The Day America Dropped Four Nuclear Bombs on Spain
In the right seat sat copilot First Lieutenant Michael J. Rooney, 25, who joined the Air Force in 1964 straight out of the University of North Carolina. The only bachelor on the crew, Rooney found the work and staid life on base a bit dull to his liking, but he got along well with the crew, especially Wendorf. As graduates of two collegiate arch rivals, the two enjoyed ribbing each other about their respective alma maters.
There was a moment, Mike Rooney remembered: He had just bailed out at 30,000 feet from the B-52 he co-piloted. He was falling backwards towards earth and, as if in a dream, he watched the giant plane roll and break apart, flaming pieces screaming past him. He had yet to realize he was wracked with pain, frozen and barely conscious from hypoxia, but after pulling the ripcord on his parachute he recalled floating down and looking out across the shimmering beaches of Spain’s southern coast and the Andalusia mountains in the distance and thinking to himself: “I might just live through this.”
What he gave no thought to were the fate the four hydrogen bombs the plane was carrying.
For years, American nuclear defenses depended on a constantly airborne fleet of nuclear-armed B-52s flying to the edge of Soviet airspace in a game of thermonuclear chicken. The theory behind the strategy was that if the Soviets were crazy enough to launch a nuclear strike against the U.S., our bombers would be in position to execute a swift and devastating blow in return. Thus the strategy’s ironic acronym, MAD, or mutual assured destruction.
On the morning of January 17, 1966, on the return leg of one such mission, a B-52G carrying four hydrogen bombs and a KC-135 tanker aircraft exploded and broke apart while attempting to hookup over southern Spain. The four crewmen aboard the tanker were killed. Of the seven aboard the bomber, two never got out. Four aboard ejected. One of them was killed when the seat’s automatic parachute failed to deploy and he hit the ground still strapped in his seat. A fifth, Rooney, managed to crawl out of the crippled plane and deploy his backpack parachute.
There was no nuclear explosion. Of the four hydrogen bombs, three hit land near Palomares, a small fishing and farming community on the southern coast of Spain. Conventional explosives in two of the bombs detonated upon impact, spreading radioactive plutonium over a two-square-kilometer area. The fourth landed in the Mediterranean Sea, prompting the largest, most expensive underwater search to date. After 81 days the bomb was recovered. In addition, military personnel removed more than 5,000 barrels of contaminated soil from Palomares and shipped it to South Carolina. The United States agreed to a long-term remediation and compensation plan with Spain, but the incident put a strain on relations between the two countries that continues to this day.
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U.S. nuclear strategy of mutual assured destruction became the fodder for apocalyptic films such as "Dr. Strangelove" and "Fail Safe." |
Movies such as “Dr. Strangelove” or “Fail Safe” (both released in 1964) seem like apocalyptic fantasies, but what they depict was largely real. The crews aboard these planes never knew for sure if that day’s mission would end with an uneventful landing back on base or the start of World War III.
During the Cold War, the preeminent instrument in America’s defense strategy was the Strategic Air Command. Between 1952 and 1960, 46 percent of the defense budget was allocated to the Air Force. In the five years between 1950 and 1955, SAC more than doubled its personnel from 85,473 to 195,997 members and its bomber fleet from 520 planes to 1,309. SAC grew to be an empire operating out of 68 bases around the world—North Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Greenland, England, Guam and Spain.
Under the command of General Curtis E. LeMay, SAC operated not as if it were preparing for war but as if it “were at war—now!” Beginning in 1955 and up until the end of the Cold War, SAC kept a significant portion of its fleet on continuous 24-hour alert status, first with the “ground alert” program, in which planes were kept fueled, armed and ready for takeoff with their flight crews living in adjacent barracks (or “mole holes”), ready to dash to their planes and be airborne within 15 minutes. In 1957, following the launch of Sputnik and the ensuing scare over Soviet missile capability, SAC established the “airborne alert” system, with nuclear armed bombers flying 24-hours a day in prearranged orbits that approached Soviet airspace. Officially these flights were called “indoctrination” flights, or training flights, but unofficially these were the frontline of our nuclear deterrence.
