B-36B 44-92075
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
B-36B 44-92075 was a United States Air Force B-36 bomber that crashed in northern British Columbia in 1950 while carrying a nuclear weapon. It was the first time in history that a nuclear weapon was lost.
The flight began the evening of February 13, 1950. With sixteen crew and one passenger on board the plane took off from Eielsen Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska. The planned route was to fly south over the Pacific before heading inland over Washington State and Montana. It would then launch a simulated attack on San Francisco, California before landing at Carswell Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas. The flight was to have been part of the first ever full scale practice for a nuclear strike against the USSR. The twenty hour flight plan was deliberately designed to not enter Canadian airspace. The plane held a Mark IV atomic bomb, but according to the airforce, it did not contain the plutonium core necessary for detonation. The bomb did still contain a substantial quantity of uranium and conventional explosives.
Several of the B-36s had been suffering from the cold of the northern winter. 92075 was no exception and a number of minor problems had been noted prior to take off. Seven hours into the flight the number one engine developed problems and had to be shut down. Moments later engine two burst into flame, and soon after that engine five also began shooting flames. An investigation later blamed these problems on the build up of ice in the carburetor.
With its large supply of fuel and heavy payload the plane could not stay aloft with only the three remaining engines. The crew decided that the plane would have to be abandoned. An attempt was made to dump the atomic weapons. The bomb itself was dropped and detonated causing a large conventional explosion some 30 kilometers off the coast of British Columbia. However the cold prevented other components, including the fake core, from being similarly dropped.
The captain turned the plane over land so that the crew would not have to jump out into the freezing North Pacific. The crew members jumped when over Princess Royal Island abandoning the plane and reportedly setting its autopilot to send it back out into the open ocean.
The crew had remained in radio contact with the Strategic Air Command and within minutes of the crash the Royal Canadian Air Force launched Operation Brix to search for the missing men. The Canadians were never informed of the atomic nature of the payload. Poor weather hampered the initial search efforts, but three days later the men began to be found. Eventually twelve of the nineteen crewmen were found alive. The five others were presumed to have landed in the ocean and drowned. They were the first to have jumped from the plane and it is believed they ejected before it was safely over land.
An exhaustive search was not launched for the plane as it was believed to be at the bottom of the Pacific. Three years later, however, an RCAF flight involved in the search for missing millionaire Ellis Hall spotted the wreckage of the plane on the side of Kologet Mountain in the isolated region north of Smithers, British Columbia, about fifty miles from the Alaskan border.
The USAF quickly launched an effort to try and investigate. A special forces team was sent in September, but after nineteen days of trudging through the wilderness they failed to reach the site. The search was resumed the next summer and in August, 1954 a team of USAF personnel and a local guide arrived at the wreckage. They recovered important components and then used high explosives to destroy what was left of the aircraft. The American and Canadian military kept the location of the plane secret, they announced it had been found but claimed it was on distant Vancouver Island.
In 1956 a civilian surveyor came upon the site and the general location of the plane became known to the general public. The plane was subsequently covered by snow and forgotten until local helicopter pilots spotted it in 1997. One such pilot visited and stated that not much could be found except bits of metal, the turret guns, and lots of ammunition scattered around.
How the plane ended up in northern British Columbia is uncertain. The plane had flown for some hours and gained 3000 feet in altitude in the period after the crew had abandoned it. It had also flown in the opposite direction from where it was meant to have been sent by the autopilot. One possibility is that some of the disabled engines later restarted spinning the plane and allowing it to gain altitude. Another long running theory is that one of the crew members did not abandon the plane with the others and instead tried to fly it back to Alaska. This action is normally credited to Captain Ted Schreier, one of the five whose body was never recovered. In Smithers, local legend has it that the USAF recovered a body from the wreckage in 1954. It is also possible that the autopilot simply malfunctioned.
There have also been conspiracy theories that have claimed that the plane carried an actual plutonium core. This is unlikely as in the period tests were always conducted with a lead dummy, due to the possibility of an accident such as this one. The Air Force did not even have control over the cores as they were in the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1996 the Canadian Department of National Defence conducted an analysis of the site and found no unusual radiation levels.
External links
- Broken Arrow - BC Aviation Magazine (http://www.user.dccnet.com/welcomewoods/Nuclear_Free_Georgia_Strait/b_arrow1.html)
- Site with links to news stories and DND report (http://www.cowtown.net/proweb/brokenarrow1.htm)
- Site with pictures of the crash site (http://www.air-and-space.com/b-36%20wrecks.htm#44-92075)
