“Unraveling the Mysteries: How Fire, Ice, and Plutonium Could Redefine Our Understanding of the Universe”
The 1966 Palomares crash dramatically revealed the extreme risks involved in Operation Chrome Dome. At the same time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pushed to cancel the operation altogether, arguing that the BMEWS radars and newer, more sophisticated ICBMs like the LGM-30 Minuteman made the scheme redundant. SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently opposed this suggestion, but eventually agreed to a scaled-down version of Chrome Dome which involved fewer aircraft but retained the Thule Monitor mission. Barely two years would pass before McNamara finally got his wish, thanks to another deadly accident whose fallout – both literal and political – dwarfed even that of the Palomares Incident.
Around noon on January 21, 1958, a B-52G of the 380th Strategic Bomb Wing with the callsign HOBO 28 took off from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York, and headed north to take up its station on the Thule Monitor route. Aboard were seven men: pilot and commander Captain John Haug; copilot Captain Leonard Svitenko; radar navigator Major Frank Hopkins; Electronic Warfare Officer or EWO Captain Richard Marx; gunner Staff Sergeant Calvin Snapp; substitute navigator Captain Curtis Criss; and mandatory third pilot Major Alfred D’Amario. Like the aircraft in the Palomares crash, HOBO 28 was armed with a standard load of four 1.1-megaton B28 thermonuclear gravity bombs.
The flight to Thule and the first air-to-air refuelling were uneventful, and at around 6PM local time HOBO 28 arrived on station and began flying a long, figure-eight shaped orbit along the length of Baffin Bay at an altitude of 10,600 metres. Though the cabin heaters were turned up to full blast, the crew soon grew uncomfortably cold. This prompted Major D’Amario, the spare pilot, to open an engine bleed valve, which vented hot air from the aircraft’s jet engines into the cabin heating ducts. Unfortunately, a malfunction caused this bleed air to barely cool before it entered the ducts, and over the next few minutes the cabin grew uncomfortably hot,. Then, at 6:22, Captain Marx, the Electronic Warfare Officer, reported smelling burned rubber. Searching around the cabin, the crew quickly discovered a small fire burning under the instructor navigator’s seat at the rear of the lower cabin deck. Shortly before takeoff, Major D’Amario had stuffed a number of cloth-covered foam-rubber cushions under this seat; unfortunately, it happened to sit directly over one of the cabin heating vents, and under the full blast of the hot bleed air from the engines, the cushions had ignited.
