At a time of military weakness and political uncertainty, the United States particularly needed accurate, verifiable information about the Soviet Union. While a foreigner could easily travel in the United States and purchase any number of publications regarding U.S. military forces and their location, strength, readiness, organization, and equipment, no equivalent access was available in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union remained a closed society. The only practical option, other than human intelligence with its many shortcomings, was aerial reconnaissance. From the early 1950s to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and the United Kingdom implemented a cooperative effort to reconnoiter the periphery of the Soviet Union with aircraft equipped with various types of sensors. On special occasions, aircraft, with authority from the U.S. president or the British prime minister, overflew the Soviet Union and its satellite nations to gather critical information. Was there a bomber gap between the United States and the Soviet Union? The answer could be found only by the men who risked their lives and flew over the Soviet Union to obtain that information.
As the years passed and Soviet fighter and surface-to-air-missile technology advanced, overflights of Soviet territory required aircraft to fly ever higher. In 1960 a U-2 photo-reconnaissance aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency was shot down near the Russian city of Sverdlovsk. With that shootdown it became obvious that the time for aircraft overflying the Soviet Union had nearly passed. (One exception was the U.S. Air Force’s Mach 3 SR-71, which flew at altitudes higher than eighty thousand feet.) With the exception of peripheral reconnaissance flights and a limited number of ground stations, after 1960 the United States relied mostly on satellites to keep watch over the Soviet Union.
Table 1 is a compilation of known overflights of the western and northern Soviet Union by U.S. and British aircraft. Overflights of the eastern USSR and communist China from bases in Japan and Taiwan, although frequent, are not included. Major events affecting U.S.-Soviet relations are highlighted.
Table 2 is a chronology of reconnaissance and observation aircraft, as well as civilian aircraft misidentified by the Soviets as reconnaissance aircraft, known to have been lost to interceptors, AAA, or SAMs. Some of the downed aircraft were airliners straying over Soviet territory. The 1978 and 1983 attacks on South Korean airliners revealed the continuing disarray of the Soviet air defense system. Although the loss of life was tragic, such incidents provided invaluable information to American military planners.
Table 1
Note: Prior to the advent of the U-2 in 1956, RB-57A and RF-100 aircraft, flying from German airbases, made several overflights of Iron Curtain countries.
Table 2
RB-47E photo-reconnaissance aircraft refueling from a KC-97 tanker above Lockbourne AFB, Ohio, 1954. Colonel Austin flew the same type of aircraft over the Soviet Union in 1954. H. Austin.
Chapter 8
Taming the RB-45C Tornado
We were flying supersonic [on October 14, 1947]! And it was as smooth as a baby’s bottom: Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade. I kept the speed off the scale for about twenty seconds, then raised the nose to slow down.
General Chuck Yeager
We also pushed it through Mach 1 more than once. Our group lost eight airplanes in that first year [1950]. One of the first we lost, we think the guy went through the Mach trying to get down. . . . I went through the Mach with it—rough as hell going through, rougher coming back out.
Hal Austin, RB-45C Tornado pilot
The B-45 was a 1943-vintage design, America’s first all-jet bomber, with a rigid, straight wing and a B-17–style gunner’s station in the tail. The XB-45 flew for the first time on March 17, 1947, piloted by North American test pilot George Krebs, who died flying the XB-45 on September 20, 1948. With his untimely death, no further significant flight testing was conducted, and the B-45 went into production. Many of its flaws were later discovered by some unlucky air crews. Ninety-six bomber versions of the North American B-45A were built. The aircraft were assigned to the Tactical Air Command with their final duty station the 47th Bombardment Wing at RAF Station Sculthorpe in County Norfolk, England. The last forty-three aircraft built, incorporating advances in design and lessons learned from the A models, were delivered in 1950 and 1951. Ten of the forty-three C models were built as bombers; the other thirty-three were reconnaissance versions. The production line for the B-45 was then discontinued. All of the forty-three C models were assigned to SAC.
