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You know, speaking of 135s, there's a number of weird accidents in that community. In accident investigation school at Kirtland, I remember a listing of 135 accidents (we happened to be covering 135s) and there were a number of interesting ones that I can remember off the top of my head:
1977, KC-135A at Beale AFB lands and strikes a herd of cattle that had wandered onto the runway. Aircraft overran the runway and caught fire. Destroyed.
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This was almost a comedy even if it was something that could have been a real tragedy. I was a Castle IP at the time and knew the entire crew. IP on board was John McKnight, who eventually went to Air Florida and then TWA. The Castle CCTS tanker sorties used Beale, Travis, and Mather for transition bases due to the sheer volume of flights each day. This was a night flight which meant transition training was in the early AM. (had to do with “night” nav training having to be at, well…er “night”!) Apparently cows on the base were really a common sight as there was adjacent land that had a lot of cattle grazing on them. This night a herd got on the runway and kind of “bedded down”. A near tragedy was avoided as a deployed airplane full of people had landed just an hour or so before, obviously before the cattle showed up. Had they been her a plane with 60 or so folks in it would have been involved. Anyhow John and his crew flew a missed approach, which apparently stirred up the herd who began ambling down the runway. Next time they did a touch and go. Just as the nose came down, as John (who had a real sense of humor) said in the debrief, “saw something”…a real understatement, as there was a heard of maybe 20 or so cows they hit!
When the nose gear hit the firsts “bovine blocker” it got ripped off and went through the forward body tank, starting a pretty good fire. Next the left main gear hit more of the herd and that ripped it off. Now the airplane, still moving smartly, was on it’s now flaming fuselage and the left outboard engine rather than all three gear. Immediately started veering left.
Here’s where it gets interesting according to John’s story.
The crew knew something was wrong, no [censored]! The could see the glow of the fire now present in the left wing as the #1 engine was ground down and the magnesium gear case caught fire. (note: magnesium burns VERY brightly) John said they began discussing what was next. Very calm too. They all rolled their gloves up, sleeves down and collars up because they knew they might have to get through some fire to get out. The pilot in the jump seat was composed enough to call the tower and tell them to “roll the fire trucks”! There were two crew members in the back. They felt the impacts got up and started moving forward. When the got to the cockpit they looked back and by now the cargo compartment was on fire due to the forward body tank fire burning through the floor!
By now the airplane had departed the runway and was slowing down. The crew was getting ready for a ground evac, started unstrapping, opening windows, tossing out evacuation ropes and all that stuff. There were seven on board. Two in the pilots seats, one in the jumpseat just aft of the center console, one student nav, one student boom and the instructor nav and boom. The instructor boom and instructor nav were the two who came up from the back. When the airplane finally came to a stop, the last thing it did was a quick 180 turn which helped sling the fuel pouring out of the ruptured tanks to the right of the plane, keeping it from sloshing forward to the cockpit. The first one out of the left window was John who just dropped to the ground which was a lot closer than normal due to not having a nose gear holding up the cockpit! The guy in the jump seat next as the copilot went out the right side, using the rope as it was a longer drop due to the airplane being over on the left side. (remember there was NO left gear either) Next out was the jumpseater who was a pilot student. He basically dove straight out the open window, the one John had just used. Only problem was John had more or less fallen out, and was just getting out as this big dude comes flying out the window, landing right on top of John, flattening him! Nobody got hurt and they both got up and took off, nearly getting run over by the fire trucks who were on the spot, thanks to the earlier call.
The rest of the crew exit the windows with more finesse than the jumpseat pilot and John had done. All escaped with only minor injuries. The closest anybody came to being burned was the instructor boom. He was the last one out, and used the right window. As he was climbing down the side of the airplane a blast of fire shot out of a fuel vent on the side of the fuselage near him and gave him a little “singe job” but nothing else.
Eventually fire consumed what was left of the airplane, along with what ever embedded parts of beef were in it.
Couple of funny things came out of the investigation.
The determined exactly which cow got hit first. The found the nose gear landing light imbedded in the remains of the carcass! The next night the crew, after being checked over and some debriefing were offered free steak dinners at the O-club! Who says even in the midst of the total destruction of an airplane due to a crash there can’t be humor.
In the end nobody got hurt which was good.
The analysis pointed out that the problem was not the presence of cattle on the base itself but that they had managed to make it into the air operations area. As a result a “cow proof” fence was put around it. Prior to that there was just the normal barbed wire fence. It was discovered that when one of those range cattle starts grazing if they come to a barb wire strand fence, they just stick their head between the strands and keep right on grazing. Once past the fence strands return to their original position and no one knows they ever went through. Took some high altitude photos of Beal to show the trails the cows had used for years to get in and around the runway! Amazing, truly amazing.
So much for the “night the cows died” (with apologies to Paper Lace and their song “The Night Chicago Died”)
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1975, KC-135A crashes on a frozen lake near Eielson AFB following a gear malfunction. Didn't get into this one much, but sounds eerily like a Eastern 401-esqe accident.
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Trying to remember this. If it’s the one I’m thinking about the crew was executing a series of instrument approaches at a different runway and lost situation awareness. Ended up in the dirt, rocks and trees, albeit frozen. They were using a KC135 but were RC135 types. This was common practice for instrument work as the RC135s were a pretty pricey asset to be used just for pilot instrument proficiency. A distracting malfunction may have contributed but I just don’t remember.
