NASA's WB-57Fs: the last Canberras flying

The B-57 was Martin's licensed version of Britain's Canberra jet bomber, and in the 1960s General Dynamics rebuilt 21 of them as RB-57Fs for high-altitude reconnaissance, giving them a new wing more than twice the span of the original, Pratt & Whitney TF33 turbofans and provision for two small auxiliary jets. Redesignated WB-57F for weather reconnaissance in 1968, they sampled nuclear test fallout and the upper atmosphere until the Air Force retired them in the 1970s. NASA took two for its own high-altitude research, and they have flown from Ellington Field ever since.

In 2011 NASA decided it needed a third, and a WB-57F that had sat in the desert at Davis-Monthan since 1972 was pulled out of the boneyard, overhauled and returned to flight in August 2013 as NASA 927, the longest any aircraft had spent in storage before flying again. The three are the only Canberras of any kind still airworthy.

The WB-57 is NASA's heavy lifter at altitude: it carries up to about 8,800 pounds of instruments in the nose, bomb bay and wing pods for six hours above most of the atmosphere, which suits missions that need big sensors rather than the U-2's single pilot and tight payload. The aircraft have measured hurricanes from above, sampled volcanic plumes and the stratosphere, tested satellite instruments before launch and flown classified sensor work for the Air Force; two of them spent years in Afghanistan as airborne communications relays. On April 8, 2024 two WB-57s flew along the path of the total solar eclipse at 460 miles an hour, giving their cameras more than six minutes inside the Moon's shadow. They also track rocket launches with their cameras, including flights in support of NASA's Artemis II mission in 2026.

On January 27, 2026 NASA 927 suffered a landing-gear malfunction and belly-landed at Ellington; nobody was hurt, but the aircraft was seriously damaged, and whether it flies again is not yet known.

A long, straight wing out of all proportion to a slim fuselage, two large engine pods close to the body and a tall tail; the shape is unlike anything else in the sky. They wear white and gray with NASA titles and tail numbers 926, 927 and 928. On the tracker they broadcast N926NA, N927NA and N928NA with NASA callsigns, climbing from Houston to altitudes that read like typos, typically 55,000 to 63,000 feet, and flying long straight legs or racetracks.