In contrast to the A-model bombers, the C model had a solid rather than a glassed-in nose, carried 1,200 gallon wingtip fuel tanks, and, best of all, was capable of in-flight refueling. Air refueling enabled the aircraft to reach nearly anyplace on the globe without having to land as long as a tanker was available to support it. Furthermore, the RB-45Cs were equipped with a remarkable suite of high- and low-altitude cameras designed by the renowned Harvard astronomer James G. Baker. On August 26, 1950, the first of the thirty-three RB-45C production models was delivered to the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Barksdale AFB near Shreveport, Louisiana. By the end of 1950, SAC reported that twenty-seven RB-45s equipped the 91st Wing. Its unit equipment (UE) authorization had been set at thirty-six aircraft. The wing began its incremental move from Barksdale to Lockbourne AFB near Columbus, Ohio, in June 1951. By that time, the wing had expanded to thirty-eight B/RB-45Cs, and SAC headquarters had increased the wing’s UE aircraft authorization to forty-five. That would be the high-water mark for the RB-45C wing in terms of the number of aircraft it was authorized to have.
In 1952 the C-model bombers were turned over to TAC. SAC finished the year with twenty-two RB-45Cs on its roster. In only sixteen months of operation, eleven of the thirty-three RB-45Cs had perished. One had been shot down by Russian MiGs in a secrecy-shrouded mission near the Yalu River. In January 1953 SAC began the transfer of the RB-45C to TAC, as SAC’s inventory of newer RB-47 aircraft increased. The last four RB-45s, assigned to the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Yokota Air Base in Japan, were transferred to the Far East Air Force on December 1, 1953.
Colonel Harold R. Austin
In late 1949, after flying the Berlin Airlift, Colonel Harold R. “Hal” Austin, then a captain, was assigned to the 324th SRS of the 91st SRW at Barksdale. The wing had two other squadrons, the 322d and the 323d. In the summer of 1950 Hal was selected to transition into the RB-45C. He picked up a brand-new aircraft from the factory in Long Beach and, along with other air crews, began the task of learning to fly a jet airplane. Hal Austin had no checklist, no technical data, and no company technical representative with pilot qualifications who could answer his many questions.
Hal Austin, like his friends Sam Myers and Harold Hendler, now lives in Riverside, California, and he recalled his assignment to the then state-of-the-art RB-45C jet. “Every one of us, of course, had to try to see how high we could get in the new airplane. We got to nearly 50,000 feet—49,500 feet is the highest I took it. It took forever. We were light, having burned off most of our fuel at the end of our mission, when we got to that altitude over our home base of Barksdale. In the early days, no one else was up there except for a few F-86 fighters. We flew cruise-climb for our departures. North American told us to do that. We would normally end up over Barksdale at 43,000 feet. The day I took it up to 49,500 feet, when I pulled the power back, the airplane hardly slowed down. It had no speed brakes, nothing to slow it down. I started pushing the airplane down, which put me in a high-speed buffet, and of course when I pulled back, I was in a stall, or right between buffet and stall. It took me thirty minutes to get back to 40,000 feet. To land, we flew a teardrop approach from over Barksdale. In a steady descent toward the Gulf of Mexico, I would eat up a third of the altitude. Then the second third was in the turn, and the final third would be coming into Barksdale. When I made my turn at the widest point, I was two hundred miles south of Barksdale over the Gulf of Mexico. There was no way to slow that aircraft down. We finally talked the FAA int
o letting us use a letdown coming straight in. Initially the FAA said, ‘What do you mean, you want to let down en route? We’ve never heard of such a thing.’ They finally let us do it. We fussed about the lack of braking from day one with the RB-45. You couldn’t get it out of the sky.
“We also pushed it through Mach 1 more than once. Our group lost eight airplanes in that first year. One of the first we lost, we think the guy went through the Mach trying to get down, trying to see what the airplane would do. I went through the Mach with it—rough as hell going through, rougher coming back out. The one that crashed had the tail come off. He was southeast of Barksdale at forty-three thousand feet when it happened. That’s the altitude where I pushed mine through, the only time I ever pushed it through. We lost other aircraft going through the Mach before anyone survived to tell us what happened. An aeronautical engineer finally explained to us that the rigid wing passed the vibrations encountered going through the Mach to the tail section. Unfortunately, the airplane wasn’t designed to handle such stress. It was basically a World War II airplane powered by jet engines.”
