B-1B, Ellsworth, all eject

Whoa damn. I can't remember now......capsule (a la F-111) was just B-1A right, with B-1B being conventional individual seats?

Save a fuel starvation event (or I guess ice+loss of control), this must have been a pretty badly crippled plane. Either way, glad to hear they made it out safely
 
Conditions at Ellsworth about 10 minutes after the crash:

KRCA 050000Z AUTO 00000KT 1SM R31/4500VP6000FT BR VV001 M04/M06 A2989 RMK AO2 SLP168 PWINO TSNO VISNO RWY13 $
 
Since everyone made it out ok I feel like it’s ok to say “Damn that sounds expensive.”
 
Whatever the cause good to see the crew made it out.
 
35 AoA said:
Whoa damn. I can't remember now......capsule (a la F-111) was just B-1A right, with B-1B being conventional individual seats?
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It's conventional seats in all operational production runs. Only (some, not all) the -A model prototypes were fitted with the capsule, but it never saw the light of day in production. It's a good thing too, the -111 capsule was a death trap straight out of a Squid Games episode or SAW movie.

I say that about the option for individual seats, and I'm immediately reminded of a former coworker (probably walking around the DFW AA crew rooms these days counting his blessings, and his $$$$ lol) who got himself a DFC for saving his crew, when he opted to land a Bone with active, unsuccessfully mitigated, wing fire indications in the cockpit, and after his verbal command for ejection yielded one of his navs having a failed seat attempt. Situation which prompted him to stay with the jet (everybody opted to stay at that point) and give him a fighting chance. The beesh of it is, during the mx post-mortem, turns out all the seats would have failed to launch, yikes. Our legacy bomber capitalization situation is a disgrace, right along anything that isn't fEeF gEn.

This is great to hear about this crew having successful seats and infusing some needed confidence in these aging undercapitalized life support systems. The batting average for the Bone ejections was certainly in dispute in recent years.
 
hindsight2020 said:
This is great to hear about this crew having successful seats and infusing some needed confidence in these aging undercapitalized life support systems. The batting average for the Bone ejections was certainly in dispute in recent years.
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That thought entered my mind when I first heard about the mishap. It's not a sure thing all four seats are going to go when called upon, and that they did is a wonderful outcome.
 
RyanShort1 said:
Its replacement, in good USAAF tradition, might be named "Hang the Expense"

42-39867 | American Air Museum

www.americanairmuseum.com www.americanairmuseum.com
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The saga of Frank Velesh and the several B-17s named Hang The Expense is one of my favorite crew stories of WWII and the storied 100th BG.

www.mnflyer.com

Minnesota B-17 Pilot Had Unique War History

Frank Valesh had a career in military aviation that was brief, interesting, and frequently violent. From September 1943 until August 1944 Valesh flew B-17s for the U.S. Army's Eighth Air Force in Great Britain. His bombers all had the same nose art featuring a human female with an impossibly...
www.mnflyer.com
 
3393RP said:
The saga of Frank Velesh and the several B-17s named Hang The Expense is one of my favorite crew stories of WWII and the storied 100th BG.

www.mnflyer.com

Minnesota B-17 Pilot Had Unique War History

Frank Valesh had a career in military aviation that was brief, interesting, and frequently violent. From September 1943 until August 1944 Valesh flew B-17s for the U.S. Army's Eighth Air Force in Great Britain. His bombers all had the same nose art featuring a human female with an impossibly...
www.mnflyer.com
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1704551032104.jpeg

One of the damaged ones he flew home.
 
35 AoA said:
Whoa damn. I can't remember now......capsule (a la F-111) was just B-1A right, with B-1B being conventional individual seats?

Save a fuel starvation event (or I guess ice+loss of control), this must have been a pretty badly crippled plane. Either way, glad to hear they made it out safely
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Any deets yet?
The VV100 that someone noted above makes me wonder if it was a weather accident; they couldn't find asphalt so instead of losing plane + crew, they decided to only lose plane? Heard of such, in WWII.
 
