Notable Incidents and Accidents
On Labor Day, Monday, 1 September 1952, a tornado hit Carswell AFB, Fort Worth, Texas. It smashed the 7th and 11th Bomber Wings' complement of B-36s, 2/3 of the USAF's entire B-36 fleet, as well as six aircraft being built by Convair's Fort Worth plant. The base was shut down and operations transferred to Meacham Field. Joint repairs by Convair and the USAF got 10 of the 61 B-36s up and running within two weeks and repaired the other 51 aircraft within five weeks. Eighteen of 19 heavily damaged aircraft (and the six damaged and unfinished aircraft at Convair) were repaired by May 1953. The 19th (#2051) had to be totally scrapped and was used as a nuclear testing site ground target and one heavily damaged aircraft (#5712) was written off and rebuilt into the NB-36H Nuclear Reactor Testbed aircraft.
Though the B-36 had a better than average overall safety record, 10 B-36s crashed between 1949 and 1954 (three B-36Bs, three B-36Ds, and four B-36Hs). A total of 32 B-36s were written-off in accidents between 1949 and 1957 of 385 built. When a crash occurred, the magnesium-rich airframe burned readily.
B-36s were involved in two "Broken Arrow" incidents. On 13 February 1950, B-36 serial number 44-92075, crashed in an unpopulated region of British Columbia, resulting in the first loss of an American atom bomb. The bomb's plutonium core was dummy lead, but it did have TNT, and it detonated over the ocean before the crew bailed out. Locating the crash site took some effort. Later in 1954, the airframe, stripped of sensitive material, was substantially destroyed in situ by a U.S. military recovery team.
On 22 May 1957, a B-36 accidentally dropped a Mark-17 hydrogen bomb on a deserted area while landing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Only the conventional trigger detonated, the bomb being unarmed. These incidents were classified for decades. See list of military nuclear accidents.
Read more about this topic: Convair B-36
Famous quotes containing the words notable, incidents and/or accidents:
“Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it’s more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)