Forty Years of Bad to the BOne!

December 23rd was the 40th anniversary of the first flight of the B-1A, and ironically, on December 26th, the Archive found and acquired this rather faded, signed print from that flight.

Pilot for that historic flight was Rockwell's Chief B-1 program test pilot Col. Charlie Bock (ret)., copilot was USAF Col. Emil Sturmthal, and the flight test engineer was Richard Abrams.

Bock was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, with 103 combat missions under his belt. He had also served as an SR-71 test pilot before retiring from the Air Force and hiring on with Rockwell. He later moved to Northrop and worked on the B-2 program.

Sturmthal was also a former combat pilot, starting with the B-26 in Korea. In all, he racked up 196 combat missions, then moved to the test world where he flew a number of planes, including the XB-70.

Abrams had worked for the Air Force and the FAA, before moving to Rockwell. He later moved to Lockheed and was the flight test program manager for the YF-22. He was the recipient of the AIAA's Chanute Flight Test Award for his work on the F-117 and the YF-22. Sadly, he died at the age of 56 in 1994.

When the B-1A program was cancelled, 74-0158 had a mere 403 hours in its log book. It was dismantled and parts of it were used for weapons training.

Legend of the Lame Loon

This is the Loon, a first experiment in developing what, at the time, was called a hydroaeroplane. It failed miserably, never becoming airborne and eventually sinking. But sometimes, failure spurs further development and research, and ultimately leads to success. And of course, it also leads to a really good story (and several digressions).

The Aerodrome #3, aka June Bug, reborn as the Loon sometime in late 1908 or early January 1909 on Keuka Lake, NY.

When most people think of Alexander Graham Bell, they naturally think of the telephone, with which he is credited as inventor. However, Bell was responsible for so much more, and aeronautics was one of his biggest passions. To a certain degree, he can be credited with ensuring that the world of American aeronautics was not dominated by two monopolizing brothers from Dayton, Ohio.

Bell's personal secretary had a son, J. A. Douglas McCurdy, who had just recently graduated with an engineering degree. Being close to the Bell family, Douglas one day invited his close friend and classmate Frederick "Casey" Baldwin over to the Bell's for dinner and a discussion on aeronautics. Alexander Bell's wife, Mabel, suggested that the three men establish a research society in order to collaborate and experiment in aeronautics. Since Mabel was independently wealthy through real estate investments, she offered to finance the endeavor with a fund of $35,000 (almost a million, in today's dollars). They called the collective the Aerial Experiment Association, and it was officially established on September 30, 1907; Bell later described it as a "co-operative scientific association, not for gain but for the love of the art and doing what we can to help one another."

The airplanes they hoped to build would need engines, so the group approached Glenn H. Curtiss, who had made a name for himself by developing gasoline engines, and had became famous as "the fastest man on earth" when he had ridden his V-8 engine-powered motorcycle to an unofficial world speed record of 136 mph in 1907. Curtiss had also realized that aviation was the future, and had offered one of his engines to the Wright Brothers, only to be rebuffed; they had their own engine design, thank you very much. Curtiss thus readily accepted membership with the AEA.

The AEA Five, (L-R) Curtiss, McCurdy, Bell, Baldwin and
Selfridge. (Photo from Wikimedia)

Understanding that the government would likely be very interested in the new developments in aeronautics, Bell became aware of Army Lt. Thomas Selfridge's interest in the technology, and wrote a personal letter to President Teddy Roosevelt asking if Selfridge could be assigned to participate in the AEA. Teddy was more than happy to accommodate the request, and the AEA was then five.

Since the AEA was intended as a non-commercial scientific endeavor, they also solicited input from other inventors, and the Wright Brothers as well as Octave Chanute willingly shared some of their experimental design data. The AEA's first project was an unpowered hang-glider based on some of Chanute's design knowledge. Subsequently, the AEA group built five aircraft, each having a different one of the five principal AEA members as its chief designer.

The first was a plane designated Aerodrome #1, and named the Red Wing, designed by Selfridge (the name came from the red silk used for the wings, and oddly, the color red was chosen because it would look the best in a black and white photograph). On March 12, 1908, with Baldwin at the controls, the Red Wing took off from the ice of frozen Keuka Lake, new Hammondsport, NY, flew 319 feet, reached an altitude of 200 feet. The flight was heralded as the first public flight in the US (all of the Wright Brothers' US flights had been done in secret), and the first flight piloted by a Canadian citizen. Then, during a second flight on March 17th, it crashed, damaged beyond repair.

The AEA's second project, Aerodrome #2, built on the lessons learned. It was designed by Baldwin and called the White Wing. The design incorporated a number of innovations, including using wheels for its landing gear, and ailerons championed by Bell for roll and directional control (more on this a bit later in the story). First flight, with Baldwin at the controls, took place on May 18, 1908; unlike the Red Wing, this one flew quite well. The following day, Selfridge flew it (becoming the first US military pilot), and on the 20th, Curtiss took it into the air with a flight of 1,017 feet. Two days later, on the 23rd, McCurdy flew it but crashed on landing. It, too, was beyond repair.

