CONVAIR B-36 PEACEMAKER

by Richard Drake, Guest Writer

Convair B-36 Peacemaker

The B-36 was the airplane that impressed me the most in my early years.  It was built by Convair Aircraft originally intended for long range usage against Nazi Germany, but did not make it into that war.  It was an very large airplane with a wing span of almost 230 feet, as I remember.  It was powered by six Pratt and Whitney engines mounted so the propellers pushed the plane.  On one vacation Marcia and I stayed at a motel in the flight path of Carswell Air Force Base.  Sitting by the pool we could see these large planes very low directly overhead.  The sound from the engines was awe inspiring.  The bomber was phased out shortly after this time.  We may have seen some of the last ones taking off from this field.

One of my early stories from the late 1950's involved a B-36 landing at Kirkland Air Force Base. My job required me to fly to Los Alamos frequently.  This was always an exciting trip in small twin engine planes. The Los Alamos air strip was very short in length and had been built on top of a mesa.  With the extremely high thermal updrafts during the summer months, the pilot had to aim the aircraft directly at a point about 50 to 60 feet below the mesa rim and use the air currents to lift the plane over the edge.  If the pilot attempted a normal approach, updrafts would make the landing approach too high for the limited stopping distance.  On my first trip, I sat in the co-pilots seat so I had a front row view of the landing.  I must confess it scared the "willies" out of me.  On the take off the plane would be catapulted into the air as if it were on a rocket. The saying at the time was that it 
would be a good idea to check your underwear upon entering the terminal. 

On one windy day, in late March, my return flight to Albuquerque was very bumpy with the high winds. As we approached our pilot was instructed to go into a holding pattern while a B-36 in front of us made a landing.  We circled in a holding pattern and watched the graceful turn of the big bomber as it made its way slowly to the landing point.  It was a beautiful thing to watch and then all of a sudden it appeared that something fell off the bottom of the aircraft.  There was a big puff of dirt on the lower slope of the mountains to the east of Sandia Base.  The B-36 continued its graceful landing and taxied off to its hanger location. We speculated that part of a landing gear had fallen off.

We finally landed and I caught my ride to work at the Sandia Laboratory.  As I walked in to my office building, the Health Physics Building, I found a state of feverish activity.   I quickly learned that a bomber, while landing at Kirkland, had accidently dropped a nuclear weapon. Search parties were being organized and the Health Physic staff would have the lead role in finding the weapon. I immediately realized what we had seen during our landing and told my boss that I knew where  weapon had landed.  I was directed to lead the search teams to the location.  We quickly found the site and determined that the weapon was intact and no radioactive material had escaped the weapon housing.

Later we were told that the cause of the accidental release of the weapon was the result of a human engineering design flaw in the aircraft control systems.  The lever that locked the bomb release mechanism was located next to the bomb release lever.   The officer in charge had pushed the wrong lever.  An emergency retrofit of all of the B-36 aircraft was immediately preformed.  

We were also told that the air force officer who had dropped the weapon was a civilian at the end of that day.

Richard Drake, guest writer
for Mil's Place
5/10/14