Observations on aviation-related stories in the news.
Tom, a friend from Pennsylvania, thought I’d enjoy this story from the Pittsburgh CityPaper:
And I did. It’s a cool story, and new to me. Back in 1956, an old WWII bomber ran out of fuel and ditched in the Monongaha River. Several witnesses saw it happen and tried to help rescue the six crewmen, two of whom drowned in the near-freezing water. The bomber sank, never to be found despite many attempts over the years to find it. Naturally, conspiracy theories abound. Since the flight originated at Nellis AFB in Nevada, some believe it was carrying alien-related artifacts from Area 51. Some say it carried nuclear bomb components. Some say the USAF secretly fished the wreckage out of the river in the middle of the night. Some say Howard Hugues was aboard.
Fueling the conspiracy theories is the fact that portions of the official USAF accident report are redacted. That right there shows you the Air Force must have been up to something shady, am I right?
Here’s what I wrote back to Tom:
Tom, I hadn’t heard this story before. Thanks for sending the article. I don’t think the redactions in the accident report were because there was something secret about the plane or its cargo. I think the reason certain sentences were blacked out was to spare the feelings of surviving family members (and make it harder for them to sue). In any case, when this mishap happened in 1956, the USAF was flying jet bombers. WWII-era B-25s were long obsolete and relegated to training roles. Most had already been scrapped, and the few remaining were bound to the boneyard.
There are plenty of missing aircraft that have never been found, but I must say I’m surprised no one’s found this one, given all the enthusiasts looking for it over the years!
As for the Nellis AFB/Area 51 connection: Nellis is a huge base in North Las Vegas, its activities fully visible to anyone driving by. Area 51 is 100NM to the north, located within the boundaries of the Nellis Ranges, restricted areas closed to the public. Area 51 itself is a restricted area within a restricted area, off limits to anyone who doesn’t work there. Closest I could get to it, when I flew Red Flag exercises at Nellis, was about 25NM, close enough to see the airfield on the dry lakebed at the center of it, but not close enough to make out detail. Folks who work there are flown up from Las Vegas, where they live, aboard white-painted 737s operated by a private contractor and using the callsign Janet. A good friend of mine was an F-15 instructor pilot at Nellis’ Fighter Weapons School. When he retired he went to work for that contractor, flying worker bees between McCarren Field in Las Vegas and Groom Lake in Area 51. He lasted about a year, got bored with the same-old same-old, and left for a job with Southwest.
This callsign story is not like the others:
Military leaders go after callsigns every few years. But generally they’re after the use of tactical callsigns and personal nicknames, whether on name tags or over the air (in radio calls, etc). This time, though, they got upset over a computer-generated aircraft callsign, the kind they want us to use.
When I flew at Kadena, by way of illustration, the 44th Fighter Squadron Vampires assigned “Bat” and “Vampire” callsigns to individual aircraft and flights of F-15s. Both pilots and controllers used those callsigns — “Vampire 21 holding short,” “Bat 01, climb to and maintain one-five thousand,” “Vampire 11, traffic 12 o’clock, ten miles,” like that. Periodically some higher headquarters type would issue an order forbidding use of unit callsigns, directing us to instead use randomly-generated alphanumeric callsigns from a daily list sent out to flying units. You might be BORON 01 this day and IDICK 69 the next.
Oops, maybe you shouldn’t use one with DICK and 69 in it. Which is what happened here. If I thought about it at all (actually I never did until now) I’d have assumed there’d be filters to keep off-color or inappropriate callsigns off those daily lists. Apparently not! The article, which is worth a read, mentions other callsign scandals, including KC-135 tankers operating as “Titties” and “Boobies,” and a B-1B bomber operating as “Fuck0107,” which I frankly do not believe.
But as I said at the start, what the generals and admirals normally go after are tactical callsigns like Skid (my own) or my old squadronmates Jugs, Ripple, Bag, and Peeper.
I just remembered a story. When I flew in the Netherlands, our sister F-15 unit in Germany, Bitburg AB, was home to the 525th Fighter Squadron Bulldogs. The tradition there was for Eifel Control, whenever a 525th FS flight took off, to ask “Is there a Bulldog in the air?” To which the flight lead would answer “You bet your ass there is.” One day a visiting general from Air Training Command was flying into Bitburg on a T-39 and overheard one of those exchanges on the radio. The next day U.S. Air Forces Europe put out a command-wide Be-No (as in “there shall be no …”), and the tradition was outlawed.
As to whether our colleagues at Bitburg started ignoring the new directive as soon as the visiting general left, I cannot say. I can say, though, that while I’ve lived through multiple tactical callsign prohibitions — in USAFE, TAC, and PACAF — not one of my commanders or squadronmates ever paid them any mind.
I vividly recall my experiences in USAF survival training and have written about them on the blog. So when I saw this story, forwarded by another friend, I read it with interest.
This is not a big surprise. I’ve often thought civilians would pay good money for the kind of training I got at USAF Survival School, which is where this former instructor learned his stuff. Obviously he came to the same conclusion and put it into action. As for the Christian nationalist connection, as realtors say, it’s location, location, location. SERE School (the new name of survival school) is at Fairchild AFB in eastern Washington, right next door to Idaho.
As a note of interest, the former USAF officers who advised the Bush/Cheney administration on torture and waterboarding after 9/11 were instructors at Fairchild when I went through in the 1970s, so there’s a long history of this sort of thing.
Paul knows there are a lot of crashed aircraft to be found in the U.S, mostly civilian, and mostly in Alaska. We may know where they are, or were, but it takes a long time for the glaciers to melt.
Dear readers, I made a small change to this post. I had previously misidentified Bitburg’s Bulldog squadron: it was the 525th FS, not the 22nd FS. Memory, they say, is the first thing to go.
Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the response!