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The Strategic Air Command's "airborne alert" system had nuclear-armed bombers in the air round-the-clock, flying routes right up to the Soviet airspace in a game of thermonuclear chicken. |
Historians and former SAC servicemen talk of the “SAC mentality,” a culture of perfectionism and preparedness that bordered on religion. At SAC, nothing was left to chance or improvisation. Procedure, standardization, teamwork and policy guided nearly every aspect of an airman’s life. Manuals and checklists outlined nearly every task. A failure by a single member of an aircrew, for example, could mean the demotion of the entire crew.“To err is human,” went the joke. “To forgive is not SAC policy.”
By 1960, more than 6,000 airborne alert sorties had been flown under various code names–Headstart, Steel Trap, Front Rail. On January 18, 1961, SAC rechristened the program Chrome Dome, with up to 12 nuclear armed bombers flying routes over the Mediterranean and southern Europe, over Greenland, and over Alaska and the Arctic Circle, and with each bomber carrying up to four nuclear bombs. The missions took off from a variety of bases in the continental United States. Each mission typically took 24 hours to complete and included two aerial refueling.
If the crews aboard these planes harbored any misgivings about the possibility of killing three million people in an instant, they never showed it. “We were doing something we thought was important,” James Charles Wendorf, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and commander of the B-52 that morning told me in 2015. “We saw ourselves as white knights riding a white stallion; ready to go to battle for our country.” And like any job, it got to be a routine.
Flying Chrome Dome had some advantages over many assignments. The flights were regularly scheduled and the crews returned home after each mission to be at home with their families. The bases were self-contained communities. They’d have cookouts, dinner parties or babysit for each other. “We lived a regular life,” recalled ret. Lt. Col. Larry Messinger.
They had been flying together for about a year, part of the 68thBombardment Wing, 51stBomber Squadron, based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Well-acquainted with their duties and each other, there was no reason to believe this wouldn’t be an ordinary mission—another boring flight “around the patch” as it were. As with most missions, this was a two-plane flight. One B-52 was designated Tea 16, the other Tea 12.
In the cockpit of Tea 16 sat Major Wendorf, 29, pilot and commander of the seven-man crew. An ROTC cadet at Duke University, Wendorf went straight into SAC after graduation. Like a lot of cadets, he dreamed of being a fighter jock, but found he enjoyed the challenge of piloting the heavy bomber and managing a crew. His superiors considered him a natural, and after three years promoted him to commander, the youngest at SAC, a distinction that rankled some longer-serving and higher ranking officers. Wendorf also had a brash, sometimes irreverent style. During ground alert tours, he hung a sign outside his private suite: “Charlie’s Flying Circus.” By January 16, 1966, 2109 hours of his 2500-total flight hours were in B-52s.
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The positions of crew stations, including the ejection/bail-out configuration aboard the B-52. |
Behind them, on a jump set, sat Maj. Larry G. Messinger, the designated relief pilot, standard for long missions. At forty-four, he was the oldest and most experienced pilot on board, with over 5,000 hours of flight time. Messinger started his career in the Army Air Corps in 1942 flying B-17s. He subsequently flew B-29s over Korea and later B-47s before commanding B-52s. Now a staff pilot, Messinger divided his time between the wing command post and flying relief.
About 20 feet behind the cockpit, facing backward sat First Lt. George J. Glesner, 26, an electronics warfare officer, in charge of jamming enemy radar, launching decoys and chaff, as well as arming the nuclear bombs. Beside him sat Technical Sergeant Ronald P. Snyder, who operated the four 50-caliber guns in the bombers tail and acted informally as the crew’s cook.
Between the cockpit and the defensive crew stations, a short ladder led down to a cramped, windowless space about the size of a closet. Facing forward at a small metal table, surrounded by racks of electronics and display screens, sat Capt. Ivens Buchanan, 34, the radar navigator or bombardier. A reserved, regulation-minded career officer, Buchanan, or Buck, was responsible for guiding the plane to the target and releasing the nuclear bombs. Beside him, also facing forward sat First Lt. Stephen S. Montanus, 23, the navigator, the youngest and newest member of the crew.
Behind the navigator and radar navigator stations was another jump seat that, with the seat lifted, doubled as a toilet. Most crewman, however, did their utmost never to use it, not just because of the lack of privacy, but because SAC custom dictated that whoever used it first was responsible for cleaning it at the end of the flight.