I drove past Ellsworth about 30 minutes before this crash. Crazy. Didn't even know it happened.
 
Alignment was good. Just a little below glide path.
 
Oof.
The board president also identified several substantial contributing factors, including poor crew resource management, poor weather conditions, ineffective flight operations supervision, a lack of awareness of airfield conditions, and an organizational culture that tolerated decaying airmanship skills, a lack of discipline, poor communication, and inadequate focus on regulations.
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AIB Final; brutal summary begins on p. 43.

 
Calculated stable approach descent rate was 750 fpm. Actual descent rate just prior to impact was in excess of 1,800 fpm. That plus the ejection would likely mandate a trip to the dentist to reinstall some teeth.
 
TCABM said:
Oof.


AIB Final; brutal summary begins on p. 43.

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yup, a complete clownshow, I was gonna do the big debrief on all the ways this crew doesn't deserve to retain the quals they held that morning, but I already ruffled feathers over on the mil site, so I'll let this one sit. This was just public confirmation of what my rumint/bomber-bro network had already hashed out privately last winter. I digress.

P.S. biggest reason I don't miss the caf...those 30-60-90s. forget that noise. This .mil paycut qweep-laden job isn't worth that little sortie count. Knew it then, know it now, glad training command gave me an out with more flying before I lost my heart and quit pro flying outright.
 
hindsight2020 said:
yup, a complete clownshow, I was gonna do the big debrief on all the ways this crew doesn't deserve to retain the quals they held that morning, but I already ruffled feathers over on the mil site, so I'll let this one sit. This was just public confirmation of what my rumint/bomber-bro network had already hashed out privately last winter. I digress.

P.S. biggest reason I don't miss the caf...those 30-60-90s. forget that noise. This .mil paycut qweep-laden job isn't worth that little sortie count. Knew it then, know it now, glad training command gave me an out with more flying before I lost my heart and quit pro flying outright.
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My boss is an ex SAC B-52 driver and wing commander. He said back in his day just after LeMay retired he would have had the crew and direct oversight officers assigned to flying desks in supply for the rest of their career. He recalled that just any one of those findings would have immediately dequal’d you and if it had been in the 50s with LeMay would’ve been lucky not to be on the receiving end of his wrath.
 
ARFlyer said:
My boss is an ex SAC B-52 driver and wing commander. He said back in his day just after LeMay retired he would have had the crew and direct oversight officers assigned to flying desks in supply for the rest of their career. He recalled that just any one of those findings would have immediately dequal’d you and if it had been in the 50s with LeMay would’ve been lucky not to be on the receiving end of his wrath.
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It has been about 100 years since LeMay was a household name. Are you in your 90s? :)
 
ARFlyer said:
My boss is an ex SAC B-52 driver and wing commander. He said back in his day just after LeMay retired he would have had the crew and direct oversight officers assigned to flying desks in supply for the rest of their career. He recalled that just any one of those findings would have immediately dequal’d you and if it had been in the 50s with LeMay would’ve been lucky not to be on the receiving end of his wrath.
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In fairness, they went harder during Bent Spear '07. I was an FTU student right as it occurred, it was wild to witness. Weeks of milling around because all IPs were decertified pending an enterprise wide revalidation. It wasn't a fun place before, and sure wasn't a fun place immediately after. To wit, SECAF and CSAF lost their jobs over it. SAC (now *global strike) had the infamous "beatings will continue until morale improves", and such was the same trend line in the years following the incident. They resurrected that *command as a result. Those were drastic and large changes in a very short amount of time.

This forum isn't suited for long stories, but I got a chapter earmarked in my post retirement memoirs to the story of how Bent Spear and the Lost Decade shaped my military career, which I consider Honorable but remarkably stunted by bad timing. There's a lot to unpack to say the least. Will have to wait for the audiobook lol.
 
