Tag Archives: B-52

Chapter 75, I See the Light!

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I’m taking a poll.  How many of you believe in at least one urban legend or myth?  It can be that bigfoot is real or there are alligators living in your sewers or Bill Clinton wasn’t a pathological liar and womanizer or a myriad of others.  There are lots of them out there and I think, to some degree, we all believe that some totally unproven event or thing actually might exist.  My favorite one is UFOs.

There have been hundreds of books and documentaries written and produced about the subject.  Thousands of eyewitness accounts yet there really isn’t one piece of indisputable evidence proving their existence.  So now that I’ve got some of you true believers fired up, it’s time to tell my UFO story.

I’ve written about my first Aircraft Commander at least once.  He was an old, crusty, Vietnam vet named Mike, but I’ve never mentioned my second AC, Jim.  By the time Mike left the crew, I was considered a seasoned copilot.   What they usually did was to balance out the cockpit experience level by pairing up an experienced copilot with a brand new aircraft commander.  That was Jim.  Jim was a great pilot but his outlook on life was a little different than Mike’s.  Jim was a lot more, shall we say, fun loving.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re flying a 488,000 lb bomber, there’s a lot of opportunity for “fun loving” to get you in trouble.  Here’s what I mean.

On the bottom of the B-52 there’s a very odd piece of equipment.  There have been lots of things added to the venerable BUFF over the years.  Antennas,  cameras, lumps and bumps everywhere, but an original piece, that by 1980 was never used, was something called the “terrain clearance light”.  No one ever explained it’s use, they just said; “Leave it alone, we never use that thing anymore”.  Here’s how it worked.  In the cockpit there were two switches.  One was an “on/off” switch and the other an “extend/retract” switch.  When it was turned on, an large 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight mounted in the belly of the airplane would illuminate and you could then extend the light to the point where it would shine out ahead of the airplane.  You could also stop it any intermediate position.  It purpose was a little confusing.  A million candlepower seems like a lot, but when you’re moving along at 350 knots, 300 feet off the ground, it really couldn’t illuminate out far enough to accomplish anything and by the time I was flying the airplane, there was a low light camera mounted in the nose and a bright light would have rendered the camera useless.  And besides, why in the world would you want to turn on a huge light if you’re trying to penetrate enemy defenses.  But, because it was installed on the aircraft, the maintenance guys still had to keep it in working order.  Jim had come up with a “fun” use for the thing.

The first night we flew together we were on a standard 3 hour low level leg somewhere in Montana or Wyoming or Nebraska, they all ran together.  We were flying in a wide valley at the end of which was a highway running perpendicular to track on a plateau.  We were actually slightly below the altitude of the highway and when we were about ten miles from it Jim turned to me and said, “extend the terrain clearance light”.  It was a request I had never heard before but, after fumbling around the dark cockpit for a second to find the toggle switch, I dutifully extended, without illuminating, the light.  As we got close enough to see individual vehicles on the highway Jim pointed out a camper.  He said that he was going to fly right over it and when we were three miles from the road he wanted me to turn on the light and then slowly retract it and keep it aimed at the camper until we were directly over it and then turn it off.  It’s at this point that I was in a position to make a conscious, life changing choice.  I could be a responsible, mature adult, or could head down the path of perpetual practical jokes and sophomoric pranks.  A difficult decision.  Only seconds to decide.  I turned on the light.

The camper lit up under the blistering intensity of a million candles.  I could see the brake lights come on but as the vehicle slowed Jim eased in some right rudder to keep the light squarely on the side of the weaving Winnebago.  I slowly retracted the light and as we passed directly over the terrified driver, whose face I could just make out, I turned off the light.

I can’t help but wonder what the driver told his children and probably tells his grandchildren today.  “There I was, 1:00 in the morning, driving my camper in the middle of nowhere when I had an alien encounter.  The noise was deafening, the light was blinding.  It seemed to hover over me for a second and then it disappeared in a instant.”

Ah, the good old days!