Fully loaded with fuel and carrying four torpedo-shaped Mark 28 hydrogen bombs each weighing 2,320 pounds and packing 1.45 megatons of explosive power, about 70 times as much as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, the plane weighed a total of 482,000 pounds as it lined up for take-off just after 6 p.m. The wings, 185 feet from tip to tip, and which can flex as much as 30 feet, require a set of outrigger wheels to keep the tips from scraping along the pavement. As far as the crew was concerned, the most exciting moment of the mission would be whether the lumbering aircraft got off the ground before running out of runway.
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The B-52, nicknamed Buffalo or BUFF: A plane that gets much respect, but little love among pilots. |
Among Air Force pilots, the B-52 gets much respect but little love. Boeing named the plane the “Stratofortress” but SAC pilots simply call it the BUFF, short for “Big, Ugly, Fat—ahem—Fellow.” Huge and heavy, the B-52 was designed for endurance and payload, not maneuverability. Pilots compare its handling characteristics to those of a house. “You had to bully it,” recalled Rooney.
Or, as another veteran writes: “There are no ailerons [the plane uses spoilers to turn] so roll control is ever so slow. Move the yoke and one… two… three… okay, it's finally rolling. Center the yoke and one… two… three… it's still rolling… okay, it's finally stopped.”
Or, as another veteran writes: “There are no ailerons [the plane uses spoilers to turn] so roll control is ever so slow. Move the yoke and one… two… three… okay, it's finally rolling. Center the yoke and one… two… three… it's still rolling… okay, it's finally stopped.”
After takeoff, with Tea 16 in the lead, the two bombers flew west for about a half-hour to gain altitude and to insure their systems functioned properly, and then turned east toward Russia. Messinger slept on a small bunk between the cockpit and defense stations while Wendorf and Rooney flew the plane. About seven hours later Wendorf completed the first refueling at the Golden Spur refueling area over northern Spain.
Without aerial refueling, Chrome Dome missions would be impossible. No bomber has the range to fly from American bases to the Soviet Union and back non-stop. Under the direction of Gen. LeMay, SAC in the 1950s took what had been a barnstorming stunt a few years earlier and made it routine. Today, nearly every military aviator needs to be proficient at aerial refueling. Even so, it is a delicate and demanding task. For B-52 commanders, aerial refueling is where they really earn their paycheck.
Flying in tight formation with another large aircraft requires precise flying. Doing so while connected by a 33-foot long pipe, having to keep the aircraft within a ten-foot square envelope while the plane’s weight and center of gravity are constantly changing as it takes on 6,500 pounds of fuel per minute, requires very precise flying.
Many B-52 pilots, Wendorf said, constantly fought the aircraft to keep it in that envelope. They’d come away from a 20 or 30 minute refueling exhausted and dripping with sweat. But not him. “I could fly that plane through the eye of a needle,” he said. “It was like an extension of me. It didn’t do anything I didn’t want it to do.” Rooney recalled watching in awe as Wendorf flew the plane during a refueling with just two fingers on the control yoke.
Tea 16 and Tea 12 switched places midway through the mission, with Tea 12 taking the lead position. Due for rest, Wendorf relinquished the pilot’s seat to Messinger, who with Rooney piloted the plane to the far end of the Mediterranean before making the turn home.
Having performed the first refueling, Wendorf let Messinger pilot the plane for the second refueling, while he relieved Rooney in the right seat. The Accident Investigation Board later made much of this, citing SAC regulations dictating that primary crew members be in their positions during all critical phases of flight—landing, takeoff and aerial refueling. Strictly applied, this meant Wendorf should have been in the left seat, Rooney in the right seat, and Messinger in the jump seat. Wendorf claims it was common practice on Chrome Dome missions to let staff pilots—generally the most experienced pilots and highest-ranking officers on base—to pilot the plane during one of the refuelings. Besides, Messinger was both experienced and qualified, having been flight checked just a month before.
