Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Zink and his crew were expecting the drill on September 15, 1980. It was about eight thirty in the evening, and out the window you could see the fire trucks and the wing commander’s car. The Klaxons sounded. They ran to the plane. Zink put on his headphones and turned the crew volume low, so he could hear the code from SAC headquarters over the radio.

“Alpha, Charlie, Delta…” he heard, copying each letter down. And then his pilot’s voice was shouting over the intercom.

“Terminate, terminate, terminate.”

For some reason, the pilot was ending the drill. Zink felt scared for a moment, wondering why the pilot was yelling. He and the bombardier looked at each other. They couldn’t see outside, had no idea what was happening — and then heard a loud bang. Something big had struck the right side of the plane. The lights went out, the cabin became pitch black, and Zink knew it was time to evacuate. The navigator was supposed to open the hatch for the rest of the crew and leave the plane first. But the gunner, who sat upstairs, had already jumped down, landed on the floor, and opened the hatch. And without a word, the gunner leaped through the hatch to the tarmac below. Zink’s seat was closest to the hatch, yet four of the five other crew members managed to get out of the plane before him, like rats from a sinking ship. Through the open hatch, Zink could see a bright orange glow — not a good sign.

Zink didn’t bother with the ladder. He jumped the five feet to the runway, landed in a crouch, saw that the right wing of the bomber was on fire, and ran as fast as he could. Now he understood why the crew was in such a hurry. A B-52 had caught fire on the runway a few weeks earlier, at Warner Robins Air Force Base, near Macon, Georgia. Within minutes the plane had exploded, and it literally melted into the ground. But that B-52 hadn’t been carrying nuclear weapons. This one was loaded with eight SRAMs and four Mark 28 bombs.

Zink ran for about three hundred yards, expecting to get knocked down at any second by an explosion. The wing commander’s car pulled up beside him. A window rolled down, and the wing commander said, “Get in.” Zink was glad to obey that order. He turned around and saw that the plane’s number five engine was shooting flames like a blowtorch. It was the engine on the right wing closest to the fuselage, and the fire was cascading down the length of the aircraft. The wing commander was calling firemen on the radio, trying to solve the problem, well aware that not only the plane, but his career at SAC, might be going up in flames.

The nose of the B-52 was pointing toward the southeast, and a wind with gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour was blowing in that direction. The wind swept from the tail straight down the fuselage, keeping the fire away from the fuel tanks in the wings and away from the bomb bay. Although the power had been shut off on the plane, gravity continued to feed jet fuel into the number five engine. It had become a gigantic flamethrower. Fire trucks sprayed foam on the engine, and yet the steady supply of fuel kept the fire burning. For the moment, the strong wind was pushing the flames away from the B-52. But the wind could change direction, the plane was getting hotter, and its tanks still held another few hundred thousand pounds of fuel.

TIM GRIFFIS WAS AT HOME with his family in Alvarado, Minnesota, a rural town with a population of about four hundred, when the phone rang. Griffis was a civilian fire inspector at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about forty-five miles to the south. His job mainly involved teaching the public about fire hazards and looking at blueprints to make sure that new buildings complied with the fire code. His wife was a schoolteacher at the base. They had a six-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter. The kids had gone to bed.

George VanKirk, the fire chief at Grand Forks, was on the phone. The two men were good friends, and they both lived in Alvarado. A B-52 caught fire near the runway about forty minutes ago, VanKirk said. Did Griffis want to come along and help out? Griffis said yes. The two sped to the base as fast as they could in VanKirk’s Ford Fiesta.

By the time Griffis and VanKirk arrived, the fire had been burning for about an hour and a half. The strong wind was still blowing the flames away from the bomber. But the fire trucks couldn’t put out the fire. Some of the hoses were now being used to cool the wings and the fuselage. The copilot had admitted that he might have made a mistake before leaving the plane. Two of the steps in the emergency checklist may have been performed in the wrong order. The checklist said to pull the fire suppression handle for the number five engine, shutting off the fuel — and then turn the emergency battery switch off, cutting the power. The copilot may have turned off the battery first. Without any power, the fire suppression system wouldn’t work, and fuel would continue to flow. Firefighters climbed into the plane twice, entering the cockpit and attempting to perform the steps in the correct order. But nothing happened.

SAC headquarters was on the radio, along with representatives from Boeing, trying to figure out what to do. By quarter to midnight, the fire had been burning for almost three hours. The right wing and the doors of the bomb bay were starting to blister. The fuel tank inside the wing would soon get hot enough to ignite. Boeing’s recommendation was simple: pull the firefighters from the area, abandon the plane, and let it burn. The safety mechanisms on the nuclear weapons would prevent them from detonating, and nobody would get hurt. For some reason, SAC headquarters didn’t seem to like that idea.

VanKirk looked at Griffis and said, “What do you think?”

Griffis knew what the question really meant: somebody should make one last attempt to shut off the fuel.

“Yeah, let me try it,” he replied.

Although Griffis’s current job was fairly sedate, he’d worked for years as a firefighter at Castle Air Force Base in California, where many B-52 pilots were trained. He’d served as the crew chief of a rescue squad, a post that required him to lead men into burning planes as everyone else was leaving them. The interior layout of a B-52 had become awfully familiar, and Griffis thought he could find his way through one blindfolded. But just in case, he wanted Gene Rausch, one of his fire inspectors, to climb into the plane with him — and bring a flashlight.

Their conversation was brief.

“Gene, you want to go with me?”

“Yeah.”

Griffis conferred with the wing commander, going over diagrams of the console and the position of switches in the cockpit. Griffis and Rausch borrowed “silvers,” hooded firefighting suits, from one of the trucks. The boots were two sizes too big for Griffis, and he had to grip the insoles with his toes to walk in them. He stuffed a handheld radio in his hood to communicate with VanKirk, and their conversation was recorded.

“Chief, that engine is getting pretty hot,” Griffis said, five minutes before midnight, “it’s starting to pop, if we’re going to go in, we’ve got to do it now.”

“Yeah, go.”

Griffis and Rausch ran to the plane, entered through the bottom hatch, and climbed into the cockpit. Griffis realized he didn’t need Rausch with him after all. The cockpit was so bright from the flames right outside the window that a flashlight was completely unnecessary. Rausch could have stayed outside in the truck. Griffis had been in burning planes before, but never in one where the fire was cascading with such force. He had no idea if the fuel could be shut off. But he’d give it a try — and if it didn’t work, they’d get their asses out of there. He saw that the fire suppression handle had already been pulled. All he had to do was plug it in. He switched on the emergency battery, and the fire went out, like the burner of a gas cooktop that had just been turned off. And then Griffis and Rausch heard everyone cheering outside.