“We had no viable emergency airfields, and I did not want to be a no-notice, no–flight plan, single-engine emergency arrival at David Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, especially since the…
“I scramble down it to see what the fuss is all about. Moving to the rear of the Lightning, the cause of everyone’s concern becomes apparent; highly inflammable hydraulic fluid…
“We could have been throwing up dust clouds behind us, we were so low. One wrong move and we’d have been splattered over miles of cactus,” Jay Lacklen, former B-52…
“The B-52 suddenly snapped nose down ten degrees, a horrendous and panic-inducing loss of control that promised to kill us all in about ten seconds as the moonlit pine forest…
“As the plane leveled off, Hunt’s Mesa suddenly appeared above the aircraft on the crew’s radar scopes that displayed the plane’s position well below the mesa rim. The pilot firewalled…
“You haven’t been lost till you’ve been lost at Mach 3 because for every minute that you don’t know where you are, you’re 35 miles further away from where you…
“My call sign was ‘Belmont 86’ and my transmissions to approach control were something like this: ‘Bodø Approach, Belmont 86, six-zero miles west, declaring an in-flight emergency, request straight-in approach…