There was a Castle KC135 that crashed at Beale under a similar “distraction” scenario. Drug an engine on a touch and go, had a fire. IP took charge, tried to fly, talk, coordinate, while pulling up for a unnecessarily (IMHO) quick return. The classic “nobody flying the airplane”! Stalled, rolled over and crashed on downwind with three good engines and one with a fire on the bottom of the cowling from a drain valve that got knocked off in the touch and go.
If any lesson can be learned from this one it’s in any abnormal or emergency situation, somebody’s got to FLY THE AIRPLANE!
And like I put in my musings…..”Wind the clock, FIRST!”
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1971, C-135 that was being used out of Hickam AB to monitor French nuke testing disappears on one such flight.
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Can't remember a thing about this one.
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1969, RC-135E "Rivet Amber" recon plane out of Shemya AB, snooping out the coast of the former Soviet Union reports heavy vibration inflight. No further transmissions other than mysterious mic clicking heard prior to the aircraft crashing at sea. No survivors.
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If memory serves me right this was a one of a kind airplane. I had a big chunk of the upper fuselage removed and some sort of recon equipment installed with a hatch that actually opened up in flight. The compartment was obviously not pressurized. A buddy of mine flew out of that unit and he speculates that the removal of so much of the structure eventually led to a catastrophic failure and nearly instantaneous inflight breakup of the aircraft. I thought though he called it one of the “Cobra Ball” aircraft. The “Rivet Amber” name may have been the mission.
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1987, KC-135 gets caught in wake turbulance of B-52 during airshow practice and crashes at Fairchild AFB, crew killed as well as one person in a vehicle on the ground. From what I heard, the scheduled navigator for the flight had been taken off the crew for a sinus problem and was replaced with another prior to the accident flight. After the 135 lost control in the turbulance and as it was heading to the ground, the car it crashed into was that of the sick navigator that had gotten off the flight earlier, and he was killed by the same plane he was supposed to have flown on.
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This is one that always gets me, for several reasons.
The crew member on the ground was the boom operator, a young man who had been a student on my crew at Castle, and later came back as an instructor. He did get taken off the crew due to illness and drove his car out to a spot near the runway to watch the show. Then the airplane ended up crashing on top of him. If memory serves me right it was some time before his family even knew what happened to him as it wasn’t immediately known that the airplane had crashed on top of a car. For a while he was just missing and nobody knew what had happened to him. A real tragedy, but one of those that puts meaning into a belief that God does control when we will be taken.
There was a time when SAC had a string of serious crashes. And the following is IMHO, my personal take on events! (sort of a disclaimer to protect Doug’s web site if you will)
For years and years SAC had more or less been the top dog in the Air Force as one after another Chief of Staff positions came out of SAC. This really grated on the TAC types. Eventually they got their way and one of their own became CINCSAC, i.e. the command was about to be “TACimcised!” The new guys first order of business was to make SAC like TAC, specifically to put stan/eval at the unit level and virtually no where else. This was a direct opposite to the way SAC had been organized since Curt LeMay started it. It had always been a highly structured, from the top, standardized to a gnats ass command. Especially in the crew operating business. And it WORKED! They had an enviable safety record. Sure they were a bit of an overbearing dinosaur that needed a little tweaking from time to time, but the bedrock foundation of SAC was the best there was. Trust me, I spent an entire career in it. It worked, and worked good.
But the new CINC took a different approach. He decided to completely tear down the command, break up that foundation that had been around since day one, and start from scratch. And it was a disaster! No where was this disaster more visible than in the airshow arena. Suddenly SAC heavy aircraft were doing low altitude stuff at airshows. B52s and KC135 doing low altitude yank and bank stuff. A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN! And that day it did. The B52 and the KC135 wear basically doing a “weave” maneuver. Maneuvering for a low altitude flyby in relatively close trail. As the 135 rolled in he got caught in low altitude turbulence and rolled right in! Face it, big airplanes that get upset need more than a few hundred feet of altitude to recover. You being a fighter type can get away with a lot more as you have more power, less weight, and a helluva lot more responsive aircraft. The 135 is not a snap rolling airplane. It is relatively slow and ponderous. Does NOT even have hydraulic ailerons and elevators. Uses spoilers to help it roll. Not exactly a hot shot “yank and bank” aircraft.
I will forever hold the CINCSAC who dreamed up the idea of such activities responsible for those deaths and others! He nearly single-handedly destroyed a command that had stood the test of time for years, and contributed to needless deaths by sheer arrogance and stupidity.
Other than that, I don’t have an opinion on the matter.
FWIW there was another crash at Fairchild. This time a B52 doing a series of low passes, flown by a pilot who was on his last flight. One that had a reputation for being a “maverick” and one that some crew members had expressed a reluctance to fly with. In the end he took innocent crew members to their death with himself by continuing to perform a series of energy losing maneuvers at low altitude until finally the B52 ran out of energy and crashed. And you know all about that energy thing! There have been some fighters lost for the same reason. Imagine a B52 doing it! Sad!
Again, other than that, I don’t have an opinion on this matter either!
Well so much for setting a record for the longest post ever on this web site!