Chapter 70, “Stories That Peg has Never Heard” #4

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32 hours is a long time to spend in an airplane.  It would be one thing if it were a 747 with flight attendants, in flight meal meals, and a bathroom, but it’s a horse of another hue when it’s a B-52 with no place to even stand up and stretch your legs.  So, as the expression goes, “there I was” on my first deployment to beautiful, tropical Guam.  Home to lots of brown tree snakes and Japanese tourists.  It was the very early 80s and we were keeping the pressure on the Iranians and the Russians by making our presence known in the Persian Gulf.  Even if it was just a pair of B-52’s working with a carrier task force and taking pictures of ships and it was making the point that we could project power anywhere in the world if need be.  So, because there weren’t that many bases in that part of the world which could, or would, support the Buff, we were launching two-ship formations out of Guam and making the 32 hour non-stop round trip.  We would takeoff with four tankers who would top us off over the Philippines.  The tanker crews would land at Clark AFB, do a little shopping,  get a nice dinner, go to bed, get up, file their flight plans, preflight their airplanes, takeoff, and join up with us to top off our tanks for the final sprint back to Guam.  The gas-passers always had it better than us!

On my first mission, I was a lowly lieutenant and I was flying with my lieutenant colonel aircraft commander and, to “augment” the crew, an extra pilot, a major.  Obviously, I was the low man on the totem pole.  The extra pilot got in the seat for 3 of the 4 air refuelings but, otherwise, he slept on the floor.  My AC, an old C-47 pilot, decided that the lieutenant could use the flying time so I flew the airplane for at least 24 of the 32 hours.  Now, while the B-52 does have an autopilot, it was prone to failure and, you guessed it, it failed about 6 hours after takeoff.  Not only did I find myself hand flying the airplane, but we were #2 in formation.  3000′ behind lead, in and out of the weather gets pretty old after awhile.

We descended into the Persian Gulf, did our low level work with the Navy, which included buzzing the deck of an aircraft carrier at 100′ surrounded by 20 Navy aircraft, climbed back to 39,000′, topped off with tankers  out of Diego Garcia, and watched the sun slip below the horizon behind us as we started the long leg back to Guam.

It was a beautiful night.  Not a cloud in the sky.  It was filled with billions of stars with no ground lights to wash them out and, occasionally, a little green St Elmo’s fire dancing on the windscreen.  If I hadn’t been awake for over 24 hours, if lead could have held a constant heading and not been continuously turning back and forth, if the autopilot had been working, if I could have just taken a good dump, it would have been perfect.  At some point, I think it was about 2 AM, I realized that I was the only one awake on the airplane.  I think the gentle swaying of the airplane as I tried to stay in position behind lead, who I found out later had also lost his autopilot and copilot instrument lights and he was the only one awake trying to fly by looking cross cockpit to the pilots instruments, had rocked my crew to sleep.

We were coming up to the Straits of Malacca when I noticed something to the right, out of the corner of my eye.  I turned my head to get a better look and several thousand feet below me I saw flashing lights.  At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but as it continued to move away from under us, I realized that it was another airplane.  Normally I would just assume it was a commercial airliner and think nothing of it but, in my sleep deprived state, my brain went through some odd scenarios.  I thought, “Why is lead heading that direction?  He was in front of me just a minute ago”.  It took a few seconds, but I did come to the right conclusion and then turned my attention back to the task at hand, staying behind lead.  But when I did turn my head back to find lead I was in for a surprise.  Flying is sort of like driving.  Unless you’re careful, your hands will follow the direction you’re looking.  If you’ve ever taught someone to drive you know that new drivers tend to keep their heads looking straight ahead.  It takes some practice checking for threats by moving your head to see what’s going on all around you while still driving the car straight ahead.  The same is true in an airplane.  You’ve got to keep your head on a swivel yet keep your head disconnected from your hand. Well I had failed to disconnect the two and, while I had been looking at the airplane cross beneath us, I had rolled the airplane into 90 degrees of bank.  All I saw outside was stars and blackness and my HSI was telling me that something wasn’t right.  It took a second to realize the instruments weren’t lying so I fought with the seat of my pants and slowly rolled the airplane level and climbed back up to altitude after losing nearly 2000′.

I picked up lead in the distance and as I gradually worked my way back into position I realized that everyone else in the airplane was still sound asleep.  I guess it’s best to die in your sleep but I’m glad I wasn’t the one to facilitate it.  Adrenaline got me through the rest of the night and I figured the rest of the crew didn’t need to know how close they came to death so this is also a “Story my old B-52 crew has never heard”.

Chapter 67, “Stories That Peg has never heard” #1

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…..He asked, “What’s the highest peak in the rest of the route?”, and the Navigator answered, “Just under 10,000 feet”.  “We’ll fly the rest of the route at 11,000″……

Let’s start at the beginning……..