They had been aloft for 11 hours. As they approached the Saddle Rock refueling area, awaiting them were two KC-135 tankers assigned to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, and flying out of Moron air base near Seville, Spain. Designated Troubador 12 and Troubador 14, the tankers circled at 31,000 feet in a left-hand racetrack-shaped orbit. In a well-practiced and precisely choreographed routine, Tea 12 approached Troubador 14, flying a thousand feet below and guided by the bomber’s radar navigator. Offset by 3-4 nautical miles, the two planes flew towards each other. At a distance of around 16-18 nautical miles, the tanker made a 180-degree turn to put it 3 nautical miles in front of the bomber. The bomber then slowly closed the distance between the two planes.
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Map depicting flight routes with refueling areas for Tea 16. |
The weather over southern Spain that morning was sparkling. Bright, sunny skies; cool with a stiff breeze out of the west, but smooth as glass. Everything was going beautifully. Buchanan called out the distance between the two planes in one-mile increments up until the last mile, at which point the pilots took over visually. Communications were crisp and to the point, with each crewmember listening to the exchanges via the aircraft intercom. At one-half mile separation, the B-52 was 500 feet below the tanker, lined up fuselage to fuselage. From here, the tanker’s boom operator, Master Sergeant Lloyd Potolicchio, took over. Lying on his stomach in rear of the tanker, he watched the bomber though a small window while using a control stick to steer the boom into place.
From the copilot seat, Wendorf controlled the fuel system in preparation for the fuel transfer. As the planes drew close, he turned his full attention to the hook-up, keeping his right hand on the control yoke and his left hand on the throttles (the B-52 throttle quadrant has a second set of handles below the main set, which allow both pilot and copilot to guide the throttles).
They were approaching the pre-contact position, just behind and below the tanker, where the two planes would stabilize before moving in for refueling.
“You’re going to make a slight overrun,” Potolicchio called out casually.
Messinger and Wendorf noted that the rate of closure was about six knots, or 10 feet per second. A bit fast, they thought, but nothing to worry about.
“We were in a perfect position,” recalled Wendorf. If anyone sensed trouble, they would call for a “breakaway,” in which case the B-52 would cut power and descend, and the tanker would increase power and climb.
At between 100 and 150 feet below and about 300 yards behind the KC-135, Wendorf noticed the closure rate between the two planes increase slightly. He reached to pull the throttles back, but Messinger had already done so. Perhaps instinctively, Messinger also pushed the plane’s column forward to initiate a shallow descent. Messinger later told investigators he then glanced at his instruments.
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Pilots, from left, Charles Wendorf, Larry Messinger and Mike Rooney posed for a photo the day after the crash at a Madrid hospital for Spanish newspaper, apparently an effort to downplay the incident. |
As Messinger did so, Wendorf felt a shudder go through the plane, much like the buffet experienced when a plane approaches a stall. There was a loud bang! and then a “grinding” noise followed by a flash of noise, heat and debris that blew into the cockpit.
The plane pitched down a bit, then the control column snapped out of his hands and the plane pitched violently. Thrown forward, Wendorf’s head smashed into the instrument panel, knocking him unconscious.
Messinger didn’t wait to see what happened next. He grabbed the ejection handles near his armrests and pulled them as hard as he could.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. Nothing.
He realized he forgot to pull the triggers on the handles.
He tried again. The next moment he was floating in space.
On the lower deck, copilot Rooney sat on the jumpseat behind the navigators’ stations, his foot braced against the ladder, his gloves off, reading a book, Michael Farrell’s Thy Tears Might Cease. The communications between crew and the tanker were normal.
“Everything seemed to be good,” he recalled.
Then “we hit something that felt like air turbulence, like the wake of another aircraft,” he said. “Then about three seconds later there’s this huge explosion. All sorts of stuff went flying past the hatch above me and toward the front of the airplane—charts, bits and pieces of airplane, and fire—it was violent, like nothing I had ever felt.” It was at that moment, he said, that Glesner and Snyder likely died.
The airplane pitched down slightly, he said, then more sharply. The lights went out and the radios died. The impact threw him to his feet and his book went flying. He grabbed the ladder. The emergency lights kicked on.
“Things were shorting out. I remember Bucky [Buchanan] turning around with a look of ‘What the hell is going on?’ And I gave him a thumbs down, like ‘Get out of here,’ because I was sure at that point the plane was going down.”
