The Sound of Freedom

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I miss sonic booms.  If you are of a certain age (a polite way of saying ‘Old!’), you probably remember when the Air Force regularly rattled your house like an outhouse in a tornado.

Yes, you can occasionally still hear a distant rumble, but nothing like the long, deep rumbling booms of the fifties and the sixties.  I grew up in Texas, and have since moved to the high desert of New Mexico. Those are the two states which—along with Arizona and Southern California—make up the Air Force’s private sandbox.  On any given day, you can still see contrails and jets in the sky, but they are always rather distant and too far out of earshot.

It was different in the fifties:  Huge bombers flew low over my school’s playground and when a B-58 Hustler flying out of Carswell Air Force Base hit Mach 2, you could feel the boom in your chest.  Baseball games at recess stopped while everyone cheered.  Sometimes the bombers flew so low that you could actually see the black vapor strings from the jet engines floating downward on the wind.

As kids, we even had a poem about it:

         Roses are red,

         Violets are blue,

         You stink worse

         Than a B-52.

Those early fuel injectors were crap, so the plane’s designers made up for the defect by using a lot of them, increasing the fuel to air ratio, which carbonized the fuel.  That doesn’t happen today....And, sadly, neither do the low-level flights. 

Almost every day, the teacher would have to pause for a few seconds in class until the plane overhead had passed, or you would interrupt a conversation on the phone until the roar overhead passed, only to have your friend on the other end of the line stop you a few seconds later when the fast-moving jet had reached his house.

If anyone ever complained about the noise of the aircraft, the inevitable response was, “That ain’t noise—that’s the Sound of Freedom.”  It was always said in such a way that you could tell those words were capitalized.

As loud as those jet engines were, they weren’t nearly as impressive as the monster radial engines that the bombers used to use.  I am young enough to remember a little of the old propeller-driven planes, but old enough to have heard a lot of stories about the days when flights of bombers with massive radial engines roared overhead. 

I can remember a few of the B-29 and B-50 bombers, but my favorite was the B-36 Peacemaker, a plane that had everything.  Powered by six massive Pratt & Whitney radial engines and four jet engines—it was a beautiful airplane that probably never made any sense, but was still wicked cool.    This was the largest combat plane ever built, capable of flying 10,000 miles without refueling.  Well, while the plane couldn’t actually refuel in flight, it could stay aloft for forty hours at a time.

The plane was huge!  With a wingspan of 230 feet, it dwarfed all the other bombers of the day.  The photo at right shows the B-36 alongside a B-29, a B-17, and a C-47.  In case you are wondering, the wingspan of the B-36 is 45 feet wider than that of the B-52 bomber still being used today.

The bomber was originally designed to be used in World War II in case the United States lost its favorite aircraft carrier, England.  The B-36 could take off in North America, bomb Hitler in Germany and return to North America.  Similarly, B-36 bombers based in Hawaii could reach Tokyo and return.  As the war progressed, the lack of need for such long-range bombers diminished and the project was tabled.  When Russia detonated their atomic bomb in 1949, suddenly the need for a long-range bomber capable of carrying the heavy atomic weapons revived the plans for the bomber.

Since the planes flew out of Fort Worth, everyone in Texas was used to seeing them in the air and there were lots of stories about them.  A plane that could take off, fly to Europe, then turn around and fly back without landing, was interesting to everyone, and that was even before the “Buzz Job” incident.

Every time I heard the story of that famous flight, the details changed.  Some said the jet engines flamed out halfway through the takeoff roll, while other versions had the propellers stop turning because the crew forgot to fill the tanks before taking off...but everyone had the plane just inches from crashing.

Actually, what happened was far simpler.  Since the plane was designed to carry five tons of bombs and over twenty thousand gallons of fuel, if the aircraft was only lightly loaded, the massive plane could get off the runway in less than a thousand feet, literally leaping into the sky.  The Air Force, always seeking a bigger budget, liked to demonstrate this ability to visitors.

That Sunday afternoon in October, 1954, there was a convention of firemen in town, and the Air Force asked a pilot, Major Thad Neal, to provide a little show.  Neal and his crew were about to take some leave time, and this was supposed to be their last flight in October.  Neal agreed to stage a show, then telephoned his wife, telling her to get her movie camera ready.  Since the Neals lived in a nearby housing development, Neal planned to have his wife film at least part of the flight.

The plane performed beautifully, taking off in under a thousand feet, then Neal quickly climbed, flying over the nearby lake.  Once out of the pattern, Neal banked the plane into a 180 degree turn and returned to make a low-level pass for the dignitaries gathered along the runway, and then fly over the nearby subdivision where his wife was waiting with the camera.

As the plane returned to the field, all ten engines were at full power, or as they said at the time, “six turnin’ and four burnin’”.  Neal later said as he crossed the numbers on the end of the runway, he was making “better than 180 knots”.  (No one knows exactly how much better.)

It was certainly a "low pass", but how low, depends on who is telling the story.  The plane’s bombardier, from his vantage point in the nose of the plane, later said the propeller tips were “close to the tarmac”.  The firemen and gathered dignitaries decided to prudently watch the pass from a ditch that ran alongside the runway!

While the plane did rise a little after leaving the base, the workers at nearby General Dynamics fled from their jobs, believing a plane was crashing.  Several car crashes occurred on Highway 377, and residents of Fort Worth later complained that their television antennas had been removed by the low hanging jet pods.  Almost everyone in the West Ridglea subdivision reported that pictures had fallen off walls, dogs had run away, and windows had broken. 

There is only a little documentation for the flight.  Since the Peacemaker was flying so low, Major Neal’s wife only knew that the plane was coming at the last second.  She only managed to capture a few seconds of the low-flying plane.  The photo at right is from her home movie.

The Air Force had to do something.  General Ryan fined Neal $250, effectively slapping the pilot on the wrist.  The accompanying verbal reprimand the general gave Major Neal might have been taken more seriously if he hadn’t ended with the comment that the flight was “best buzz job" he had ever seen.”

There are a lot of stories about the massive bomber—some of which are just recently declassified.  One such story concerns the time a B-36 accidentally dropped a live nuclear bomb on Albuquerque.  This was a great, but unintended, test of the arming circuitry since the triggering device actually detonated!  But, that’s a story for another day.