My first operational assignment was flying B-52s.  I had graduated #2 in my class and somehow I was deluded into thinking the higher you graduated the better chance you had getting the aircraft you wanted.  The problem was that I wanted a C-130 or C-141 but I was FAR (Fighter, Attack, Recce) qualified and, unbeknownst to me, that combination set you up for the venerable B-52.  It all worked out in the end, but I found myself at the most northern of SAC’s (Strategic Air Command) southern tier bases.  Only in the Air Force would South Dakota be considered a “southern” base!

After a year in the buff my first Aircraft Commander, a crusty old LtCol, was moved to a staff job. We ended up getting a brand new, straight from upgrade, AC.  With an experienced AC you usually got the “good” deals but once you got a new guy you were stuck with the less than desirable duties.  In this case, we were doing a practice ORI (Operational Readiness Inspection) and since our new AC wasn’t fully trained yet the rest of the crew was stuck flying as safety observers.  This meant that I would sit in the instructors seat, which was no more than an aluminum box with space for size 10 boots, I wear a 13, with a parachute on my back and no ejection seat, for a 10 hour mission, at night.  But at least I was flying with the S-01 crew.  They were the number 1 crew in the wing and the “S” meant that they were a Standardization/Evaluation crew.  The creme de la creme.  I figured I could at least pick up some new techniques.

The route we were flying was a brand new route that no one in the wing had ever flown.  It snaked its’ way through Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska  and a bit of Colorado.  Three hours of low level flying 300′ above the ground at 350 miles per hour in extreme mountainous terrain.  SAC’s idea of a good time.  To truly appreciate the hazards of this type of flying you have to understand that this was long before the days of NVGs (Night Vision Goggles).  The aircraft had two cameras mounted under the nose.  A FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) and a Low light.  The Low Light was an early generation night vision system but required some pretty significant moonlight or starlight to give even a grainy image.  You could select which camera image you wanted to be presented on your screen in the cockpit.  Along with the video presentation the screen also included a ribbon radar altimeter (height above the ground), airspeed, a little cartoon airplane in the center and, what I called, the “squiggly line”.

The squiggly line was a continuously updated presentation of the highest terrain in front of you at either 3, 6, or 10 miles.  The shorter the distance the more aggressively you would fly the route.  Theoretically, if you kept the cartoon aircraft above the cartoon squiggly line you would miss the, not cartoon, mountain by 300 feet.  All of this at night, with no moon, in unfamiliar terrain.  To add to the fun on this particular night, the gyroscopic stabilization of the squiggly line was malfunctioning.  This meant that the line was totally unusable unless the aircraft was straight and level.  Good times!

Now that I’ve set up the scenario, and given you way more information than you really needed, let’s proceed with the rest of the story.  So there I was, at 1:00AM( 0100 for those in the military), sitting on the little aluminum box, parachute on my back, helmet on my head, in the mountains, a lowly 1st lieutenant, flying with the #1 crew, 300′ above the ground, 350 miles per hour, a less than stellar terrain avoidance system, peering into the blackness.  We had just crossed over a 9,000 ft mountain peak and had started a large left, descending turn into a valley.  The squiggly line was useless and, since there was no moon, the cameras showed nothing.  There was that odd silence that occurs when an entire crew is unsure of the situation.  It’s a very unnerving silence that, once you’ve flown long enough, sets off a little voice in the back of your head.  At that point, inexplicably, I did something that you normally wouldn’t do while flying low level at night, I looked up.  On the B-52 there are two windows high up in the cockpit.  They’re used during air-refueling to see the tanker.  Otherwise you rarely use them.  What I saw, through those windows, were stars but the stars ended in the blackness of the silhouette of a mountain straight ahead and thousands of feet up.  I reached forward, pushed all 8 of the throttles to the wall, pulled the yoke back into the pilots lap and screamed “Climb!”.  Once the AC realized what was happening he took control of the aircraft and all I could do was watch as the airspeed bled down to 200 knots and the radar altimeter descended through 500′, 400′, 300′, 200′ and then started climbing again after it bottomed out at 134′.  After what felt like an eternity, someone finally spoke.  It was the AC.  He asked, “What’s the highest peak in the rest of the route?”, and the Navigator answered, “Just under 10,000 feet”.  “We’ll fly the rest of the route at 11,000”.  It was a very quiet flight home.