Yet the engines offered barely more thrust. During the Cold War, SAC stuffed the G models so full of bombs and fuel that they usually topped the takeoff weight sitting in the chocks. To help the plane take off, engineers devised a technique called “water augmenting” the engines, pushing the limits of technology in pursuit of SAC’s Cold War mission.
During takeoff, B-52 pilots injected 10,000 pounds of water into the back sections of each engine.
The water cooled the engine blades, allowing them to spin faster without melting or disintegrating.
The water also added mass to the exhaust, creating more lift. Often the B-52 remained well above its takeoff weight as it zoomed down the runway. But during the trip, the plane consumed 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of fuel and 10,000 pounds of water. That weight loss, along with the extra 2,550 pounds of thrust, allowed the bomber to crawl into the sky.
The water-augmented thrust lasted exactly ten seconds. When the airborne plane reached about a thousand feet, it lost power and took a sudden dip. The dip usually caused utter panic in first-time pilots, much to the amusement of old-timers.
At 10:20 a.m. on January 17, 1966, the sky in Saddle Rock shone a bright, clear blue. The bomber and tanker cut their speed and began their approach. In the B-52, Messinger sat on the left, in the pilot’s seat; Wendorf sat in the copilot’s seat to the right. Rooney was downstairs reading. The B-52 was 31,000 feet in the air and about 150 feet below the tanker when Messinger sensed that something was wrong.
“We came in behind the tanker. We were a little bit fast, and we started to overrun him a little bit,” Messinger said. “There is a procedure they have in refueling where if the boom operator feels that you’re getting too close and it’s a dangerous situation, he will call, ‘Breakaway, breakaway, breakaway.’” Messinger remembers overrunning the tanker a “wee bit” but nothing serious. “There was no call for breakaway, so we didn’t see anything dangerous about the situation,” he said. “But all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose.”
What happened next is disputed. Wendorf says he still had his eye on the tanker when he heard an explosion coming from the back of the B-52. The plane pitched down and to the left. Fire and debris shot into the cockpit, and the plane began to come apart.
The other pilots agree that the accident began with an explosion in the back of the B-52. But the official accident report tells a different story. Investigators concluded that the B-52 overran the KC-135 and then pitched upward and rammed the tanker. The collision ripped the tanker’s belly open, spilling jet fuel through the plane, onto the bomber, and into the air. A fireball quickly engulfed both planes.
Rooney and Wendorf suspect that fatigue failure — a problem in the B-52—caused a portion of the tail section to break off. Flying debris sparked an explosion in one of the gas tanks, and the plane came apart. After the initial explosion, the bomber may have rammed the tanker — everything happened so quickly that the pilots can’t be sure. But they insist that the explosion came first and that it came from the back of the bomber.
We may never know conclusively whether a collision or an explosion triggered the accident. After a crash, it is Air Force custom to bury the wreckage. Because this accident occurred on foreign soil, SAC dumped the debris into the ocean. The one surviving member of the investigation board has refused to speak publicly about the accident.
Regardless of how it started, the first explosion grew into a massive fireball that enveloped the KC-135 tanker. The tanker had no ejection seats; the four men aboard were incinerated. More explosions began to rip both planes into large chunks and flaming fragments, flinging four hydrogen bombs into the sky.
In the cockpit of the B-52, the force of the explosion pitched Wendorf forward. He hit his face on the steering column and blacked out for a few seconds. When he came to, the cockpit was hot. The ejection hatch next to him had been blown, and Messinger and his seat were gone. The plane was tumbling downward, and the excruciating g-forces crushed Wendorf into his seat. He was bent over and unable to move, his left hand stuck, immobile, on the throttle.
“To eject from a plane,” Wendorf said, “you have to be upright in your seat, with your back straight, elbows in, and your feet together. If you are not within the confines of your seat, you are going to lose whatever is hanging out there.” Wendorf remembers taking a long look at his left arm, stuck on the throttle. He felt as if he had all the time in the world to make a decision, and finally he did. “I knew I was going to lose my arm,” he said. “But I thought it was better to lose that than lose everything.” With intense effort, he forced his right hand to pull the ejection trigger on the arm of his seat and shot into the sky.
