history

‘Usually, the SR-71 Blackbird pilots weren’t a chatty bunch, but I could hear the anxiety in the voice of this one,’ Jody Liliedah, Airman

The Vietnam War was still raging in 1972. Japan’s Kadena Air Base was regarded as the entry point to the southeast. Due to the Playboy logo she wore on both rudders for the majority of her career, SR-71 Blackbird #978—also referred to as the “Rapid Rabbit”—crashed at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, on July 20, 1972. In October 2015, Air and Space magazine published an article by Airman Jody Liliedah detailing his eyewitness account.

‘On the afternoon of July 20, 1972, I was in my maintenance truck, eavesdropping on the tower frequency. Word had gotten around that an SR-71 would be landing soon. Usually, the Blackbird pilots weren’t a chatty bunch, but I could hear the anxiety in the voice of this one.

‘I heard the tower warn him of a 90-degrees-to-the-runway crosswind of 35 knots gusting to 50 knots—a typhoon was on its way. I could’ve sworn I listened to the tower advise him to consider an alternate airport. Landing anywhere else was out of the question. The SR-71 wouldn’t have had the fuel, and everyone understood without discussion that the brass wanted that airplane on the ground and out of sight as quickly as possible.

‘I sought out a good vantage point to observe the landing: a small concrete building which housed fuel pumps, about 50 yards from the runway the SR-71 was headed for. I climbed to the roof and settled in. I could see the landing lights before I could make out the airplane, perfectly lined up with the runway, three or four miles out. I couldn’t have been more focused if I were landing the da** thing myself. The main landing gear touched down, and despite the horrible crosswinds, the fuselage was aligned perfectly with the runway’s centerline. It looked like the pilot was going to pull off a picture-perfect landing. But as soon as he deployed his drag chute, a wind gust blew it to port. I watched the nose shift to starboard.

‘Then one of the left main landing gear tires exploded.

‘The pilot jettisoned the chute, poured the coals to the burner, and rotated away from the runway, climbing back into the sky to circle around.

‘I remember thinking, “What the h*ll is he gonna do now? No drag chute. Blown tire. And a monster crosswind, increasing by the minute.” Fortunately, an incoming or outgoing SR-71 had the entire base to itself. The pilot made a second approach, dumping fuel the entire length of the runway, then came back around for his final approach.

‘As he touched down, a fireball engulfed the left landing gear. The airplane kept rolling, nose still high in the air, and then the right gear tires blew. The Blackbird skidded past me like that, nose up and tires on fire, for four or five seconds. When the left gear collapsed and the wing struck the runway, the left engine exploded, and debris flew high into the air. The entire airframe began to spin, still traveling down the runway at probably 150 mph, and finally, the right gear buckled.

‘The flaming wreck continued sliding down the runway, still on the centerline, until it finally drifted off to the left, into the grass. It came to rest about two-thirds of the way down the runway, about 4,000 feet from where I stood watching, jaw agape.

‘I watched the pilot and reconnaissance system operator in their bright orange flight suits leap from the remnants of their aircraft and run from it as fast as they could. I jumped down from the building, and several of us started running toward them, but a fire truck and a base security car cut us off. The officer in the car ordered us to stay back.

‘Five hours later, the typhoon was upon us.’

Both Captain James W. Fagg, the reconnaissance systems officer, and Captain Dennis K. Bush, the pilot, managed to escape unharmed. Even though this was a routine flight, Lew Williams, a member of the recovery team, noted that Bush and Fagg were wearing the yellow/orange suits.

Williams recalls: “A crew from Palmdale led by Mel Rushing was deployed to our detachment and did the cutting up and the disposing of the structural remains and the location was on Habu Hill [According to the book SR-71 Revealed the Inside Story by Richard H. Graham, Habu Hill was a notorious viewing spot on Kadena where crowds of curious and avid aircraft watchers assembled to see the SR-71 takeoff and land].”

Checkout Habubrats Facebook page for further Blackbird photos and stories

Photo by U.S. Air Force

‘When we went on a combat mission, we carried a sealed letter in our pocket. We were told the letters and who signed them changed from time to time and we never saw them,’ SR-71 Blackbird RSO Colonel Richard Sheffield

Colonels Robert (Bob) Spencer, the pilot, and Richard (Butch) Sheffield, the reconnaissance systems officer (RSO), flew an SR-71 Blackbird on a mission over Vladivostok to gather the SA-5 radar signal. During the flight, the aircraft’s engine failed, forcing Spencer and Sheffield to make an emergency landing in South Korea.