Aerodrome #3 was designed by Curtiss, and again took advantage of lessons learned. The team had their eyes set on the $2,500 Scientific American Cup, a prize offered for the first aircraft to make a public flight of one kilometer (3,280 feet, or about three times farther than the White Wing flew). Named June Bug by Bell for the ochre color of its coated silk wings, the resemblance to the insect and the month of its completion, it first flew on June 21st, and between then and the 25th made five flights with Curtiss at the controls, each progressively longer, the last being 3,420 feet. Buoyed by these successes,  the team contacted the Aero Club of America and requested the opportunity to fly for the prize. In an attempt at fairness, the Aero Club asked the Wright Brothers if they wanted to attempt the record first, but they declined saying that they were too busy preparing for a government demonstration flight. So, Curtiss was given the opportunity to fly on July 4th, and a huge crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. After one false start, Curtiss easily exceeded the measured course, covering 5,360 feet in one minute, forty seconds, clinching the prize.

Then, on September 17th, the 26-year-old Selfridge was riding as a passenger with Orville Wright as the Wright Flyer was demonstrated for the Army Signal Corps, when the right propeller broke and the subsequent damage led to the crash of the plane. Neither man wore any kind of safety restraint, and both were violently thrown forward in the impact. Wright was badly injured, and Selfridge suffered a skull fracture, passing away several hours later after an unsuccessful surgery; he thus became the first person in history to be killed in an airplane crash. He had not been wearing any head protection, and as a result, the Army specified that their pilots would henceforth wear helmets.

While the faces of most of the men are obscured making identifying them problematic,
it is likely that the man working on the engine is Curtiss, with Baldwin at the controls.

The AEA team mourned his loss, but continued their development. Bell and Curtiss had both been intrigued by the idea of flying a plane from water rather than land, so decided to modify the June Bug with twin pontoons. The modified plane was re-christened the Loon and testing began on November 28th on the 20-mile-long Keuka Lake, one of New York's Finger Lakes. Try as they might, though, the team could not get the Loon to exceed 29 mph, and at that speed it couldn't break free from the water and become airborne. The AEA team continued to try until on January 2, 1909, one of the pontoons was damaged and the plane sunk. Though it was recovered, no more attempts were made, and the Loon eventually rotted away while stored in a nearby boathouse.

The failure of the Loon to get airborne was the result of one rapidly-progressing technological discipline, aeronautics, running head-on into the limitations of another, hydrodynamics. As soon as the AEA team bolted on the floats, they entered a different world, and had two areas of engineering to deal with. To understand the challenges, we need to digress for a moment and talk about boats (this will be a general overview...if you want a bit more technical of an explanation, jump down to the engineering notes at the bottom of this article). As a boat, say your average rowboat, sits in the water, it is held afloat by buoyancy, one of two forms of water-related "lift" that a boat can experience. As the rounded hull (known as a displacement hull) moves through the water, it has to shove a whole bunch of water aside and ahead of it, and that creates a whole bunch of drag, called wave-making drag. In addition, the boat also experiences friction drag from the hull interacting with the water over what's known as the "wetted" area. As the boat moves faster, the drag increases significantly, meaning that ever-increasing amounts of power are required for even small increments of additional speed. In addition, such displacement hulls have a tendency to tuck under if too much power applied.

The second type of lift is what's known as "planing" or "hydroplaning", in which the boat is supported by the dynamic lift provided by the water rather than its buoyancy. It's not unlike part of the lift experienced by an airplane's wing. If a boat is properly designed and can reach the point (and speed) where it is planing, it will no longer tend to tuck under, but instead the nose will pitch higher and higher as the center of lift (aka dynamic pressure) moves aft with increased speed.

What doomed the Loon to failure was the fact that it used two very thin, knife-like pontoons, and so all of its water-derived lift was displacement, and as the pilot tried to accelerate to the speed where the wings would produce enough lift to fly away, the water drag would increase dramatically, and tuck-under would start to happen. In the parlance of the day, the AEA team described it as not being able to become "unstuck" from the grip of the water.

The liquid-cooled V-8 engine on the Loon was a direct
descendant of Curtiss' air-cooled V-8 motorcycle engine.
The tall component is the engine's radiator.

The AEA went on to build two more land-based aircraft, the successful McCurdy-designed Silver Dart which first flew on February 23, 1909, and the highly unorthodox and unsuccessful Bell-designed Cygnet II, which was not able to get airborne. By this point, Curtiss saw the commercial potential for aeroplanes, and partnered with August Herring to form the Herring-Curtiss Company in late March. This led, ultimately, to the dissolution of the AEA. Curtiss purchased the design rights to Aerodrome #3, and modified it to become the Curtiss No. 1 (aka Curtiss Gold Bug, aka Curtiss Golden Flyer), with which he again won the Scientific American Cup in 1909.

Despite the failure of the Loon, Curtiss and Bell hadn't given up on the idea of water-borne flight. The lakes, rivers and oceans presented, as Curtiss saw it, a lot more places to fly from than land, with a lot few obstacles. An article in the March 1906 issue of Scientific American by William Meacham on the principles of hydroplaning had intrigued Bell, and he and Baldwin did some experiments in 1908 to test out some of the principles the article advocated. It is unclear whether Bell continued to work with Curtiss on the concept of hydroplaning after the break-up of the AEA, or whether they studied the same concepts parallel to each other; Bell's efforts drifted towards developing the hydrofoil, culminating in his HD-4, which set a world marine speed record of 70.86 mph on September 19, 1919.

