TALL MAN 55 - PART 2

The B-58's ancestry was peculiar, to say the least. Initially designed as a long-range fighter, the length of the fuselage was such that it exactly fit the length of the B-36 bomb-bay. Yes, amazingly, the concept that designed the airframe was to hang this bird beneath the B-36 to provide air-to-air protection for the bomber fleet over enemy territory. In World War II days, while fighter air cover was provided across the English Channel and sometimes on the fringes of Europe, fighters just didn't have the range, even with long range tanks, to provide protection against enemy fighters deep in their territory.

While the concept of carrying your own fighter protection sounded good on the drawing board and was even flight tested, the idea was not very practical and was discarded long before going into production. Thus, the plans for the B-58 airframe gathered dust over the years until someone in General Dynamics Corporation was collecting ideas for a new supersonic, delta-winged bomber. Some aeronautic engineer with strong "waste-not, want-not" training in his childhood, fished out this set of plans as the starting point for an entirely new plane.

Technology had brought many changes during those years. The original fuselage design was basically a "straight" body and conventional aluminum skin over ribs construction. Since that design was put on paper, engineers had discovered the pinched waist, "coke-bottle" fuselage was much more compatible with supersonic flight. Thus this new "supersonic shape" was incorporated, as was the introduction of modern "honey-comb" construction for added strength and reduced weight. Titanium was used in some strategic spots and even spent-uranium paneling was put into flight control surfaces that sometimes entered the fury of the engine exhaust at maximum afterburner settings.

The end result was an aircraft that was far ahead of it's day. Crewed by three officers, pilot, navigator and defensive systems operator, it was designed to fly easily at twice the speed of sound, Mach 2. Each big GE engine was a marvel of engineering. While pushing the aircraft to Mach 2, they had to keep the engine inlet air subsonic and this was done using a sharply pointed cone in the center of the engine inlet.  It’s position was moved forward and to the rear according to the speed of the air entering the engine and it set up con-shaped sonic waves ahead of the engine that protected it from the very destructive effect of the almost solid wall of tightly packed air molecules that piled up there at supersonic speed.  It was said that you could actually put the throttles in maximum afterburner position, then push the starter button and watch, hands-off, as the engine spooled up, ignited and advanced automatically to the full afterburner mode without a hitch.  It was also said (I don’t know of anyone that tried this…) that you could throw silver dollars into the engine air inlet all day without damage to the turbine blades.  However it was described, it was a very powerful and very effective engine, generating over 15,000 pounds of thrust from each engine… and there were four of them!

One of the public relations projects of the day was a video made for TV that was to help prepare the public for the most noticeable change in their lives when the B-58 was introduced... the cannon-like sounds of sonic booms anytime a supersonic flight passed through the area. In those beginning days, the mission of the B-58 was a supersonic dash to a target deep in enemy territory and supersonic flight was routinely practiced on every mission at least once during the flight.

Titled, "TALL MAN 55," the video chronicled a B-58 with that radio call sign making a routine supersonic training flight someplace over the Midwest United States and down the eastern seaboard. It showed B-58 crewmembers going through the normal preflight checks for a training mission and followed the preparations for take-off. The launch was at dusk and the four afterburners were shown hurling the aircraft into the night sky with a loud roar and flaming exhaust. The film then described graphically how this plane was designed to protect our freedom by flying at twice the speed of sound into enemy territory and exactly how the sonic boom was formed, trailing behind the speeding aircraft. This was described as, "the sound of freedom!" It showed ordinary working Americans in various occupations and activities that were momentarily interrupted by the sharp crack of a sonic boom. The film showed that this was nothing to be alarmed about and that it was just the sound of American flyers protecting them. It was a very well done film and made you proud to be a part of it every time you saw and heard it.

To control the sonic boom "problem" as much as possible, we only flew supersonically in carefully surveyed and marked supersonic corridors that avoided urban areas where we could. Since these sonic booms were truly daily occurrences in those areas (and 8-10 times a day in some cases), it was no surprise that our legal offices had a busy time in those days as they handled claims for cracked walls and windows.

One very clear exception that we noted about sonic boom claims was from the city of Amarillo, TX. This was a location for radar bomb scoring (RBS) and thus attracted numerous supersonic bomb runs by B-58's daily. In spite of the many sonic booms delivered to the patient citizens of Amarillo,  Monday through Saturday, day and night, to the best of my knowledge, the Air Force received NOT ONE claim! They truly felt that, "It was the sound of freedom! "

One of the supersonic corridors went right across our base at Bunker Hill AFB and was often used for test flights since it was so close to us. We also used it for practice supersonic bomb runs going to the Minneapolis RBS site to the north. Since these runs were tightly scheduled, you could

expect sonic booms at precise times during the day and almost set your watch by them. No matter how many of them you heard, it was still something to watch and listen to. In the far distance, you could see the rapidly approaching high-altitude contrails, coming from the distant horizon, passing silently overhead and beyond to about the 45 degree point, when suddenly there was the characteristic double boom of the B-58's sonic boom. No one ever explained why it made a "Ka-boom,. boom" but it invariably did. Maybe it had something to do with a leading edge shock wave and a trailing edge shock wave, but it was always there. As the speeding B-58 passed overhead at 50,000 feet, almost 1,350 miles an hour, literally 20 miles a minute or 2,000 feet a second, it could actually have outpaced a bullet fired from a gun!

