Broken Arrow (code word for nuclear disaster)

In 1950 a B 36 suspected to be carrying a nuclear weapon was on a training mission out of Fairbanks, AK. following the western coastline that was to take it to the southern US. Somewhere along the way a problem developed and three of the aircrafts six engines caught fire.

As the story goes, due to this problem the crew were required to jettison the “cargo” into the Pacific Ocean and then abandon the plane which is what they said they did. The aircraft was losing altitude in the neighborhood of 500 fps, after the crew abandoned the a/c it made a 180 degree turn and somehow gained altitude and came down in northern BC (British Columbia, west coast of Canada), 200 miles from where it was thought that it would come down.

A local gentleman, Mike Jorgenson (of “Battle of the X Planes” fame) had set about doing a documentry of this incident. I had the good fortune to meet and work with him on this project. He had a full scale mock up of the weapon made and it is now displayed at our museum. And in the very near future will be going on a cross country exhibit with parts recovered from the site of the crash. Discovery Channel will be airing the documentory in the fall and should you get the opportunity to watch it you’ll see a point where the weapon is being tended to inside an aircraft. The aircraft used for this sequence is an Electra from Airspray out of Red Deer, Alberta.

There is a mystery still attached to the crash and part of that is that the USAF still will not talk about it, 54 years after the incident and at the time of the crash had sent a special operations team into the crash site to destroy what was left of the airplane. According to Mike some claim that parts of the weapon were still in the aircraft and still others claim there could’ve been a second weapon aboard.

Gerry :confused: 😮