Curtiss also continued studying the concept, and achieved some success by employing single pontoon with a wide, flat bottom. This became his Model E Triad (which we featured in this December 31, 2011 blog post). The flat, curved nose of the pontoon promoted planing as the flying speed was approached, but at the same time also caused excessive nose pitching. In addition, flat-bottom hulls have their own sets of problems - they're harder to turn at speeds greater than 30 knots, and they tend to ride very rough moving from wave to wave. So the Triad was progress, but not the end.

Through the efforts of Curtiss, as well as powerboat pioneers Gar Wood and Christopher Smith (who went on to found Chris-Craft), hydrodynamics came of age and the key turned out to be the "stepped" hull. By cutting a notch or "step" across the hull roughly amidships, the area of the hull supporting the weight of the vessel was split in two. This accomplished two primary things: first, it reduced the "wetted area", the amount of the hull directly in contact with the water, thus dramatically cutting the drag of the water, and allowing the vessel to go faster on less power. Second, it supported the weight by two pressure points spread over the length of the hull, which meant that the nose didn't pitch up nearly as much. For the boating world, the innovation of the stepped hull was huge, resulting in dramatically increased power boat racing speeds. For the aviation world, it now opened up all kinds of technological development possibilities, which Curtiss and other designers exploited, moving from traditional airplanes mounted on pontoons to true flying boats, stepped-hull boats with wings attached. Curtiss finally found success with his Model F Flying Fish (which we covered with this post from March 8, 2013). For this development, Curtiss was awarded the 1912 Robert Collier trophy, aviation's highest award for innovation. In 1918, Curtiss received a patent for his stepped hull design.

The triangular ailerons on the Loon, nearly identical to those first used on the
White Wing. And one has to wonder about the hat of the person in the back of
the rowboat in the distance....

But there's another digression to the June Bug/Loon story which we'll take for a few minutes, the bit about the ailerons that I mentioned early on with the White Wing. The Wright Brothers controlled lateral stability (meaning roll) through the use of wing warping. The AEA crew were leery of this methodology, because of the stresses it placed on the wing's structure and wires. Over-stress things, and you break your wing and fall out of the sky. Instead, Bell came up with the idea of moving triangular surfaces mounted to the ends of both wings. Ailerons (French for "little wings") had been used experimentally by Robert Esnault-Pelterie in France since as early as 1904, and it is unclear whether Bell had "borrowed" the concept from the French, or whether he came up with it independently.

The ailerons were connected by cables to a harness (on the White Wing) worn by the pilot...lean to the left and the surfaces (which initially were known as "horizontal rudders") moved to turn left. For the June Bug, the harness was replaced by a yoke which the pilot sat against with his shoulders, but again, it was lean left, bank left.

All was fine during the flights of the White Wing, because it was a purely scientific research project. The June Bug was a different story altogether. As soon as the AEA cadre had clinched the $2,500 Scientific American Cup prize, they received a nasty-gram from the Wright Brothers, chastising the AEA team as the Wrights had not give permission for the use of what they considered their proprietary aircraft control technology for public exhibitions or other commercial use - this despite the glaring fact that the AEA used ailerons whereas the Wrights used wing warping. The letter was a first-shot in an epic legal battle that would span the next several of years and dominate the politics of American aircraft development.

While the Wrights didn't use ailerons in their design, they had written their patent application so broadly that the concept behind ailerons was included as part of their exclusive intellectual property, or so they alleged. And, after firing off several warning shots, they alleged it with success in court. In response, Alexander Graham Bell filed and was granted a patent that specifically applied to ailerons in December 1911. Unfortunately, his claims were later overturned by a court in 1913, which ruled Bell's attempt as a violation of the Wright's 1906 patent. The fight went beyond the AEA, and the Wrights specifically went after Curtiss. Undeterred, he and his lawyers put up one legal roadblock after another, and he all the while continued to utilize ailerons, and refined how they were implemented, in his designs.

The legal wranglings between the two parties so chilled American aircraft development that when WWI started, the US had no practical aircraft with which to fight, and initially had to use French-designed planes. Fed up with the impasse, the US government forced all the parties into a patent pool, and innovation once again started flowing, at least for the duration of the war. Ironically, in 1929, the Curtiss and Wright companies merged, creating the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which continues in business to this day.

The irony is that no one, at the time, remembered an early but very important bit of aviation history: that ailerons as a method of lateral control had been actually developed and patented way back in 1868 by Englishman Matthew Piers Watt Boulton. But because no one as yet had successfully built a powered aeroplane on which ailerons could be used, the Boulton patent sat all-but-forgotten. Had this little bit of information been remembered and brought up in court, it is very likely that the Wright's claims over the designs would have been thrown out, and the course of American aeronautical development might have taken a very different, and much faster route.

