Warbird Information Exchange

The B-1 travelling to KBFI from Arizona will be on the move this weekend on it's final leg from Portland KPDX to KBFI after 'resting' @ Portland for a few months. It's scheduled to leave the KPDX airport area around 2330 Friday night (9/7/12) and travel Northbound on I-5 to Olympia and R.O.N. there. Then leave Olymipa around 0230 Sat. morning and arriving @ KBFI around 0630 Sunday.
It will be escorted by several State Patrol Crown Vicks and in a couple spots will take up all lanes of I-5 (like south of Olympia) plenty of overpases for photos, and the weather is supposed to cooperate.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Sorry, but I'm out of the loop. What's the story on this one? Going to a museum I suppose?

The fuselage is being brought to Boeings avionics labs @ KBFI by Boeing for a 5 year, $185 Million dollar avionics upgrade and advancement program.
I would tend to doubt the fuselage would roll back down I-5 when the R&D project is completed.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

From my understanding, this is the long-awaited Phase 5 work being done to finally complete the B-1B CMUP (Conventional Munitions Upgrade) and the fuselage being used (one that had been grounded for various reasons) is so they can make a "pattern airframe" for the modifications/updates so the living fleet can keep flying while they figure out how to do it right. The whole program will take 5 years, but I think they've only slated like 5 or 6 months for each airframe of the 90 or so remaining airframes that will be updated and more than one will be done at a time, thus why they need to have a pattern to work from since there aren't any "extra" aircraft that can sit for a while as the guinea pig.

According to the Air force Association's 2012 USAF Almanac there are only 66 active B-1s left

"Active" is a bit of a misnomer anymore. Almost all of the fleets have a portion that are mothballed at any time and this changes month to month which airframes are part of this "mothball" fleet. It's a maintenance scheme implemented by the DoD back in the late 1990's to deal with budgets that never kept up with the rise in cost of maintaining the aircraft. Unfortunately, as with many things in the public sector, what was supposed to be a "short term solution" is now the permanent procedure.

It's pretty much the same here in the private sector as well. In my job we're still using procedures and equipment that were put in place as temporary stopgap solutions years ago. The company's philosophy is "since it kinda-sorta works as is, why spend money to do it properly." Of course, eventually the "temporary" solution gives out, and the emergency fix ends up costing way more than it would have to properly address the original problem.

SN