Buchanan got the message. He ejected—straight into a fireball. He twisted to try and protect himself but the searing heat blinded him. He tumbled downward. Burned, hypoxic and freezing, Buchanan struggled to maintain consciousness.
The ejection seats were designed to automatically deploy the parachute at 14,000 feet and for the seat to fall away. Buchanan, however, was still attached to his seat with the earth rushing up at him. He reached around and began pulling his parachute from the backpack, arm-length-by-arm-length. Though still attached to the chair, he released the chute, only to then realize that flaming debris from the disintegrating plane was now falling around him. He watched helplessly as his chute caught fire. Buchanan was twisting, spinning, and accelerating like a charm on the end of string. He noticed that two panels remained of his chute before passing out.
In the cockpit, Wendorf came to. The airplane was flipping, cartwheeling through the air and Messinger was gone. Wendorf had no idea who else might still be aboard. It was every man for himself.
Crushing g-forces inside the plane pinned Wendorf into his seat, his hands immobilized on the throttles. “To eject from a plane,” said Wendorf “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. I knew if I ejected at that moment I’d likely break my back and definitely lose my left arm.”
Ironically, Wendorf recalled, “I was in no rush to do anything. I felt I had all the time in the world to make a decision. It seemed like everything I’d ever heard, read, joked about, cried over went through my mind.” After what seemed an eternity, he decided that whatever happened to him, “I didn’t want to go down with this plane.” He located the ejection handle with his right hand, turned it and pulled the trigger.
Catapulted out of the plane, Wendorf recalled being in a state of semi-consciousness. He had a vague awareness of tumbling, free-falling, of flying through heat and debris, with pieces of airplane bouncing off of him.
With a heavy jerk, his parachute opened and he returned to his senses. “Here I am,” he recalled. “It’s a beautiful day.” Better yet, he still has his left arm—bloody, broken, and with a piece of bone sticking through his wrist, but otherwise intact. He had lost his helmet and one of his boots. His pants were ripped, and gone was the pocket where he kept his wallet. “Dag nab it,” he thought. “I’m going to have replace my driver’s license.”
But he then noticed he was descending too quickly. He looked up. Somehow the survival kit under his seat had become tangled in the chute’s lines. Reaching with his right hand, he shook the control lanyards, which cleared the lines and opened the chute. But when he tried to steer the chute, it again collapsed, setting Wendorf into slowly accelerating spin that knocked him out. When he awoke, he was under water.
On the lower deck, Rooney clung to the ladder and watched in fascination as Buchanan stiffened and pulled the ejection handle between his legs. There was a slight hesitation and then, almost as if happening in slow motion, the hatch blew open. Light poured into the darkened space. “I remember his seat starting down the rails and then he just disappeared.”
At that same moment, another explosion pitched the airplane over, the force of which spun Rooney around and smashed him backwards into the radar navigator’s panel, splitting the back of his helmet and tearing all the muscles in his neck and shoulders. If not for the cushioning effect of his backpack, he said, he likely would have been killed.
The same g-forces that pinned Wendorf in his seat now pushed Rooney into the corner. Barely able to move, Rooney looked over at Montanus, who after struggling to get his arms back into the straps of his parachute (he had made a habit of slipping them off after takeoff to increase his mobility), prepared to eject. Montanus gave Rooney a look as if to say “I’d love to help you, but…” and then was gone.
Rooney was now the only living person left on the plane. He pulled himself over to the hatch using the handles on the radio racks. With one hand on the edge of the hatch, he leaned back and managed to get his upper body out of the plane. But he was stuck. The excruciating g-forces left him half out, half in. He kicked furiously to free himself. The wind was blowing up into his helmet and his chinstrap was slowly strangling him. Suddenly, the plane pitched up a bit, and Rooney was spit out of the plane like a watermelon seed.
He remembers falling, upside down, looking up at the disintegrating plane. “The tail section was gone,” he remembered. He watched flames shoot out from the right wing root, which then spread along the entire wingspan. An engine pod broke loose, the two engines still running, and screamed past Rooney so close that it singed the hair off his arms and neck. “There’s all sorts of stuff falling down around me,” he recalled—bits of airplane, radar chaff, flaming debris. “Finally, I’m away from it all,” he said. “I hit my chest so hard to grab the T-ring to my chute that it left a ‘T’ on my chest the next day.