Some hydro engineering notes for my aero friends (those prone to boredom beware: the fun story is over and it's essentially a technical snoozefest from here on out): As mentioned briefly above, the primary limiting factor for a rounded-bottom displacement hull which constantly is pushing its bow wave out in front of itself, is its "limiting speed" or "hull speed", the speed at which no amount of additional power can result in any additional speed (as long as the boat remains in displacement mode); in other words, the drag curve exceeds the power curve. Essentially, it is the speed at which the wavelength of the bow wave is equal to the length of the boat, and the boat is thus trapped in its own wave and cannot accelerate further. This is usually measured by its Froude number, the speed-length ratio of the boat (to be clear, the ratio is actually speed in knots divided by the square root of the length of the loaded waterline); the Froude number is analogous to a Mach number in an aircraft...as the Mach limit is approach, resistance rises exponentially. Hull speed is typically reached at a speed-length ratio of 1.3 to 1.5. This "limiting speed" is affected by two factors: weight of the vessel (and longitudinal weight distribution as a subset), and length of the hull.  If you want to go faster, you either reduce weight or lengthen the hull (or both).

However, if the hull shape is altered, the boat is light enough and enough power is used, a boat can move beyond displacement speeds. What happens then is that the bow wave is pushed aside so forcefully that it doesn't fully close behind the boat, and the stern drops down into the resulting trough, raising the nose. Now, suddenly, the waterline of the boat is shorter than its hull length, and the boat begins to interact dynamically with the water, creating a hydrodynamic pressure point (ie, creating hydrodynamic lift) which then moves aft as the speed continues to increase. In practical terms, then, as the speed increases, the boat breaks out of displacement mode and literally climbs on top of and begins planing on the bow wave. In the speedboat world, this was first achieved in 1908 (there's that year again!) by Henry Crane with his Dixie II, which then dominated the Gold Cup and Harmsworth Trophy competitions for the next few years.

The next step in the technological development of boat hulls (and hydroaeroplane hulls) was to refine the shape of the bottom to promote planing, essentially making it easier for the boat to climb up on top of its bow wave. By creating a sharp "chine", or edge where the bottom of the boat meet the side, the planing hull tends to force the bow wave down, rather than pushing it to the side as the displacement hull does. This does two things. First, it starts to lift the nose out of the water, allowing the boat to climb on top of the bow wave. Second, it keeps the water away from the vertical, flat side of the boat, reducing wetted area, and thus reducing drag. Meanwhile, it was also discovered that a flat-bottomed hull also reduces drag (remember Curtiss and his Triad?), so a typical planing hull with be vee'd in front with sharp chines, but flat abaft.

A planing monohull has its limits, though. Once on top of the bow wave, and as the pressure point continues to move aft, the angle of attack will start to drop, meaning that the wetted area - and drag - will increase. Again, a limit is reached where no amount of additional power will result in additional speed. That, then is one of the primary factors in limiting the top speeds of a racing boat, and why even slight variations and refinements in hull design can result in victory or defeat. For a seaplane, this limit speed becomes important relative to the flying speed of the wings. With a big, slow biplane such as the Triad, the wings will simply lift the hull off the top of its bow wave before the limit speed is reached. But larger, heavier planes (ie, planes big enough and with enough of a payload to be genuinely useful) typically have higher flying speeds, which can easily exceed the limit speeds of a planing monohull. This is the situation that Curtiss then found himself in. The Triad was nice, the Navy was intrigued, but it really wasn't terribly useful for anything really practical. And that's why he continued to seek better hydrodynamic answers.

In a planing monohull, the majority of the lift is generated at the front of the water contact area, with the area behind it creating mostly drag. By using a step (or multiple steps) to split up the areas of dynamic pressure, a single long, narrow (ie, low aspect ratio) area is replaced by several short, wide high-aspect areas. By shortening the length of the wetted areas, the portions primarily producing drag are significantly reduced, meaning that now the boat (or seaplane, in Curtiss' case) can go significantly faster on less power...now it can reach flying speeds. In addition, use of distributed pressure points allow the surfaces to contact the water at the optimal angle of attack over a much wider range of speeds and thus it is very efficient hydrodynamically.

The development of a stepped hull can be traced as far back as 1872 in England when the concept was theorized, but at the time, there were no powerplants yet invented that could drive a boat to the speeds necessary for a stepped hull to be effective. Development in the US in the early 20th Century took place on multiple fronts. William Henry Fauber received a patent in (you guessed it) 1908 for a stepped hull, but found little commercial or racing interest in the US, so went to Europe to try to find interest. Gar Wood won the Harmsworth Trophy in 1920 with the first Miss America, a boat with a single step, and his subsequent designs so dominated the competition that few other boats even chose to compete. The stepped hull developed by Curtiss is used universally on seaplanes to this day. At slow taxiing speeds, a sea plane will be in displacement mode, which can easily be seen by the large bow wave it pushes out in front of itself. But as the pilot accelerates, in aviation terms, he "gets up on the step", meaning that the hull begins to plane and rise up out of the water, riding on top of its bow wave. Fast taxiing is referred to as "step taxiing".