Rooney, sitting in the lower compartment with his nose buried in his book, had removed his gloves to better turn the pages. He heard the explosion and looked up. Through the hatch he saw fire and debris shooting forward from the back of the plane. The gunner and the electronic warfare officer, sitting just to the rear of the hatch, were probably killed instantly. Buchanan, in the lower compartment with Rooney, turned around to see what was going on. Rooney gave him a thumbs-down, signaling that he should eject. Buchanan pulled the ejection handle and shot down out of the plane. His ejection seat, designed to automatically separate from him and activate the parachute, didn’t work. He raced toward the ground stuck in his seat, his parachute stubbornly shut. He reached back and started to haul his chute out of the pack, foot by foot. It finally snapped open just before he hit. He crashed into the ground, still trapped in his seat, and survived with major burns and a broken back.
As Rooney unbuckled himself, the plane pitched violently to the left, flinging him into the radar with such force that his helmet split. He crumpled, badly stunned, as the plummeting plane careened into a left-handed spin. Montanus ejected. His ejection seat, like Buchanan’s, malfunctioned.
Montanus didn’t make it.
Rooney was now the only living person left in the plane. A few feet away gaped the hole in the floor where Buchanan and Montanus had been sitting. The g-forces crushed Rooney to the floor, just as they had pinned Wendorf to his seat. Barely able to move, he looked out the hole at the brown earth and blue sky. The hole was only a few feet away, but it seemed an impossible distance. “I’m saying to myself, either I get out of here or I’m going to die,” Rooney recalled. He dragged himself across the wall toward the hole. He reached the hatch and grabbed its sharp edge, giving his gloveless hands a vicious slice. Pulling himself halfway out, he stuck there, pinned in place by the fierce wind.
Then the plane shifted and suddenly he was free, hurling through the hole and into the sky.
Rooney tumbled through the air as hot chunks of debris hissed by. A flaming engine pod passed so close that it singed the hair off his arms and neck. When he was clear of the disintegrating plane, he pulled his rip cord. As his chute caught the wind and floated him gently over the water, he pulled his gloves over his cold, bleeding hands and inflated his life vest. He splashed down about three miles out to sea. He unstrapped a Buck knife from his boot and cut himself free from his parachute. Then, bobbing in the waves, he prayed for help.
Charles Wendorf was knocked unconscious when he ejected from the plane and woke with a jerk when his parachute opened automatically at 14,000 feet. With a sudden burst of cheer, he realized that he was still alive, with his left arm intact. He took stock of the situation: though happily still attached, his left arm seemed badly broken, with a bone sticking out of the wrist. His helmet was gone, and there was a bloody tear on his left leg where a pocket used to be. With a shock of dismay, Wendorf realized that the pocket had held his wallet. “Shoot,” he remembers thinking, “now I’m going to have to get a new driver’s license.” Then he had another realization — his parachute didn’t seem to be working so well. And he smelled smoke.
Looking up, Wendorf put it all together. Part of his chute was on fire, and the rest was tangled and flapping wildly. He saw his boxy survival kit caught in the lines, preventing the chute from opening fully. “I tried to reach up with my left arm, but it wasn’t working,” he said. “So I reached up with my right arm and shook out the lines.” A few shakes put out the fire and untangled the lines. The parachute opened and slowed his fall. Wendorf breathed a bit easier.
Floating out over the sea, Wendorf saw several small fishing boats below. When he got closer to the sea, he tried to steer for one of them. But as he pulled the riser, he accidentally collapsed his chute and plummeted into the cold water. He swam to the surface, buoyed by the rectangular survival kit that was somehow tucked under his right arm. He inflated his life preserver and floated in the water, waiting for help. Like Rooney, he had landed about three miles out from shore. The two men had hit the water astonishingly close to each other but didn’t know it. The waves rolled too high for them to see very far. Within ten minutes, the fishing boat
