The Department of Defense questioned the need for any bombers at all. SAC, fearful of losing their defining mission, argued that the BMEWS radar sites, particularly the one at Thule monitoring the over-the-pole route for enemy missiles, could be taken out by a stealthy Soviet overland strike, and the data link back to the command center in Colorado would go dark. We would have no idea what was being sent in over the North Pole with that radar knocked out. The only way to ensure that all was well at BMEWS Thule was to fly over it in a bomber and make sure it was still there. It was a weak justification, but the DoD went along and gave SAC permission to keep exactly one plane in the air. It would fly a “butter-knife” pattern, a sort of figure-eight route starting at Baffin Bay, over Thule, then over the BMEWS station, and back down to Baffin Bay, over and over, with in-flight refueling.[218] If the connection to BMEWS Thule was ever lost, the B-52 could look down and tell whether it was just a power outage or it had been blown to Kingdom Come. The operation was named “Hard Head.”
The old reliable pair of MK-39 thermonuclear weapons carried in the B-52 bomb bay had been replaced with a four-round clip of sleek, slender MK-28FI bombs in case something of global significance happened while the bomber orbited over Thule. The newer bombs were only 22 inches in diameter but were 12 feet long. They looked exactly like cigar tubes, dull but attractive aluminum with perfectly hemispherical noses, and each weighed only 2,300 pounds.[219]
The Command Pilot on HOBO 28 was Captain John M. Haug, the Copilot was Captain Leonard Svitenko, and the Third Pilot was Major Alfred J. D’Amario. The crew was Major Frank F. Hopkins, Radar Navigator; Captain Curtis R. Griss, Jr., Navigator; Captain Richard E. Marx, Electronics Warfare Officer; and Staff Sergeant Calvin W. Snapp, Gunner. Their mission, Junky 14, started at 7:30 a.m. with a pre-takeoff briefing in the Bomb Squadron room at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York. Captain Haug and his crew loaded their equipment into HOBO 28 and started engines at 8:44 a.m.
The Third Pilot, D’Amario, had to sit downstairs in “the hole,” an uncomfortable, fold-away jump seat bolted to the bulkhead of the lower crew compartment. The back rest was a thin cushion glued to a door at the back of the cabin. The sealed doorway led to the front landing gear compartment, and a door on the far side of that space led to the forward bomb bay. There was a seat belt and a headphone jack, but it was the only seat in the plane that would not eject from the aircraft on demand. Officially, the seat was designated the IN, for Instructor Navigator.
At D’Amario’s feet was the “egg crate,” the grid over the folded-up ladder for the aircraft’s front door, a hatch underneath the ladder. He looked into the backs of the ejection seats for the Navigator and Radar Navigator, and on his left and right were racks full of electronic equipment. At his left elbow was the urine canister, piped downstairs from the crew’s toilet, to which the yellow ladder in front of him led.
There was no place to put extraneous things in a B-52G. D’Amario had gotten some extra cloth-covered foam rubber cushions to make his long stay in the hole more comfortable. Before takeoff, he stowed three of them under the jump seat, right on top of the “hot air spray tube,” or what anywhere else would be called the “furnace vent.” After takeoff, D’Amario found that the extra cushion he was sitting on did not do as much good as he had hoped, so he crammed it on top of the other three cushions, and in front of them he moved a metal box to put his feet on.
By 1:09 p.m. they were entering the orbit area over Greenland, where it was dark 24 hours a day. The pilots had just finished a successful in-flight refueling, and D’Amario went upstairs to spell Svitenko in the copilot’s seat. Svitenko immediately noticed that it was freezing cold downstairs, and he called for more heat. The temperature control knob was already turned all the way up, so D’Amario turned on the emergency cabin heater system, taking hot air from the jet engine manifolds on the right side of the plane. It was still cold downstairs, but on the flight deck it immediately started getting uncomfortably hot. As the pilots puzzled over the temperature paradox, Marx called from downstairs that he smelled something burning. Rubber?
A brief search found smoke coming from underneath the IN seat. Marx unhooked a fire extinguisher from the wall, pulled the safety pin, and released its contents all over the seat. One fire extinguisher did not do anything, so he quickly found another and emptied it in the direction of the smoke. Svitenko pulled out the metal box in front of the cushions, and flames erupted into the downstairs compartment. Haug immediately called Thule, reporting an emergency on board and requesting an immediate landing. Marx opened the sextant port to try to vent the smoke out of the compartment, while Griss tried to smother the fire with an A-3 bag.[220] It was only growing worse. As the plane descended, at 3:32 P.M. D’Amario dumped the cabin pressure, trying to smother the flames by depriving them of oxygen. The smoke was so thick, the pilots could not see the instrument panel. Three minutes later, all electrical power failed, and Haug shouted the bailout order.