The shape of the step is critical, and different shapes can be "tuned" to be most efficient at different speeds. Because the basic purpose of the step is to raise a portion of the hull out of contact with the water, it is essential that an air path be included. This is why the steps are cut all the way to the edge, or chine, of the hull. As the boat is lifted when reaching planing speeds, a low pressure region is created immediately behind the step, and this pulls in air from the sides. An unobstructed air path is critical. If, for instance, the air path on one side of a boat is momentarily blocked, the planing is interrupted on that side immediately. One marine writer describes it as if the boat was suddenly grabbed on that side by a giant hand. The result is usually a sharp, uncommanded turn - as much as 180 degrees! - and potentially even capsizement. Because of this, some boat designs use air inlets far above the waterline, and/or vent engine exhaust into the step region. This can be a factor for seaplanes, as well, as was demonstrated in a well-publicized crash of a Grumman Goose on an Alaskan river (video clip here). Loss of planing on the step on one side leads to a wing float strike and then all control is lost.

Not bored enough? A detailed paper on the math of hull design factors can be found here.

Note on the print: The Archive's print appears to be one of a series (photo #6 in the set) that was commercially offered as souvenirs. This is not necessarily a unique image, as there are several other low-resolution examples out on the internet (I have yet to see any, though, that have the degree of detail that this print features). There appear to have been at least two different commercial offerings of the image, as the numeral "6" appears in different places. However, all seem to demonstrate the same zebra striping over the ridge in the background, indicating that the master negative, probably a wet-plate type, was damaged early on.

The Legacy of the Clobbered Turkey Tragedy

Apologies to my regular readers, as this article ended up going very long...none of the sources I found had the complete story, only various parts of it. But the story was so compelling I decided the whole thing really needed to be told in one place...so here it is.

Today's photo is another case where a rather innocuous-looking print was hiding a pretty amazing and tragic story, that of the Clobbered Turkey. The 8x10 is one of three that originated at the 72nd Reconnaissance Squadron; my source found them at a flea market (the other two were featured in this post).

The Clobbered Turkey in flight over Alaska sometime between mid-1946 when the 46th RS was stood up, and December 1947 when it crashed.

The plane shown, named Clobbered Turkey, is a Boeing F-13 photo reconnaissance variant of the B-29 (serial 45-21775; earlier in its life it apparently was also known as the Forlorn Turkey; if anyone has diffinitive information on when the name changed please comment below!). The photo was most likely taken some time between mid-1946 and when it crashed in December, 1947. The crash, and the subsequent disasterous search-and-rescue efforts, led to major and lasting changes in how the Air Force prepared for and conducted rescue operations. The Clobbered Turkey was assigned to the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron (Very Long Range, Photographic), which was activated on June 1, 1946 and was based at Ladd Army Airfield, Fairbanks Alaska; on October 13, 1947, the squadron was redesignated the 72nd Reconnaissance Squadron. Known as "The Secret Explorers", their mission was to provide long range reconnaissance over the Arctic for the new Strategic Air Command, especially along the Soviet Union's northern border, as part of Project NANOOK. The unit was also tasked with deep-penetration reconnaissance missions, which were kept classified Top Secret until 2001.

On Tuesday, December 23, 1947, the Clobbered Turkey departed Ladd Air Base for a supposedly ordinary 15-hour training mission, with a crew of eight, pilot Lt. Vern H. Arnett, co-pilot Lt. Donald B. Duesler, navigator Lt. Frederick E. Sheetz, flight engineer Lt. Lyle B. Larson, radar operator Lt. Francis Schaack, electrical mechanic T/Sgt Wilbur E. Decker, radio operator Sgt Olan R. Samford and photographer S/Sgt Leslie R. Warre (this National Park Service web page has a good photo of the crew). On the return leg of the flight, the plane crashed while flying straight and level into the rising slope of Hot Springs Mountain (though it's named a "mountain", it really is more like a hill) on Seward Peninsula, 95 nm north of Nome, Alaska. The elevation of the crash site is a mere 870 feet MSL. Later, after being rescued, Duesler described the incident to the press: "I asked the pilot if he was getting sleepy. He said, 'No,' and said he did not need me to spell him. Just then one of the crewmen yelled that the ground was coming up. I grabbed the wheel and pulled it back. The nose came up and the tail hit, breaking off. Then the rest of the plane smacked into the hill with a terrific crash and turned over."

This was not Lt. Arnett's first crash in a B-29. That had been a year earlier, in 45-21853, which had crashed on takeoff and caught fire at Ladd Field on December 12, 1946, though the whole crew had escaped safely; early reports indicated that two of the engines had failed. Then, on February 21, 1947, Arnett was leading the crew of sister F-13A Kee Bird (45-21768) on a polar navigation mission in which they were supposed to fly from Ladd to the geographic North Pole and then back again. On the return leg, they became lost in a storm, ending up over northern Greenland instead of Alaska (if you look at the world from the top, Greenland is a lot closer to the North Pole than Alaska is). Running low on fuel, they had to set down on the ice. A massive search-and-rescue effort ensued, and eventually the entire crew was airlifted home in a C-54. The Kee Bird became well-known in 1995 when Darryl Greenamyer and crew attempted to resurrected it and fly it back home. An improperly secured APU fuel tank led to a fire, though, which tragically destroyed the Superfortress.