His head snapped as the chute opened. The Spanish coast stretched out before him. But the prevailing winds were carrying him away from shore. He realized he would be getting wet. Just before hitting the water, he heard a loud boom, followed quickly by another. He later learned the first was the B-52 hitting the ground; the second, the tanker.
At 31,000 feet, about two miles ahead of Tea 16, the lead B-52 prepared to hook up with Troubador 14, the second tanker. According to Ernest W. Conner, tail gunner aboard Tea 12, the plane’s copilot told aircraft commander Maj. John F. Wylam that the contrails of Tea 16 and Troubador 14 suddenly disappeared. Wylam tried several times calling Tea 16, then asked the boom operator to tell him what he could see. The boom operator said he saw a large orange fireball and what he thought was a plane, or a part of a plane, descending in a flat spin.
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After 81 days and the largest recovery effort in Navy history, the last of four nuclear bombs was recovered off the coast. |
Far below, villagers and fishermen in Palomares were used to the daily occurrence of the aerial refuelings. Many would stop their routine to watch the airborne spectacle. On this morning, however, they watched in horror as the two planes exploded and broke apart. Some ended up running for their lives as hunks of flaming debris fell around them. Luckily, no one was hurt. Crash investigators later reported that observers on the ground said there was an explosion, the B-52 broke apart, and that the KC-135 “continued ahead, shaking, for a very short distance. There was an explosion, then it pitched over into a descent and exploded again about 1600 feet above the ground and again on contacting the ground.” There was no distress call. The KC-135 is not equipped with ejection seats. All four crewmembers perished.
The strong westerly breeze blew Messinger, Wendorf and Rooney out to sea. Seeing the orange and white parachutes, local fishermen raced to pluck them from the frigid waters. The survivors would later tell investigators of seeing a fourth, gray or dirty yellow, parachute—the missing bomb. Buchanan hit the only sandy spot on an otherwise rocky beach, still strapped into the 240-pound ejection seat. When a crowd of villagers reached him, some thought he was dead. His next recollection was of being lifted into the back of farmer’s truck, which transported him to a nearby dispensary. He had severe burns, his vertebra was ruptured and he had a nasty gash over one eye. Montanus’ seat, like Buchanan’s, malfunctioned. He didn’t make it.
The four crewmen were taken to a hospital at the Torrejon Air Base in Madrid. They were warned against discussing the accident among themselves. Because of the severity of his injuries, Buchanan was taken to a separate hospital unit.
Following a major crash of an airliner or a civilian plane, the National Transportation Safety Board typically takes a year or more to conduct its investigation and issue a report on its causes. The Air Force, according to the Air Force Safety Center, endeavors to complete its investigations and issue a report in 60 to 90 days. In this case, the accident investigation board completed its investigation and issued a report just 14 days after the accident.
One reason for the urgency, speculated Barbara Moran, author of the 2009 book, The Day We Lost the H-Bomb, which details the accident and the search for the missing bomb, was the Air Force’s attempt to contain what was becoming an escalating international incident. Pressed about whether the plane carried nuclear weapons and the risk of contamination, “The Air Force kept trying to deny everything,” Moran said. These denials became more and more absurd as dozens of airmen with Geiger counters arrived, followed by an armada of 26 naval vessels to search the waters off Palomares, a fleet of bulldozers to scrape away nearly six acres of contaminated top soil (which was then packed into more than 5,000 barrels and shipped to South Carolina) and a small tent city to house the more than 800 U.S. military and Spanish Civil Guard required during the four-month operation.
In one exchange, a Department of Defense spokesman told a reporter: "I don't know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you think we are looking for."
Another reason for the Air Force’s urgency was SAC’s desire to resume Chrome Dome flights. After all, the theory of deterrence depends on predictability. The Soviets would be expecting two planes to come over the horizon the next day. If they didn’t, they might figure something was up. Some commanders urged continuing the flights over the Mediterranean without nuclear weapons onboard just to maintain appearances.
