The Broken Arrow Up North

This is a follow-up to my last post about the B-29 crash near Fairfield in 1950. Today falls within those several days in August when we think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so here’s a tale from the Cold War about the other Broken Arrow incident to happen nearby.

On 14 March 1961 a B-52F bomber carrying two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear weapons, each with a yield of 3.8 megatons, crashed in Sutter County about fifteen miles west of Yuba City and 40 miles north of our location in Davis. The plane had taken off 22 hours previously from Mather Air Force Base just east of Sacramento. (This base closed in 1993 and the field is now a general aviation airport). The plane was flying on an Operation Chrome Dome mission doing circuits over the Aleutian Islands. Chrome Dome was a Cold War mission between 1961 and 1968 where bombers would fly on alert armed with thermonuclear weapons in a position to attack targets in the Soviet Union if they got the call, with some portion of the nuclear bomber force airborne 24 hours a day.

The mission of this particular B-52F did not go well from the start. About twenty minutes into the flight very hot air started bleeding into the cockpit and the crew was unable to sort out the problem. Temperatures within the cabin grew to between 125–160 °F, and the crew took turns going to the deck below the cockpit to escape the heat. In contact with the Mather command post, the crew received instructions to continue with the mission as long as possible. Fourteen hours into the flight the pilot’s window cracked with the heat, depressurizing the aircraft. The crew decided to descend to 12,000 feet following the depressurization.

At this point the crew was exhausted and dehydrated and started making many mistakes. One of these errors was miscalculating the fuel burn rate, which was higher than normal because of the lower altitude, and a stuck fuel gauge didn’t help with the perception of the problem. Eventually they alerted Mather of their need for an air tanker, but they ran out of fuel about 2 1/2 miles before the rendezvous with the tanker. With the plane doomed to crash at that point, all crew members were able to bail out successfully, with the pilot steering the plane at the last minute toward a fallow rice field. The only fatality in the incident occurred on the ground when a fire truck responding from Beale Air Force Base overturned. The two hydrogen bombs aboard the plane were severely damaged in the crash but the high explosives they contained did not detonate and no radioactive materials were released.

In hindsight the crew should have aborted the mission when the cockpit temperatures grew unbearable. But this was the height of the Cold War, and Strategic Air Command was pushing their wing commands very hard to keep the early airborne alert program operational at all times.