One of the first things we noticed from the crewmembers' viewpoint, was that this aircraft was truly made to fly at twice the speed of sound. While it was very much at home in the air at any speed, it always seemed completely in it's realm when it reached Mach 2. Flight seemed smoother, turns were gentler and it just seemed more “right.”

The aircraft was originally accepted by the Air Force with standard open ejection seats as in most other production aircraft, but this was only a temporary convenience to get the aircraft combat ready sooner. An ejection at supersonic speed in an open seat would likely result in the death of a crewmember. During the test phase, prior to Air Force acceptance, a test crew did have to eject while supersonic. Though at least two crewmembers survived, they found heel marks on the headrest of their seats and multiple steel pins were required to put their broken bones back together. This resulted from extreme flailing of crewmember limbs as they were subjected to wind forces that approached the effect of hitting a brick wall.

The solution to supersonic ejection was an encapsulated seat. During normal flight, the multi-section clamshell door was in the retracted mode, leaving the front 120 degrees of the capsule open and much like the normal ejection seat. In an emergency, however, pulling up the handles to arm the two rocket motors that would hurl the capsule to safety, also slammed the clamshell door shut and locked to provide maximum protection from the supersonic air stream. Rather than the crewmember wearing a parachute as before, he flew in a "shirt-sleeve" environment and the capsule itself contained the parachute...a huge one.

There were two other benefits from this unique arrangement that we were glad to have. First, the B-58 was capable of flight well above the altitude where blood would boil if not wearing a pressure suit. The encapsulated seat sealed and pressurized prior to ejection. This meant that the crewmember was safe at extreme altitude without having to wear a pressure suit. The second benefit was better protection on the surface. Many of our flights were over ocean and much of the time over the arctic region. Each capsule would float and had stabilizers for remaining upright in ocean swells. Inside were all of the winter clothing, emergency rations and radio, survival rifle and tools, etc. that anyone could need in any situation.

While the 305th had never lost an aircraft nor a man in B-47's, that trend was not to continue in the B-58. It was a much more complex and sophisticated aircraft more demanding of pilot skills and far less forgiving of the least bit of careless-ness or neglect. We had many occasions to use both the open seat ejection as well as the newer encapsulated seat. Our mission demanded activity that was always right on the edge of possibility. We stressed safety, of course, and always prepared well to reduce all possible hazards, but the very nature of our business meant that death and destruction were never far away from any of us. After all, we were at war... though the world thought of it as "cold war," it required the exact same actions, dedication and commitment that "hot war" would require. Every crew and every crewmember flew each mission as a very close simulation of the real thing. Takeoffs were at maximum weights and in all kinds of weather; air refueling was performed at night, in weather and with radio silence; we flew as high as we could, as fast as we could, as low as we could go; we went after targets that were as difficult to find and get to as could be found. We practiced frequently against U.S. Air Defense Command fighter interceptors and flew realistic penetrations of U.S. Air defenses from high over Canada. We trained and tested and trained some more. We loaded and handled nuclear weapons with regularity so that the real thing would be simply routine. In a very real way, we were "at war! "

After four years and some 2000 hours in the B-47, we were already seasoned veterans of the highly specialized air war we were trained to fight. That was one of the reasons we were selected to transition into the B-58. It was a very demanding aircraft and sometimes used all of our combat-crew skills to complete the mission and survive to fly again.

I don't want this to be just a listing of accident reports, but I do want to give you a few stories that give you a flavor of the life we lived. I couldn't really begin to list all of them. I guess the mind protects itself by conveniently "forgetting" most accidents, but many are never really forgotten. For one thing, we had to study the details of every accident in order to prevent others. But the main reason, is that every accident involved a friend. I can still see their faces and easy smiles. I still feel the shared sense of mission and hazard. The end of each and every successful flight gave each of us a feeling of exhilaration often expressed as, "Well...we cheated death again" Or maybe it was the same feeling expressed by Winston Churchill when he said, "Nothing is so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result!"

One of our first air tragedies in the B-58 Hustler, like so many, didn't have to happen. It was found to be a design problem that no one could have foreseen at the time. Because the aircraft was so high-tech, it outstripped many of the manufacturing and design tools that could have engineered a solution to the problem that was to develop in regular supersonic operation. When the airframe and flight controls were tested in the early days of design, wind-tunnels of that day only went to a maximum speed of 1.7 Mach. (1.7 times the speed of sound.) Aeronautical engineers did the only thing they could at the time, they took data from zero speed up to the maximum wind-tunnel speed and extrapolated the data to the Mach two design speed of the aircraft. What they could not have forecast was