All this experimentation by the RB-45C pilots occurred in 1950 and 1951. The first flight exceeding the speed of sound had been made only three years earlier, on October 14, 1947, by Captain Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 experimental aircraft. In his autobiography, Yeager wrote of his historic flight, “We were flying supersonic [at forty-two thousand feet]! And it was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. . . . After all the anxiety, breaking the sound barrier turned out to be a perfectly paved speed-way” (Yeager 130). It wasn’t that way for the RB-45, an airplane that lacked the smooth lines of the X-1. After many catastrophic incidents, the RB-45C was limited to speeds of less than Mach .85 (85 percent of the speed of sound).
“Another problem that took a couple of crashes to resolve,” Hal Austin continued, “was the bomb bay fuel tanks. We had two one thousand–gallon bomb bay tanks—that was before we went from gallons to pounds—hung on old B-17 bomb shackles. The shackles were not designed for such a continuous load and the stress of day-in, day-out flying pulling a lot of Gs. One instructor pilot, flying in the copilot’s seat in the third or fourth plane that crashed, survived. He told us that all of a sudden the aircraft started twisting. He couldn’t remember how he got out of the airplane, couldn’t recall ejecting. When he became conscious of his situation, he found himself still sitting in his ejection seat, heading for the ground. When the wreckage was examined, the inspectors found the back-bay shackle had given way and hit the bomb bay doors. The doors flipped out and hit part of the empennage, the tail assembly of the airplane. Once that happened, the tail section twisted off, and the aircraft was out of control. North American redesigned the shackles, and that solved the problem. Every major problem we discovered cost one or two air crews their lives. We were, in fact, test pilots.
“The RB-45C was powered by the early model of the J-47 engine, which in later years proved to be quite reliable on the B-47. But that engine wasn’t reliable when we were flying it in early 1951. The engine had to be pulled every twenty-five hours of flying time for a complete overhaul. The number one and number three engines had the generators—today they’re called alternators. The generators had a solid shaft. When the bearings wore, the shaft began to wobble, finally fail, and tear up the engine, sometimes resulting in an engine fire. When the second engine became disabled, the crew had to bail out. We lost two aircraft from this particular problem.
“Number two and number four engines powered the hydraulics. Number two operated the left aileron, and number four the right. There was no aileron crossover. If I lost number two, and it wasn’t windmilling, then I lost my hydraulics on the left side and my aileron control. I was in deep trouble when that happened. If I had an engine problem and I needed to shut it down, I had to do it slowly. If I shut the engine down too quickly, the shroud ring in the hot section in back of the engine could warp, and if that happened, the engine seized. If it was the number two or number four engine, I lost my ailerons. At high speed and with the aileron not working, I had a hell of a control problem. The only alternative, and it was a difficult one, was to steer the aircraft with the rudder. We finally got the aileron crossover problem resolved. The hydraulics were redesigned so number two or number four engine could power both left and right ailerons. It was the only safety modification made to the airplane. It was a great aircraft to fly, except for the aileron crossover problem.
“I recall a landing in early 1951 at Goose Bay. I was on a flight to Sculthorpe, near Kings Lynn on the east coast of England. Our usual route was from Barksdale to Goose Bay, Labrador, then on to Iceland, and finally Sculthorpe. With full tip tanks and bomb bay tanks, we could fly without refueling for five and a half hours, about 2,500 miles. It was routine for us to cross the Atlantic without the use of a tanker. On this trip I landed first at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, where I topped off my tanks. Coming into Goose Bay, I still had too much fuel and had to spend time burning it off. I flew around a bit since I had no way of dumping fuel. When I was light enough, I eased back on the power to make my letdown into Goose. I was right over the spot where a friend of mine had crashed only two weeks earlier and my number three engine seized. It flipped us over. I know we were past ninety degrees. It scared the hell out of me. I rammed the power back up and managed to roll it level. My navigator sitting in the nose of the aircraft and not knowing what was happening, called over the intercom, ‘You son of a bitch, what are you doing up there?’ I got her down safely, but it was difficult. For a moment, when the aircraft went out of control, I thought we were going to join my friend. They never did find out what happened to his aircraft.
