I hope soon to be flying my own personal B-52. Well, not an actual B-52 — I doubt the Air Force would even let me ride along in one of those nuclear-armed behemoths. What I mean is a conveyance that, in its own small way, shares with the 1950s bomber an astonishing durability: a vintage Volkswagen Beetle.
Classic car collectors distinguish between museum pieces and daily drivers. The museum pieces rarely stray from the climate-controlled comforts of a garage (the sort with polished cement floors nearly as glossy as the concours-ready artifacts parked within). In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris and his neurotic friend Cameron step into a garage that looks like it was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Within is a pampered rarity: “The 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. Less than 100 were made,” Cameron says of the red Spyder. “My father spent three years restoring this car. … He never drives it. He just rubs it with a diaper.”
The daily drivers, by contrast, get out on the road, and not just on weekends. Their owners care for them, keep them waxed, replace the worn-out parts, but are not too fussy to leave them parked on the street. The car may be 50 or 60 years old, but a well-maintained daily driver is up to the rigors of commuting.
That describes the Boeing B-52 perfectly. Introduced in the mid-’50s, the Stratofortress is one-third of the “nuclear triad.” To make it impossible for the Russkies to catch us with our pants down, we diversified our methods for delivering nuclear retribution: nukes by land (missiles in silos), by sea (missiles in submarines), and by air (atomic ordnance in high-altitude bombers). It was a B-52, of course, that Slim Pickens piloted in Dr. Strangelove.
Over 700 B-52s were built, and about one-tenth of them are still in regular use, doing their part to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. But they aren’t exactly as originally built. Each plane is outfitted with eight Pratt & Whitney engines, which have been upgraded over the decades. The Pentagon is looking to upgrade them again. Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce, and General Electric are in the running.
This is the sort of thing that car collectors abjure. The purists never did accept the practice of pulling the balky 12-cylinder engine out of a mid-’70s Jaguar sedan and replacing it with a reliable small-block Chevrolet V8. A Jag with a “Chevy conversion” is almost always worth less than one in “correct,” if clunky, original condition. And yet, if you’re looking actually to drive a vintage vehicle, it pays to be flexible.
And flexible I plan to be.
I was in college when my parents bought me a 25-year-old VW Bug. It got me around for several years until I moved to Washington, when I left the little car behind in Arizona. Eventually, my folks shipped it out to me. But by then, I had small children. Strapping their car seats into the Beetle seemed about as safe as towing the children down the freeway in their little red wagon. And so the car sat. The battery died. It sat some more — about 15 years more, long enough for the battery to eat its way through the steel floorpan. You could call that an action-forcing event.
Instead of finally junking my old friend, I found a mechanic willing to restore the car, but only to daily driver condition. I made the mistake of not driving my old Bug. Were it readied for Pebble Beach, I would make that same mistake.
Which is why I have decided to think of my 1961 Volkswagen as a B-52, an old-school machine that still is useful. How useful? The Air Force has no intention of mothballing the B-52, planning on the plane to be in use beyond 2040.
Funny, but I plan to be still driving my VW Bug then, too.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
