Air Force B-52 Crashes Shortly After TakeOff in Guam | Deadly Celebration

I left Guam the day before this happened. The doctor that was on board had seen me for a minor foot issue a week prior. God rest their souls.

As an ex B-52G Crew Chief, the stab trim was very important. Before every launch, power was brought up and i had to stand back by the tail on interphone and verify the movement of the stab trim up, down, up, down, then verify the final setting by the location of the stab leading edge in relation to the pitch setting numbers on the fuselage. You definitely made sure you stood out of the way of the exhaust! It was very loud even with headphones on..

Thank you so much for presenting this accident to us. I was just entering SAC at Wurtsmith AFB, Oscoda, Michigan. Our base had just taken delivery of the first H, tail 60001 and coming right out of jet bomber maint of B 47 it was a great honor to have been placed there in the very beginning. Our base and K I Sawyer received the first two squadrons of the H. We got the odd tails and Ki got the even ones. I fell deeply in love with these unbelievable beasts and enjoyed every minute of it. You mentioned the "Stratofortress" as part of the name. I thought I would contribute why that was and how the plane outlived a number of changes in it's life. In the beginning of it's life not many aircraft could attack the 52 for a number of reasons. One of the biggest was the fact of it's ceiling. All the challenging aircraft couldn't reach the altitude of the 52 and if they could it would be from the tail, thus the tail gun. Another thing in your video, which I think it was fantastic, had a G model 52 instead of a H. The two differences are the following. One, the H has the TF33P7 engine and the G still had the older engines. Second, only the G and the H had the flat vertical tail finn. All other 52's had the pointed tail finn. The third major differences of the 52's were where the tail gunner was positioned. In the earlier versions the tail gunner was stationed at the rear with the gun and the newer versions moved the tail gunner as cockpit crew and they sat next to the EWO officer in the back of the cockpit. I did not know about this crash as I finnished my four years just two weeks before our birds were sent to Guam for the war. Please do not take offense of this post because I do not in anyway think that your production was anything but great and I am glad I know this even though it really makes me sad. I have many stories about all of this bird but I am 80 June 30 and I just couldn't get talking about it. That sad part of it is that the H has gone through so many changes and all those transitions got lost over the years. For instance, notice that the pilot is a Major and the copilot is a captain and now the pilots are Captains and the Copilots are lieutenants . When the first H's were delivered the Pilots were Full Colonels and the Copilots were Lt Colonels. While I was still there in the end Pilots were now Majors and on it went. All this had to do with the "Boss, Gen LeMay." This man was a great influence to me. I learned so much from him working in his era. Sorry I was so windy and I am so proud of the 70 plus we still have in the air and also that she will outlive me by almost twice my age. Again, thanks

Thanks for presenting this accident. I remember the day so clearly. I was then still an active-duty Loadmaster Instructor on a Navy C-130T. We were third in line for takeoff out of Guam that morning, heading to Palau. Like any aviation buff, we all watched the B-52 power up and take off. It is burned in my memory. They climbed out and outta site. We took off and headed to Palau. It wasn't until we landed a few hours later that we learned they had crashed. We all wondered why; we didn't get diverted to help look for survivors. Well now I know. I will pass this to my fellow crewmembers from that day. I still fly with one of them as a contractor now. Thanks again.

B-52 planes cannot catch a break on this channel. Uncontrollable planes are also always the scariest crashes to me. RIP to all 6 crew members.

The fact that stab trim was 5.0 degree down upon impact, that's the most touching part, that they were working hard, doing their jobs, to the very end

man, the title and the intro to this vid, pretty much set the tone that there was not going to be a happy ending to this one. RIP and Thanx for you service, Airmen!

I remember this one, very close to home sadly, left a lot of us in shock. Knew the flight surgeon, he'd often drop by our hooch to talk story with our crews while we were there at Andersen during that same period. Absolutely floored when we heard the BUFF went down that day, even more so when word came that all were lost, including the Col. Very sad day.

Josh Shepherd was my student in seventh grade; my heart hurt so much when I learned he had died…Rest in Peace Josh ✝️

We lost a 52D model in the 60s off of Patties point Anderson AFB Guam. I still think about that crash. I was a KC-135 crew chief, what a wonderful aircraft to refuel. I also trained on the B 47 in maintenance school at Amarillo AFB Texas. My heartfelt condolences to the families.

Such a sad tragedy, my heart goes out to the crew and their families.

