It was a Wednesday night, July 17, 1957. The crew members aboard the B-47 Stratojet were going through their routine preflight checks. It is a ritual for pilots everywhere, whether the craft they are about to coax into the air is the biggest jet bomber or the tiniest crop-duster.
The people of Abilene, Tex., were going through their rituals, too. Midweek church services were letting out. Baseball games were in their final innings. People were heading home or were there already.
It was a little after 8 p.m.
The B-47 was the country’s first modern bomber. With its swept-back wings and six jet engines, it looked like a fighter plane crossed with an airliner. The men who flew it found it beautiful, if temperamental. Its main mission was simple: In the event of an attack from the Soviet Union, it was to penetrate Russian air defenses and drop nuclear bombs. The Air Force ordered more than 2,000 of the planes from Boeing and positioned them at bases across the country and overseas, from Greenland to Guam.
No bomb was dropped in wartime from the B-47, but every day pilots somewhere raced it down a runway and took it airborne. They practiced low-level flying. They practiced midair refueling. They practiced bombing runs. They practiced elaborate defensive maneuvers, straining the airplane and their own bodies as the silver bomber twisted in the sky.
That is the backbone of the Air Force, of every branch of the military: near endless repetition, training so that you can do without thinking in wartime what you’ve thought so much about in peacetime.
And that’s what the B-47 that took off from Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene was doing on the evening of July 17, 1957. It was on “a routine training mission,” an Air Force spokesman said later — as if anything involving a 226,000-pound aircraft designed to fly over the polar ice cap and unleash hell could be called “routine.”
The first calls started coming in to the Abilene Reporter-News newspaper about 8:50 p.m. Readers from as far away as 15 miles could see an orange glow in the sky.
“I’ve seen oil well fires, but I never saw anything like this,” said a man named A.C. Roberts.
At the scene, the smell of jet fuel mixed with the scent of burning mesquite. The B-47 had crashed on takeoff, the flaming wreckage stopping short of a Baptist church. “The plane first struck the ground about a mile and a quarter from the end of the runway and skidded more than 1,500 feet,” the paper reported, “scattering fire until the plane dropped off a bluff into part of Little Elm Creek.”
The cockpit landed upside down in the muddy creek bed.
My uncle, Lt. Francis B. “Frank” Kelly Jr., was aboard that plane. He was 24 and is buried in Section 30 at Arlington National Cemetery. He died along with Maj. William P. Price, 40, of Bastrop, Tex.; Capt. Coleman L. Adams, 35, of Carrollton, Mo.; and Staff Sgt. William C. Burdette Jr., 23, of Talladega, Ala.
I never met Uncle Frank. He died five years before I was born. I knew him only as a photo on my grandmother’s piano and in stories my father told about his youth: the typical older brother, half hero, half tormentor.
“He came home one time just after he’d gotten his commission,” my father remembered. “He hung his uniform up in a closet and went out with his friends. I put his uniform on and stood in the mirror.”
After the funeral, my father told his mother he still wanted to join the Air Force, still wanted to become a pilot.
“She said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You lost your brother. Why are you doing this to me?’ ”
Five years later, my father earned his wings.
Our airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines risk death every day, not only at the hands of our enemies but also simply by doing their jobs, jobs that by their very nature can never be made safe. Remember them today, Memorial Day, and the sacrifice so many of them have made.
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