Haug could not see much of anything, with the only visible light being a red glow coming through the hatchway to the lower compartment, but he distinctly heard four ejection seats fire off in quick succession. He looked down at the end of the left armrest and grabbed the “magic handle,” painted yellow with black stripes, with his left hand and rotated it up. The ejection trigger snapped into position, the hatch over his head unlatched and blew away, the inertial reels on his shoulder harness locked, and the control column with which he had been flying the plane spaced forward, out of the way. All the smoke vacuumed out of the cockpit, and for a second the sound of air rushing past the open hatchway was deafening. He squeezed the trigger. The next thing he knew, he felt as if he were floating. He could see lights on the ground.
D’Amario, unlike Haug, was not wearing a winter-weight flying suit with thermal underwear. He had the right undies underneath a summer-weight flying jumper, but as he saw the situation deteriorating he pulled on his snow parka. After he was blown out the top of the plane and the chute opened, he occupied himself with deploying his arctic survival kit.[221] He could see the lights on the west end of the runway at Thule.
Hopkins, the Radar Navigator, was surprised at the violent jerk of his ejection seat. The eject trigger set off an explosive charge, and the high-pressure gas generated in the explosion vented into a pneumatic cylinder at the back of his seat. The seat, mounted on rails, left the plane very quickly. Somewhere in the event his helmet and his left glove were lost, and his left arm seemed to have gotten caught in the hatchway as his seat exited downward. He could not wave his arms and stop himself from oscillating back and forth under the parachute canopy. To the east he could see the lights at Thule. His arm was hurting, which thankfully meant that it was still attached to him.
Marx was not properly dressed, having only a light summer flying suit and thermal underwear. As soon as his seat cleared the plane, he became acutely aware of the cold air. He could see the base, but he was drifting in the wrong direction.
Snapp, the gunner, was not well dressed either, and it seemed to him that it took an awfully long time to hit the ground. He had lost his helmet and both gloves in the ejection. While floating, he tried to release his survival kit, but his hands were too cold.
218
The long-range incoming threat detection equipment at BMEWS Thule at that time used AN/FPS-50 radars operating UHF at 425 MHz. The antennas, permanently aimed at Russia over the top of the world, were 165 feet tall and 400 feet wide, called “fences.” How powerful was this setup? On October 5, 1960, the moon rose directly in front of the antennas, and the radar detected it as an extremely large missile coming straight at them. The long signal return, 2.5 seconds, clued the operators that it could not really be a missile, and World War III was averted.
219
Also designated B28FI, the F means “fully fused” and the I means “carried internally.” A fully fused MK-28 could be dropped in a free fall for an airburst, dropped with a retarding parachute for an airburst, or lowered to the ground gently for a delayed burst on the ground, called a “laydown drop.” The actual bomb was a cylinder only three feet long. The entire back section of the casing held the parachutes, and the long nose was filled with balsa wood, intended to cushion the shock of landing nose-down. The intended yield of the bombs carried in HOBO 28 is unknown. It could have been anything from 70 kilotons to 1.45 megatons. The fissile material at the center of the bomb’s secondary stage consisted of highly enriched U-235, and not the usual Pu-239. Four bombs were conveniently mounted in an MHU-14/C clip-in subassembly plus MHU-19/E bomb cradle. Loading this four-bomb cluster onto a B-52G was quick and easy using a special trailer with a hydraulic lift.
220
A-3 is an “aviator’s kit bag,” a shapeless Air Force duffel still used to hold a crewman’s spare clothing and accessories for a long mission. It has become a fashion accessory, which shows that anything is possible.
221
When strapped into his seat, an airman was sitting atop his survival kit. It was two molded fiberglass halves, held together like a clamshell with aluminum hardware. When the seat fell away and the parachute opened, the kit was held against the airman’s backside by the lap belt. If there was a chance that he was coming down over water, he was supposed to reach back and pull a handle. The kit would come apart at the seam, and the back half would fall away, attached to a 20-foot lanyard. At the end of the lanyard, a life raft would inflate, ready for him when he hit the water. After he was on the ground, another handle, almost impossible to manipulate with cold hands, would open the remaining half of the kit, containing food, water, a knife, an aluminized Mylar “blanket,” a radio beacon, a book on how to survive, and, best of all, a tiny folding rifle, good for keeping rats away from your food providing they were slowed down by the cold. (In 1968, the rifle was probably an Ithaca M6, single-shot, over-under .22 long rifle and 410 shotgun with a palm-squeeze trigger that can be pulled wearing heavy mittens.)