I love when these shows call it a Big ugly fat "fella" you know dam well that's not the word they use

TFC, thanks once again for using upper and lower case screen text for improved legibility. You put so much effort into making these wonderful videos, and this one had a lot of important text.

Shame to see such outstanding aircrew loose their lives to unrecoverable situations like these.

Such a tragedy. As a kid, I worked summers for my uncle, who owned a landscaping business in Fort Worth. A particular job was in the flight path of the former Carswell Air Force Base. If you've ever been under a B-52 on takeoff, you'll never forget it. Also, forget conversation, for at least a minute. Excellent presentation.

thank you for bringing back the intros. Also want to mention thank you for putting such time and effort to making a video every week considering that is a very tight schedule. Been here since 2 years ago and this has become one of my favorite channels. Wish you the best and again thank you, bye!

My family was stationed at Kadena AFB on Okinawa when the fully loaded B-52 crashed on takeoff in 1970 as I recall. The crash and weapons detonation bounced my brother out of bed, but I slept through it. That was a very bad day on Kadena.

Of course, no one knows exactly what happened, but as a former B-52H AC back in the 1980s, I have what I consider a reasonable guess: an aggressive pilot-initiated rapid descent followed by a trim malfunction. Most training missions I flew on had a low level bombing run. Often we would either have to descend rather quickly by ATC or just wanted to in order to practice simulating a proper reaction to a threat, which was to get the aircraft low to the ground as quickly as possible, thus making it harder for radars to see us. To do that required significantly pushing the control column forward, and even putting out the airbrakes, both which required forward trimming the aircraft down. And to be honest, when 90% of a typical B-52 mission was boring straight-and-level flying, such maneuvers were also fun to do (at least for us pilots). Now having done this dozens of times before, including pulling out in time safely, my guess is that to better take advantage of the training aspect of sortie (and maybe also have a little fun and/or desire to impress their doctor guest), the pilots decided to practice evading a threat with a rapid descent. That may explain why they requested to ATC to descend like they did, making sure there were no other aircraft around to worry about. With the sortie sort of being all about fun (an airshow flyover), they may have even been a little more aggressive about the descent than usual. So what happened after that? My continued guess is that when the pilot went to pull back on the control column, including using aft trim, just like he had done safely for years, nothing happened, or the trim started going opposite of his input. It would probably take a pilot several seconds, second-guessing himself, just to determine if he was pushing the trim button the right way, or reading the rotation of the wheel correctly, looking at the other pilot, both wondering what in the world was going on. With little altitude left to work with, those seconds were just too long to survive the situation. Besides being a former pilot, I'm also a mechanical engineer, and thus have something to add about that. One of the early concerns regarding the B-52 was metal fatigue. (For lack of a better term, as a design criteria, metal fatigue is somewhat "mysterious", at least compared to other aspects of mechanical engineering, and thus can be very hard to calculate exactly.) To keep the aircraft's weight down, the wings were made to flex rather than be rigid (which requires more structure and thus more weight). The unknown was how long such a design would last. Everyone knows that if you take a wire and bend it back and forth just a little bit, you can do that forever without breaking the wire, but if you bend it back and forth "a lot", it will eventually break, which is called "metal fatigue". What exactly is "a lot", as hinted at earlier, can be very difficult for engineers to determine, if it can be determined at all. Initially, Boeing gave the Air Force a certain expected service life for the plane (I think about a couple of decades), but through testing and experience, determined that metal fatigue wasn't affecting the wings, so later extended the service life of the aircraft well beyond its original design. (Some are talking about a 100 years now.) Now that's just the wings. Obviously, there are many more other metal components to a B-52 that go through cyclic loading besides the wings--like the hydraulic-screw-actuator mechanism of the trim. Maybe it failed due to metal fatigue, but in a crash, such could be impossible to determine if that was the cause or the crash itself was the cause. And who knows what all else metal-wise in a B-52 is failure waiting to happen due to fatigue. At a certain point, if such mysterious failures start occurring more frequently, Boeing engineers will have to tell the Air Force that it's time to retire the aircraft; they just can't tell where all the problems might be, and therefore can't guarantee its performance any longer. RIP my BUFF brothers.

Seems to me whenever something goes wrong in a multi-engine cockpit, the first reaction is to reach for the checklists, then call the company for advice. But when you've only got seconds to live, somebody better do something tangible immediately.

Thank you for changing the font and to upper and lower case text. It really helps!