Barksdale said they were unable to estimate the cost of the flight. Haire said he doubted the flight would lead to the kind of criticism the Air Force endured recently, when an officer commandeered a plane to fly around Europe. ‘We’re not taking anything from point A to point B,” he said.

The B-52 took off Friday morning about 6 a.m. It was originally headed for Greenland, but high winds over Central California forced a change of course. The plane climbed to 31,000 feet and flew over Seattle, then up to Alaska, finally turning back at Atka Island off the state’s southwestern coast.

The 10-member crew ate roast beef sandwiches along the way, then returned Friday evening with the sun riding low and red over the desert. The Stratofortress roared in at 360 m.p.h. only 500 feet above the ground to drop its 19 dummy bombs, then landed.

The idea for the flight originated with Manuel. It took 18 months for final approval, which came from the highest levels of the Air Force.

After apparently taking the second record in a year back to Barksdale, the crew was asked what they plan to do next. “Go to Disneyland,” Mathers shouted, hoisting his champagne. A ground support crewman suggested that they try to break the record they just set.

Representatives of Boeing, which built the B-52s and paid the $5,000 fee for the aeronautic association observer to monitor the flight, were on hand to record the mission for company archives. They used the opportunity to pitch the reliability and prowess of the B-52, even against the new generation of B-1 and B-2 bombers. Boeing officials bemoaned Air Force plans to retire 28 of the remaining 94 B-52s in 1996.

Mathers added his vote. “I don’t see how we can afford to retire the planes. It’s a great aircraft.”

But everyone connected with the mission insisted there was no political message behind the record-setting flight. “We don’t play that game,” Haire said.

Lt. Col. Dale Kleinertz of the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale called the flight “a routine mission for us. A chance to set a world record. And to show the [military’s commanders] what these bombers bring to the table: 500,000 pounds of persuasion.”