March 31, 2022 - THROW BACK THURSDAY - DO YOU REMEMBER MARCH 31, 1960? Plus CLASS NEWS
On March 31, 1960, exactly 62 years ago, about 6:00 AM in the morning, a B-47E Stratojet bomber aircraft from the Little Rock Air Force Base, heading to Houston, exploded while flying at 15,000 feet over Little Rock, killing three members of the crew and two people on the ground in Pulaski Heights. Residents at first thought the resulting explosion was a sonic boom, a tornado, or a Russian nuclear strike. Witness Dale Harris, "It was such a terrific explosion that it almost knocked me out of bed. ... I thought the whole city was on fire. That's what it looked like. All you could see was smoke and fire. I thought we might have been bombed. I wasn't sure if it was over, either."
Debris was recovered in a line from the Little Rock Country Club to North Little Rock's Riverside Elementary School. The crash made a deep crater at the intersection of Maryland and Summit streets where the fuselage of the plane came down with such force that it created a crater that was six and a half feet deep and thirty-five feet across. Two homes and an apartment building collapsed. More damage was reported in the Colonial Court area. The nose of the aircraft was found in Allsopp Park. One hundred and sixteen homes were damaged, as was the First Church of the Nazarene. Onlookers looted a damaged Stacy's Grocery and Safeway store on Battery Street.
One of the ejection seats landed on the Pulaski Heights Junior High schoolyard. Only a few houses away, one of the six turbojet engines was “reported to have fallen in the 300 block of Crystal Courts. Fred McCulloch, [of] 320 Lynwood Court, said the motor was buried ‘almost level with the ground’ in the back yard of a Mr. Davies.” Two of the other jet engines were found in the front yard of Frederica Scott’s home at 314 Ridgeway, while two other engines were found at 3618 Hill Road. A section of the wing was found in the front yard of Dr. B. James Reaves at 4 Edgehill, while other larger pieces of debris and wreckage were found throughout Allsopp Park. These larger pieces of debris included the nose section of the B-47 and one of the jet engines. Smaller pieces of debris, like a microphone, were found, or at least reported, as far away as Riverside Elementary School in North Little Rock (Pulaski County).
Killed in the explosion were Captain Herbert Aldridge, Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds Watson, Staff-Sergeant Kenneth Brose, Alta Lois Clark at 211 Colonial Court in Hillcrest was the lone civilian fatality there; Jimmy Hollobaughs died at 1920 Maryland near the Arkansas State Capitol. One crew member, ieutenant Thomas Smoak survived, parachuting to safety.
Smoak later recalled the events that led to the crash: "I didn't sense anything was wrong. I was writing on a clipboard keeping track of statistics that you keep with an airplane during flight. I finished what I was doing, and I looked out the window to relax for a minute. But what I saw surprised me. We were in a deep, descending turn. All I could see was the back of the highly trained pilot's helmet. It appeared as though he was looking down. I could feel the G-forces as he was handling the controls. In that process, the airplane either was overstressed and broke apart because we were so heavy, or it simply exploded. I don't know what happened. It happened so fast. I couldn't see anything. I was dying. It was a horrible experience -- I was burning alive. I did not try to pull the ejection seat. You're trained to do that in your sleep. You pull up your right hand and pull the handle. You can do this in seconds. But I wasn't thinking. I was dying. I was burning alive and praying to God that it would be over with soon. The only thing I thought was this is how you die in an airplane. You're screaming at the top of your lungs as you die. ... Aldridge, the pilot, did pull his ejection seat, which blew off the canopy covering us, and he was out of the airplane."
A second explosion ejected Smoak from the plane. "I felt great. It was so quiet and still, and I was so glad to be out of that thing. The first thing I did was look around for my friends, but I didn't see any other parachutes. I was devastated. Then I looked up and saw that part of my parachute was gone and the rest of it had holes in it that were burning. It looked like a piece of paper that a child would fold and cut, except it was burning. I realized that I was descending too fast and, once again, I went from thinking that I had no more real problems to realizing I was going to die. Because my chute had so many holes in it, I couldn't control it. I could see the downtown area, I saw the river. I passed all that. I was over an area of residential homes. I had no control. I was just there for the ride."
Smoak fell into the yard of Jimmye Lee Holeman, a registered nurse, at 500 North Martin St. Remembered Smoak later, "She had two trees that went between her driveway, and I went between them. She came and helped me, brought me a blanket and cared for me." Smoak's recovery from burns took two years.
The cause of the accident was determined to be pilot error. At about 15,000 feet, the copilot suddenly realized that the aircraft was in a very steep left bank, that the nose was well below the horizon, and that the airspeed was excessive. He pulled the throttles to idle, punched the interphone button and shouted at the aircraft commander. Almost immediately, the nose came up, the wings leveled, and the aircraft disintegrated. In the cockpit section, which had separated intact from the rest of the aircraft, the co-pilot tried to eject, but the clamshell initiator pin had not been removed. The co-pilot then unfastened his seat belt. The canopy blew off at about 10,000 feet. The unconscious co-pilot was thrown out at 4,000 feet and his parachute opened automatically. The aircraft commander ejected at 2,000 feet, but his parachute had been fused by fire and he died upon impact. The fourth man was found near the wreckage and did not survive. The navigator was killed in his position. The falling wreckage killed two civilians and caused serious damage to property.
https://youtu.be/6sgac-qGS8c
1956 CLASS NEWS
Warner St. John passed away this week. His obituary has not beenpublished yet.
1955 CLASS NEWS
Heard from Carroll Lochridge this week. He and our '56 classmate, Nancy Meeks, have been married 63 years, and live in McKinney, Texas. He's retired from Raytheon Space Intelligence and renovating Classic Mustangs (5).He tries to keep up with his Aggie grandsons, while always rooting for the Razorbacks and OSU Cowboys .
Regards to all the old friends in the LRCHS Class of '55 and those former members of South Highland Methodist Church!
ML
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