Some of the subsequent events were quite comical.

The following story was originally posted on the Habubrats Facebook page and is taken from Colonel Richard Sheffield’s unpublished book “The Very First.”

‘I gave an envelope to the base commander… I was instructed to give this envelope out if we were ever in a tight spot and needed extra help…

‘When we were trying to get the tower to open the field and turn up the landing lights so we could land, the person in the tower was speaking in broken English. He said, “No can land, field is closed.” We told him we were an RF-4 with an engine out and had no were else to land. Once we were on the runway and our eyes became accustomed to the light, we saw men in black pajamas sounding the aircraft and holding machine guns. Bob asked me, “Butch, are you sure we are in South Korea?”

‘After we had sat in the aircraft for a while with the one good engine in idle and the taxi light on we saw a military auto coming down the runway at a high rate of speed and barely under control. It pulled right up in front of us and a person jumped out (he was the Base Commander) (half dressed), and we could read his lips, he was saying, “What in the f— are you doing here?” Bob said back to him, once we had the wheels in chocks and the engine shut down, “What did you want me to do, ditch it?”

‘When we gave the abort code over HF radio, we first gave the code for Kunsan, South Korea. Soon we saw that we did not have enough fuel to make it to Kunsan and decided to go to Taegu. I had never heard of Taegu and didn’t know where it was located. Bob knew he must have used it when flying the U-2. Taegu was so small and out of the way that they did not have an abort code. We gave the abort code for a base, not on the list of emergency landing places over the HF. So neither the Kadena command post nor Taegu knew where we were going to land. In other words, Taegu had no idea who we were or where we came from. The picture of the SR taken at night with the glow of a fire truck behind it must have been what we looked like. It is hard to imagine what the SR looked like sitting on the runway at Taegu in the middle of the night.

‘When we went on a combat mission, we carried a sealed letter in our pocket. We were told the letters and who signed them changed from time to time and we never saw them. Some crewmembers speculated that CINCPAC, the Air Force Chief, or even the President signed them. I do not know, but whoever signed the one I gave to the base Commander at Taegu sure got his attention. From the time he saw it until we left the next day, he could not do enough for us.

‘The mission package I had in the cockpit was Top Secret. I ask the Base Commander to take me to his vault so I could lock it up. I could not turn it over to him because he was not cleared, nor did he have a need-to-know where we had just flown in from.

‘He said we don’t have a vault to hold Top Secret data. So here I was, in a full-pressure suit with a package of classified data walking around under the aircraft. With the pressure suit on, you can’t get into an auto, so they put us in the back of a pickup truck and took us to the command post, which was the most secure area on base.

‘Once in the Command Post, I explained my problem to one of the controllers, and he said I might be able to help you. It was now about 2 A.M. He called the plan’s officer, who had a vault, and got him out of bed; he lived in town, and he agreed after much convincing by me to come out to the base and help me.

‘While this was going on, the Kadena Command Post was calling on the secure line to ask me what happened and what kind of equipment they had at Taegu to help get us out of there as soon as possible. I had no idea what they had at Taegu; I had never heard of it until a few hours before.

‘Finally, a Major showed up from plans, we wrapped up the classified data and locked it in his “Top Secret” safe. I never did know if it was really a Top Secret safe, but he said it was, and it was located in a secure area.

‘It was now almost daybreak, and we were going to fly back to Kadena that day and needed sleep. I had finally gotten out of the pressure suit and was just settling into bed when the Command Post wanted to talk some more to me. I had told them not to bother Bob; he had to fly and needed some rest. They asked if Taegu had a 40-TON LOADER. I told them why you don’t ask the command postpersons; they live here.

‘Soon aircraft started landing, two KC-135s and one C-130 with a new engine. One of the KC-135s flew the SA-5 data back to NSA. We had told the guards on the aircraft not to let anyone near it without our approval, so they wouldn’t let our own Air Force people on it to fix it. So Bob went out and cleared the people onto the aircraft.

‘They changed the engine in record time and got us out of there the next day. We buzzed the field and flew back to Kadena.’

Check out the Habubrats Facebook page for further Blackbird photos and stories.

Photo by NASA and U.S. Air Force