“Wise Guy,” as the sexagenarian strategic bomber is called, returned to duty at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota on March 9, where it will join its fellow grey-haired B-52s at the 5th Bomb Wing. The flight follows a two-year-long restoration process which, like any good back-in-shape training montage, took a lot of elbow grease to pull off.
Wise Guy’s return to service first started in 2016, when a fire destroyed a B-52 during takeoff at Anderson Air Force Base, Guam. The Air Force was thus one B-52 short of its 76-plane Congressional mandate, so it was time to brush the cobwebs off one in the sprawling aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.