The Clobbered Turkey's crash site on the Seward Peninsula, not all that far from Soviet territory.

All eight crew members of the Clobbered Turkey had actually survived the crash, the worst injuries being a crewmen with a broken leg and two with burns, one serious. The official investigation found the cause of the accident to be a defective altimeter. While the pilot thought that they were cruising at 10,000 feet, there were actually at less than a 1,000 feet, meaning that this was a classic case of CFIT, or controlled-flight-into-terrain. Though the plane broke up, the snow on the gentle slope cushioned the impact somewhat, allowing all the crew to survive. They took shelter in the tail, but after 48 hours of fighting the cold, on Christmas night, the pilot, Lt. Arnett and the navigator, Lt. Sheetz, decided to hike out for help. Sheetz believed their location to be on Ear Mountain, about twenty miles south of the Inuit village of Shishmaref. He was wrong, and the crash was located sixty miles further east than where he believed, and Shismaref was a good fifty miles to the west-northwest. According to other crew members, the two left wearing arctic clothing and had wrapped themselves in parachutes, and were carrying maps, compasses, knives and rations. They never made it.

For four days after the crash, a severe storm prevented search and rescue efforts by forces from both Ladd AFB and Marks AFB in Nome from finding the Turkey. On the evening of Saturday December 27, the storm finally abated enough that the F-13 was located by a P-51 Mustang that also spotted four figures near the plane, leading to widespread news reports that there were four survivors. As a part of the massive SAR response, the squadron started maintaining a constant overflight of the scene with B-29s. Supplies and radios were dropped to the scene, but the weather stayed nasty, with blowing snow and intermittent ground fog up to 7,000 feet thick.

Two civilian bush pilots, William Munz of the Munz Airline and Frank Whaley of Wien Alaska Airline, both extremely experienced with flying in the area, had offered their services to the Air Force, but were repeatedly rebuffed by Air Force officials.

The rescue efforts came close to further disaster on Sunday, when a C-47 Dakota towing a glider to the scene lost power to both engines, supposedly due to the effects of the extreme cold on the plane's fuel. Air Force officials had decided that the terrain near the crash site was too rough to risk a landing by a powered aircraft, and that a glider would be better suited for a rescue attempt. (During the war, the Army had determined that gliders were too expensive to abandon after one landing, and so developed the technique of airborne pickup, or "snatch pickup" of a glider by a C-47 tow plane; the C-47 trailing a hook would fly low and snag a line rigged between two poles connected to a braked drum inside the glider, and the glider would be accellerated from standstill to 120 mph in about seven seconds. This method of rescue had been used quite successfully in a well-publicized operation in May 1945 that rescued the injured survivors of a C-47 which had crashed in Hidden Valley, New Guinea. The method had also been considered during the Kee Bird operation.)

After losing power, the C-47 cut loose the CG-4A glider, which landed safely, and the crew of the C-47 attempted a dead-stick, wheels-up landing in the Imiruk Basin, sixty miles from the Turkey's crash site; according to news reports, the C-47 "crumpled" its belly. No one onboard was hurt, though, and a ski equipped C-54 (many early news reports called it a C-45, an easy dislexic mistake, but a big difference in aircraft types!), also on its way to the F-13 crash site, landed and picked up the five C-47 crewmen. The radio calls from the C-54 announcing it was landing were mistakenly interpreted to mean that it, too, was having an emergency, and the Nome Commanding Officer, Col. H. N. Burkhalter, then announced to the media that it, too, had crashed; this was shortly thereafter clarified. The two glider crewmen remained behind, well equipped with provisions, to prepare the glider for pickup by another C-47 tow plane.

Continuing to be shunned by the Air Force, Munz and Whaley (with Jack Cross, another Wien employee) decided to go check on the wreck themselves in their single-engine bush planes on Sunday. The winds were still gale-force, which whipped up the snow, and caused visibility to drop to less than a mile. Munz was unable to find the wreck site, and returned to Nome. Whaley managed to locate it, and circled it a few times, but saw no survivors. He described the wreckage as having broken in half, with the front part of the fuselage looking like it had burned, while a canvas covering had been rigged over the aft end of the fuselage. He also noted that the site sat about a thousand feet below the ridge line, and the strong winds were blowing perpendicular to the ridge, which would make landing there very difficult. A few miles away, though, he found a small frozen lake on which to land, and determined that it might make a good base camp for an overland rescue. Back at Nome, Whaley and Munz again approached the Air Force to describe what they'd found, and suggested that they be permitted to participate in the rescue operation. According to Munz's memoir of the incident, their offer was "politely but firmly declined".

Sunday night, three Air Force men volunteered to jump to the crash site, Flight Surgeon Lt. Albert C. Kinney, Jr. (news reports at the time initially identified the doctor incorrectly as Capt. Aiken Mays) and paratroopers 1st Sgt Santhell O. London and Airman T/5 Leon J. Casey. They flew to the site in a B-17 purportedly flown by General Everest, and paracuted down at about 8 pm (in winter there, just 50 miles below the Arctic Circle, the sun sets around 2pm on a clear day; it gets dark even earlier when overcast, so the jumpers went in completely blind, in the pitch-dark). After jumping, they disappeared, didn't call on the radio and never made it to the wreck. Initially, it was supposed that they merely had a radio failure, and an additional radio was dropped to the wreck site, but still no radio calls were received.

