Pilots are a special breed of human. The more of them I get to know especially the military guys it becomes ever more evident to me that they operate a little differently than the rest of us. This video is proof of that (to me anyway) because it shows the courage, presence of mind, skills, and sheer force of will that these people possess to get a job done and keep themselves along with their crew safe. If you think I am blowing up what you are about to see, you are wrong. This is one of the more amazing things we have ever seen and it happened in 1961. Thankfully the US Air Force documented the entire event with video and what can only be described as a dramatic recreation.
Essentially the story is this. A crew loaded up and went to take off in a Convair B-58 bomber and during the take off a massive fire erupted out of the back of the airplane. While that wasn’t the best thing that could have happened, things got worse when the crew figured out that the landing gear was stuck down and even worse than THAT the damage done to it was pretty significant. Operating in a situation of incredible stress, the crew got the airplane stable in the sky and immediately began communicating with the ground and making a plan on what to do.
It was decided that the plane should stay in the air until the next day and land in the daylight when the runway could be prepared and emergency people could respond in the event things went bad. The only problem is that the massive fire on take off expended a huge amount of fuel and the plane itself was wounded and it was going to need fuel and lots of it. The plane was refueled an astounding eight times while in flight over the span of 14 hours. That was umpteen thousand gallons of fuel and the only way that the pilot could keep the plane where it needed to be was to run the outer engines at full afterburner and the inner engines were used to essentially steer the plane.
These dudes lived every second of 14 hours as though it could be their last and the whole crew did an incredible job not only for themselves but for their craft. The amount of stuff that was learned through this incident had to have been massive. Oh, and as for the actual landing in the daylight? You’ll have to see how that played out. It was the icing on an already mind-blowing cake.
Some interesting stuff came out of the B-58 program.
The high heat spray paint we buy at the auto parts store is a trickle down technology from the B-58. The tail/Bu numbers and such, kept burning off during flights from skin friction induced heat, so high heat paint was developed.
Singer, John Denver’s father, Maj. Deutschendorf, set a speed record with a B-58.
The low level transcon flights scared people, animals, and broke windows across the US while testing its high speed nap of the earth capabilities.
It’s still an awesome plane just to look at. I believe they still have one at the Pima Air Museum near Tucson. Among many other aircraft, they also have Louise Timken’s Learjet (Timken Bearing) She was a lifelong pilot and flew the Lear into her eighties! I recommend a side trip if you’re in the area.
While not nearly as dramatic as this situation, in 1974 the B-52 60-0060 that I was assistant crew chief on encountered a problem with a landing gear that would not go down, neither hydraulicly nor manually via a cranking system. By using a fuel transfer chart to counterweight the plane opposite the stuck gear the crew was able to bring that big, beautiful bird down so smoothly on three gears that unless you knew what you were seeing, it looked just like any one of hundreds of other landings, except for the foam on the runway and the emergency vehicles lining it. The preparedness, training, redundant mechanical systems, courage and dedication of the United States military is a truly awesome thing and the outcome was a safe landing for crew and aircraft just as it was for the B-58 and her crew.