Hunt’s Mesa and the B-52 Crash

Curious about the tale Val, Mateo and our guide told us about the flying stratofortress, the B-52, that crashed on Hunt’s Mesa, I tried to get a little more information.

***UPDATE***
For a GREAT write up on the crash and finding the old crash site with lots of details pictures, visit, http://lostflights.smugmug.com/gallery/5643297_64jGV

Here’s an excpert from a 2009 article on azcentral.com:

MONUMENT VALLEY – Twenty-five years ago – Oct. 16, 1984 – an Air Force B-52 bomber crashed and exploded on Hunts Mesa, sending a fireball thousands of feet into the air and turning night into day across Monument Valley.

I was the night police reporter for The Arizona Republic, and after I covered the crash by phone and filed a story at midnight for the next day’s front page, my editor, Bill Waldrop, agreed to let me drive all night to pick up the story from the scene.

With the first rays of dawn oozing deep red across northern Arizona, I listened as NPR newscaster Carl Kasell led the national 6 a.m. report with the B-52 crash, which killed two airmen and badly injured five others.

By the time I arrived near the scene, the FBI had closed all roads leading to Hunts Mesa, a miles-long half-moon slab that forms the south rim of Monument Valley. So I drove to the visitor center and hired a Navajo guide.

The Stratofortresses are still in use today, 54 years after they debuted in 1955 as the Air Force’s first intercontinental-range jet bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The B-52s routinely flew low over Monument Valley at up to 500 mph. They dodged the giant sandstone-limestone towers – some more than 1,000 feet tall – during simulated, under-the-radar bombing runs of the Soviet Union.

On this windswept snowy night, despite the plane’s 6,200-feet-per-minute climbing ability, the edge of the B-52’s 185-foot wingspan clipped a rock outcropping, sending the mighty bird into a sideways cartwheel above Hunts Mesa. Six of the seven airmen ejected after the initial impact, with only seconds for their parachutes to open before the jet smashed into pieces less than 200 feet away.

Celia Black was 20 years old when she, her family and her neighbors were shaken from their homes at the base of Sentinel Mesa, on the north side of Monument Valley, near the famous Mittens – two nearly identical mesas, each with a thumb-like spire.

“We remembered a shake, like something hit our house. We woke up, and we were quite puzzled,” said Black, who remembers seeing the fire, miles to the south.

“We heard it, clearly,” echoing off the monuments, said Black, now 45, who works as a museum clerk at Goulding’s Lodge, a tourist service just west of Monument Valley. “It’s so quiet out here. When those things (B-52s) came around, all the cows and horses and sheep started running. They were flying so low, you thought they were going to hit one of our sacred monuments.”

Frank Jackson, then 51, was used to the B-52s flying low over his hogan near John Ford’s Point, named for the director of iconic John Wayne Westerns filmed in Monument Valley, including “Stagecoach” and “The Searchers.”

He didn’t hesitate to take a young reporter to the base of Hunts Mesa and lead him up a trail that he said no non-Indian had been allowed on before. I marveled at how Jackson, wearing dress pants and black, smooth-soled shoes, flew up the cliffs and seemed to defy gravity as he leaned into the wind while rounding sandstone rock domes. Near the top, he stopped. I was on my own, he said. He would wait for me.

I had only a couple of hundred feet to go to top a ridge and photograph the crash site. But I only made it halfway before FBI personnel in a Jeep stopped and told me to go back the way I came, or be arrested. It was a journalistic near hit. The next day, I joined dozens of photographers and reporters, ferried by military helicopters to the crash site.

Read more…

For more pictures of a B-52:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/b-52_i.htm

For pictures of the Monument Valley trip, visit the photo gallery