On Monday, the 29th, true to the spirit of Alaskan bush pilots, Munz and Whaley decided to ignore the Air Force's brush-off and organize their own rescue effort. Munz took a local dentist who also had some medical experience, Dr. M. R. Kennedy and Bud Richter, a local photographer, with him in his 1933 Stinson Reliant Junior. Whaley took dog musher Chuck O'Leary, a local legend, three dogs and a sled, expecting to have to go from the lake to the wreck site to make the rescue. Whaley had battery issues, so Munz arrived first at the scene, and though the weather was still much the same, he managed to find the wreck and land up-slope a few hundred yards away from it.

They found six very tired and cold survivors, three uninjured, one with a broken leg, one with minor burns and one with fairly serious burns. All six survivors were guided up the slope to Munz's Stinson and the injured plus one of the others were loaded on board. With the engine at full throttle, and the able-bodied men pushing, Munz taxiied to the top of the ridge just as Whaley and O'Leary finally arrived and joined in the pushing. Once cresting the ridge, the Stinson picked up speed going down the other side into the stiff wind, and was almost at once airborne. Whaley left O'Leary and his dog pack behind with Kennedy and Richter, and took off with the other two survivors. When both planes arrived back at Marks AFB, they were mobbed by Air Force personnel thrilled to have their comrades home.

Munz then returned for those that had been left at the crash site. This time, he landed on the crest of the hill, and during the takeoff, O'Leary pushed and then jumped in as the plane picked up speed, and there was some difficulty experienced as the other two men tried to pull him fully in and get the door closed as the plane climbed away. Finally he was in and four men and three dogs were squeezed into what was normally just a four-seat plane.

The search and rescue effort continued looking for the other five missing men, and the Air Force, under the glare of national media attention, was getting desperate. The Air Force sent out a B-17 to fly a grid pattern at low level with orders that if they spotted anyone alive, they were to crash-land if necessary in order to get the survivors into a semblance of shelter.

Munz continued to participate, and on January 5, flying with O'Leary as an observer, they found the body of Sgt. London, who had frozen to death, probably in the dark, about 500 yards from the crash site. They were unable to land to recover his body, though, and a couple of days later Whaley flew O'Leary and another musher to the frozen lake to set up a base camp. The dog teams would then go and recover the body and bring him back to be flown out. More dog teams arrived from Shishmaref, and the search grew.

Four days later, the military announced that the search teams had found a two-mile-long furrow in the snow, believing it to be from one of the paratroopers being dragged by his chute. Unable to see the ground in the dark, it is likely that he was injured in the landing and thus was unable to release his chute and the high winds had carried him off. On the 12th, the body of Casey was located seven miles away from the crash site.

That same day, the bodies of Arnett and Sheetz were also found, about four miles from the wreck site. It appeared as if they had decided to turn around and were trying to return to the downed Turkey.

The search was finally called off for Flight Surgeon, Lt. Kinney. Instead, the Air Force offered a reward of $300 to whoever found him. It took another six months, until July 2, 1948, for that to happen. He was finally spotted by bush pilot John Cross.

The subsequent investigation showed that the three jumpers were doomed because of a lack of training and lack of equipment. Lt. Kinney had no jump experience, and none of them had sufficient survival gear, nor even proper Arctic clothing. They had jumped in the dark and misjudged the 25-40 knot surface winds, and two were dragged across the tundra for long distances by their cutes.

All this, and the media attention that this incident received, resulted in the Clobbered Turkey crash becoming pivotal in the development of the Air Rescue Service, and helped show that the challenges faced by a pararescuer could be far different than ordinary paratrooper training was designed to address. This helped speed the process of developing pararescue teams with specialized training and equipped with the right gear. The idea of specific squadrons dedicated to rescuing downed aviators started in earnest during World War II, but other than a general mission statement that "Rescue forces must assume survivors in each crash until proved otherwise", there was little standardization in training, equipment and methodology. The Clobbered Turkey changed all that.  Shortly thereafter, the Air Force instituted the Air Rescue Specialty Course at their School of Aviation Medicine.

Because of the national media coverage, the Air Force finally changed their attitude towards the civilian pilots, and Munz and Whaley were awarded the Air Medal by President Truman.

No tragic crash story is ever quite complete without a little bit of a mystery and cover-up added in, and this one has an interesting twist. While the official story is, as was mentioned above, that a defective altimeter resulted in an incident of controlled-flight-into-terrain, there were persistent "rumors" floating around at the time that the situation was actually quite different, and much more dire for the crew. These stories are attributed to Alaskan locals, and conversations they had with the crew. According to the stories, the Clobbered Turkey had been on a mission to photograph the Soviet side of the Bearing Strait (the nearest Soviet land was a mere 125 miles due west of the crash site, or a half-hour at a B-29's cruising speed; in contrast, the crash site was 430 nm from their home base at Fairbanks), had been shot at and sustained damage, and at least one of the crew members had been injured when they took fire. The pilots had been struggling to keep the aircraft airborne until they could get back over Alaskan territory.