“We also had some comfort problems with the airplane. The canopy was welded shut. I guess they didn’t know at that time how to hinge the canopy. In an emergency, the pilots punched through the canopy with their ejection seats. The navigator didn’t have an ejection seat, though. He had to bail out of the access door on the left side of the aircraft, forward of the cockpit. In the summer it got pretty hot at Barksdale, and the crew-compartment temperature was unbearable. Every time the maintenance men put a meat thermometer in there to measure the temperature, the thermometer would blow up. Our maintenance people installed brackets alongside the canopy so we could carry a shade. Even with a shade, it was still hot as hell when we first got in. So it was our procedure to taxi out, push all four engines to 80 percent to cool down the cockpit, and finally the crew chief would take the shade off the cockpit.”
Although the RB-45s tail guns did not contribute to any flight safety problems, they were not installed in the SAC aircraft, for unknown reasons. There was one exception, however. Aircraft 8-042, which operated out of Yokota as part of the RB-45C SAC detachment in 1952 and 1953, for some strange reason had a set of tail guns mounted in a fixed position. One gun pointed straight back, while the other was mounted in a thirty-degree downward slant. The guns could be remotely fired by the pilot. In April 1952 the RAF used the same aircraft in an over-flight of the western Soviet Union; Major Lou Carrington subsequently flew the plane when he won the Mackay Trophy on a flight from Alaska to Japan; and Captain Sam Myers and Lieutenant Francis Martin flew this craft over the eastern Soviet Union and communist China. When the RB-45 reconnaissance aircraft were turned over to TAC in January 1953, tail guns were installed in all aircraft.
“The cockpit of the RB-45 was laid out like that of a fighter,” Hal Austin observed. “The visibility was excellent. The air-refueling receptacle was behind the canopy, so the airplane ended up right under the KB-29 tanker and didn’t feel the prop wash as much as one did in the newer B-47, with its receptacle in front of the canopy. By 1952 we had resolved our engine problems. We didn’t fix them, mind you, except for the crossover problem. We learned how to manage the engines.” Austin added wistfully, “A great pilot’s airplane.”
Air force pilots fly whatever airplanes they are given. In a period of one year, the 91st SRW lost eight of thirty-three aircraft,
24 percent of the force. Each aircraft carried a crew of three. In most cases all aboard the doomed aircraft perished. This was the sort of attrition flying units experienced in combat in Korea and later in Vietnam. But this was peacetime flying in the early 1950s. For Austin to say it was “a great pilot’s airplane” when every flight was more or less a test flight was an understatement worthy of an Englishman, not a matter-of-fact American flyer. Austin coped with day-to-day stress by focusing on those aspects of the airplane that gave him pleasure. And the RB-45C was a pleasure to fly when compared to most piston-engine aircraft. The year 1950, when the RB-45C was put in service, was early in the jet age, and the B-45 was one of the jet age’s earliest products. If there had been time, the airplane would have been flight-tested sufficiently to discover more of its problems, problems that Hal Austin and his fellow flyers had to discover the hard way. But there was no time for testing. When the RB-45C entered the air force inventory, the Korean War had started. SAC needed a fast, high-altitude-reconnaissance aircraft to complement the slow RB-29s, a fair number of which had already been shot down by Soviet interceptors. The RB-45C was that airplane.
RB-45C 8-042, piloted by Captain Sam Myers, taking off from Yokota Air Base, Japan, December 1952. H. Myers.
Chapter 9
Recon to the Yalu and Beyond
Citation to Accompany the Award of the Distinguished Flying Cross
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 16