The day after the Palomares crash, the accident investigation board began its questioning of surviving crewmembers at the hospital. “I was one continuous bruise from head-to-toe,” Rooney said. Buchanan remembers being wheeled into a fluorescent-lit conference room, heavily bandaged and in excruciating pain. With his burns, he said, it felt like “those lights were cooking me.”
The tone of the inquiry, they all agreed, was hostile, seemingly less an effort to determine what happened than to lay blame.
Wendorf said the board ignored statements by him and Messinger that the rendezvous proceeded normally until the time of the incident; that the initial explosion occurred while the two planes were 150-200 feet away from each other, and that the initial explosion occurred not outside the plane but from somewhere inside the plane. It also ignored its own evidence that the refueling boom, which arguably would have been the first thing to strike the bomber, showed “no evidence to indicate the boom contact[ed] with the B-52 in the initial collision.”
The board concluded that the two planes collided when the B-52 overran the tanker. The impact caused the tanker’s fuel cells to rupture and the B-52’s airframe to fail near the left wing root and for the wing to separate.
Wendorf and Rooney believe something else happened. They argued that the B-52 had a catastrophic failure that caused the plane’s tail, not its left wing, to break off, and when this happened the B-52 careened into the tanker, which brought it down.
The simplest explanation is generally correct when it comes to accidents, admitted Ken Katz, an Air Force veteran, former flight test engineer and author of the book B-52G/H Stratofortress in Action, but in this case Wendorf’s and Rooney’s theory “is not outside the realm of possibility.” The B-52, despite its ruggedness and longevity, has had a problematic history. Boeing designed the plane to fly high-altitude missions, but improved Soviet air defenses forced SAC to use it for low-level flights. This imposed much higher stresses on the airframe due to the heavier air at low altitudes and the exposure to turbulence. Over the years, the plane required a number of modifications to reinforce areas susceptible to fatigue. The tail itself had to be completely redesigned after several planes had their vertical stabilizer snap off in flight (one dramatically caught on film). A month after the Palomares crash, Boeing issued a directive to replace the fuselage skin and longerons—the same components the accident board said failed on Tea 16.
Ultimately, however, the Air Force deemed the accident wasn’t the fault of lousy airmanship but of lousy leadership. It cited SAC procedures dictating that all crewmembers be at their stations during critical phases of flight. Whether or not Messinger was a qualified pilot didn’t matter. Whether or not the outcome would have been any different had Wendorf been in the pilot’s seat also didn’t matter. Rules are rules.
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A Navy barge prepares to transport some of the more than 5000 barrels of contaminated soil from the site. |
In most cases, an accident—especially one involving fatalities—would end a career in the Air Force. Some SAC veterans express surprise that the crew of Tea 16 all went on to finish their careers. As for punishment, Messinger had a promotion to lieutenant colonel withdrawn after the accident, which later was reinstated. Wendorf received an official reprimand and a small fine. The reprimand, called an “Article 15,” was later expunged from his record.
Following the accident, Tea 12 tail gunner Conner said he remembers a renewed emphasis in training on breakaway procedures during refueling. Another veteran, ret. Lt. Col. Alvin L. Osborn, a former B-52 commander and instructor pilot who began flight training in 1968, recalled instruction on how to deal with superior officers in situations that could jeopardize SAC procedures.
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| The experimental submersible Alvin helped in locating the lost bomb. |
After 81 days, using a combination of divers, sonar, and an experimental remote submersible named Alvin, the missing bomb was recovered on April 7, 1966. The Palomares crash, however, spelled the beginning of the end for Chrome Dome. The Defense Department, and in particular Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had grown skeptical of the program. A similar B-52 crash over Thule, Greenland, in 1968 that also required decontamination, ended the program for good.
The diplomatic wrangling between Spain and the U.S. over the Palomares incident goes on. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised to work out a final settlement for the cleanup and compensation over the disaster. That didn’t happen, leaving the matter to President Donald Trump's appointee to lead the renegotiation on how to clean up tons of contaminated soil.
The four survivors of Tea 16 are now old men. Their flying days are long behind them. The Strategic Air Command stood down in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union. The BUFF however, is still flying. Through an ongoing program of upgrades and modifications, the B-52 is slated to be the Air Force’s frontline bomber into the 2040s, making it the longest serving combat aircraft in Air Force history.
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