National Affairs: The Deadliest Crew

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Just after 5 o'clock one afternoon last week, the B-47 City of Merced stood deadly quiet on the parking ramp of the March Air Force Base near Riverside, Calif. Suddenly the plane came alive: her six turbojets throbbed, then hummed,then split the air with a banshee scream. In their tandem seats under a Plexiglas canopy, Major Horace ("Beau") Traylor Jr., the aircraft commander, and Major Martin Speiser, the pilot, made ready to taxi to the runway. Their green coveralls were soaked through with sweat; it was more than 140° in their compartment. They faced a nerve-shredding test of their skill and endurance: the City of Merced was about to take off in her final flight in the U.S. Strategic Air Command's annual bombing and navigation competition, the supreme peacetime test of air-combat capability. From split-second improvisations during the hours of competition come bombing and navigating techniques that are later adopted as standard operating procedure.

There was a special point of interest in this year's competition: Which would show up better, the reliable old B-36 (introduced in 1946), now on its way out as a combat weapon, or the flashier, faster (upwards of 600 m.p.h.) B-47? Last year the B-36 scored higher. This time the top SAC strategists staked their hopes and reputations on the B-47.

From Castle Air Force Base (near Merced, Calif.) came the City of Merced and her crew of veterans. After the first two flights in competition, the City of Merced was well down from the top of the scoreboard (which, because of the classified information on its face, was under around-the-clock guard by armed air police). On the third and last flight, the City of Merced had to do better—much better.

Radar Strike at Sacramento. Now she was airborne. She leveled off at 35,000 feet, moving at better than eight miles a minute, and headed toward her first target: the northeast corner of the northernmost building of the Campbell Soup plant in Sacramento.

This was to be a "freestyle" bombing run, i.e., a visual approach was permitted, and the navigator-bombardier (now called the "observer") could make free use of his optical equipment, including a high-powered telescope in the bombsight. The Campbell Soup target was vital to the City of Merced, because on her previous flight, an unpredictable wind shift had drifted her off course, and she scored only one point out of a possible 85.

Despite his visual alternative, Observer Jose ("Joe") Holguin chose to strike at Sacramento by radar. Twenty-five miles from the target, Major Holguin, at his bombsight controls up forward, became the key man in the City of Merced: Beau Traylor had only to maintain air speed. His face glued to the radarscope and its tireless, swinging line of light, Joe Holguin made manual adjustments to keep the crosshairs on the pip that marked his target. Nearly everything was handled by the "K" system, the fabulous new Air Force apparatus that automatically navigates, flies the plane and releases the bomb. From a sounding device came a steady hum. At the precise moment when the "K" system would have released a real bomb, the humming stopped (the descent trajectory of the simulated bomb was plotted for official scoring purposes by electronic equipment on the ground).