The local rumors contributed to a larger story which made national news with an Associated Press article published on April 15, 1948, under the headline Russ Planes Reported over Alaska. In the article, the publisher of the Ketchikan Chronicle, William L. Baker, is quoted as confirming what Representative Margaret C. Smith (R-Me; later Senator from Maine) had said publicly about Russian aircraft violating Alaskan airspace. His statements came after a three-week tour of Alaska in which he gathered evidence of the violations.

Now, keep in mind, the hype of the Red Scare was just starting to hit full-stride in the American media at this time, but Smith wasn't one to fan those flames. A moderate Republican, Smith served on the House Armed Services Committee, had voted against making the House Un-American Activities Committee permanent, and spoke out long and loud against McCarthyism. And yet, she also confirmed publicly that Soviet aircraft had been violating US airspace over Alaska, and complained that the Soviet media routinely referred to Alaska a part of Russia's territory.

As part of his fact-finding mission, Baker referred to reports from the local aviation community which said that when the Clobbered Turkey went down, it "had a Soviet shell in her belly". Supposedly, the crew had told the local pilots that they were struggling to keep their wounded Superfortress in the air, and had hoped to at least "get their asses over Alaska before going in". What's more, the local aviation community had become convinced that the reason the Air Force had refused help from the bush pilots was because of concerns about the classfied and thus highly sensitive exposed photographic plates that likely had survived the crash, and thus would be gravely harmful to the mission if discovered and publicized by civilians.

Thus, it isn't at all surprising that after the crew was rescued, an Air Force team went back and burned the wreckage, and then subsequently bombed it in order to destroy any evidence of the actual mission, an act that begs the question: if this were just a routine training mission, why would there be any sensitive data onboard worth such efforts to destroy?

So was the Turkey really shot down by the Sovs? We'll probably never really know, but if so, maybe it was a good thing that it was covered up at the time, as such an incident could easily have led to a shooting war.

The wreckage of the Clobbered Turkey remains to this day, protected as part of Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.

Some interesting links:

• Here is the National Park Service write-up on the wreck site.
• Panoramio (Google Earth) image of the wreckage
• A video of a C-47 "snatching" a CG-4A glider can be seen here.
• White paper on the development of the glider "snatch" technique.
• Image of the letter of appreciation William Munz later received.
• A PDF of some of the documents I've dug up to support this article. Included is Munz's article "Blood on the Arctic Snow", several handwritten notes by Munz, and some photos of the wreckage from Munz's personal collection, presumably taken by Bud Richter. All of these come from the archive of the 46th/72nd Recon Association website.

Recon Superforts over Alaska

The Archive recently acquired three origial 8x10 prints from the late 1940s that feature specially-outfitted reconnaissance Superfortresses in flight over Alaska. The two shown here are backstamped "Air Force Photo, 72 RCN. SQ. (VLR) PHOTO" and are dated Sep 18, 1948. The third, which features the infamous F-13 The Clobbered Turkey, will be featured in an upcoming article.

The lead plane's s/n is illegible, left wing is 45-21762 and right wing is 45-21773, Leaking Lena

The Boeing F-13 was a little-known variant of the B-29 Superfortress. In an era when fighter planes had "P" for "Pursuit" numbers, the Army Air Forces used the "F" designation for aircraft dedicated to photo reconnaissance. One hundred eighteen early B-29-BW and B-29A Superfortresses were converted to F-13/F-13A photo reconnaissance aircraft (later changed first to FB-29J and then to RB-29), and were equipped with six high powered cameras, three 9"x9" K-17Bs, two 9x9 K-22 and a 9x18 K-18. Some were assigned to the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron (Very Long Range, Photographic), which was activated on June 1, 1946 and was based at Ladd Army Airfield, Fairbanks Alaska. On October 13, 1947, the squadron was redesignated the 72nd Reconnaissance Squadron.

The Squadron was part of the newly-formed Strategic Air Command, and participated in a number of early SAC efforts, including Project NANOOK, as well as the subsequent LEOPARD. Their mission was to provide long range reconnaissance over the Arctic, especially along the Soviet Union's northern border. The unit was also tasked with deep-penetration reconnaissance missions over Soviet Union territory, which were kept classified Top Secret until 2001.

In order to accomplish its mission, the 46th/72nd RS pioneered a number of techniques, including the configuration of the aircraft (of eighteen B-29s that the squadron acquired, it converted eight of them to the F-13 configuration), and the Grid System of navigation for use in the polar environment where magnetic compasses were unreliable. Besides The Clobbered Turkey, the squadron also was home to another famous F-13A, Kee Bird. One of the F-13, 45-21848 (possibly shown in the photo below), was the first aircraft on record to fly over the geographic North Pole, on October 16, 1946.

The image's focus is not sufficiently clear to distinguish the tail numbers (see below), so I'll let you, the reader, try to guess which is which. That being said, the closest plane to the camera is possibly 45-21848, which was the first aircraft to fly over the geographic North Pole. Note the enlarged structure in place of the tail gunner's station on the lead plane...I'm guessing that it houses some additional electronics, since these were recon birds.