So .. the post ejection checklists weren't completed. Yeah, it says that.
 
hindsight2020 said:
yup, a complete clownshow, I was gonna do the big debrief on all the ways this crew doesn't deserve ….
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I would have expected CC-directed Q3s across the board and FEBs, then the 34th and the OSS/CC* losing their jobs with a report such as that. *unless of course they were patchwearers…that community has gone too far to protect the ‘investment’, but I digress.
hindsight2020 said:
In fairness, they went harder during Bent Spear '07. I was an FTU student right as it occurred, it was wild to witness. ….
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I was just leaving the E-3 (and glad to do so) at that time. Timing is everything…I was a ‘96 guy and had to pay for the mistakes leading up and outcomes of the ‘92 RIF followed by the Blackhawk shootdown. My community was so focused on the trees to have missed the entire forest; the greybeard’s short term gains in the late 90s paid off for them but stunted the career field for good. As it played out and looking back on it now, I realize how much (and how much better) Machievelli was playing the long game.

Thankfully I’m not bitter about it, but Fly, Fight, Win doesn’t mean what it used to largely due to post-9/11 mindsets and trading the flight hour program for DMO.
 
LeMay was a household name in he late 40's and early 50's. you do not have to be in your 90's to remember him.
 
Maintaining basic flying skills when you’re flying 4 sorties and 11 hrs in 90 days? Good luck with that. Hard to imagine that a crew based out of South Dakota didn’t know about cold weather altimeter effects. :confused:
 
It is fully clear that none of the personnel in the cockpit should have been up in a real airplane until they had additional training in a simulator.

Too low, too slow, and no one looking at the guages, and nothing but white out there.

I had several friends who failed out of military flight school for performance similar to that flight.
 
Velocity173 said:
Maintaining basic flying skills when you’re flying 4 sorties and 11 hrs in 90 days? Good luck with that.
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They also do something we internally call RAP (Ready Aircrew Program) bingo, aka musical chairs. In short, they alternate batches of crews who will meet RAP that quarter/month while mothballing others, and then flip the schedule to catch up the runt next quarter. The end state is they have a minimum complement of mission ready crews (CMR), but it's internally rotted.

iamtheari said:
Eh, it’ll buff right out.
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I see what you did there. ;)

TCABM said:
*unless of course they were patchwearers…that community has gone too far to protect the ‘investment’, but I digress.
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boy have you said a mouthful. I go too deep and I doxxx myself. BL, [non-11F] patches is the gift that keeps on giving. Dunning-Kruger every ***** day of the week and twice on Friday mornings.

For those not tracking the inside baseball; imagine an olympic team you were tasked to assemble from the general qualified population, which by "Rap bingo" stipulation is definitionally overstaffed....and you still end up having to non-volunteer people in order to make quorum. I wish I was merely being allegoric.
 
How does this happen?

In a review of the post-mishap medical treatment records, there is evidence the weight of the MIP exceeded the maximum weight limit of the ACES II ejection seat (211 lbs) and Air Force-adjusted maximum weight limit (245 lbs) for safe and effective use (Tab X-5). During several of his medical encounters prior to the mishap, the MIP’s weight was just under the 245lb maximum, with at least one weight being the MIP’s self-reported when the measured weight was above 245 lbs (Tab X-5). In the MIP’s treatment records shortly after the mishap, the MIP’s weight was nearly 260lbs (Tab X-5). The MIP’s weight likely contributed to the severity of the injuries noted from the mishap (Tab X-5)
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During my time the USAF went from simple weigh-in and 1.5 mile run/walk to the bike test and BMI measurement to measure/enforce fitness. I've been gone over 20 yrs. What do you do now?
 
Van Johnston said:
How does this happen?



During my time the USAF went from simple weigh-in and 1.5 mile run/walk to the bike test and BMI measurement to measure/enforce fitness. I've been gone over 20 yrs. What do you do now?
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I retired in 2016. Pushups, crunches, 1.5mi run and something else was the basic PT test. AF Special Warfare career fields have a tier II operational fitness test.
 
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