Word: bomber
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...plane had flown higher (354,200 ft.) and faster (4,104 m.p.h.) than man had ever gone in a winged ship. Walker, who was preparing to join the B70 program, had been flying "chase" behind the Valkyrie to observe it in operation. Next, an Air Force F-5 fighter-bomber tucked into position behind Walker. To the B-70's portside came a T-38 supersonic trainer with Colonel Joseph F. Cotton, the chief B70 Air Force test pilot who had saved Valkyrie 2 with the paper clip, riding as observer and officer in charge of the formation. Behind...
...walked away with only bruises. But his copilot, Air Force Major Carl S. Cross, 40, a Viet Nam veteran who was making his first checkout flight in the craft, inexplicably failed to get out. Down from 25,000 ft., followed by Cotton's T-38, the giant bomber plummeted like a felled eagle. It smashed belly-down into the Mojave Desert, exploding into a thousand pieces. The long, proud neck was broken off and hurled 50 yds.; the heat was so fierce that much of the fuselage melted into rivulets of metal. Cross's body was found...
...Indefensible." At week's end, as the Air Force convened a 62-member board of inquiry, few thought that Walker could have carelessly rammed the bomber; there was speculation that turbulence or the B-70's backwash may have caused the collision. But the circumstances surrounding the crack-up raised other questions. Though it is standard procedure for manufacturers of Air Force equipment to take pictures of their craft in flight, both for publicity and research purposes, even Pentagon officials conceded that last week's spectacular line-up was hardly standard...
Died. General William H. Blanchard, 50, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff and No. 2 in command, a heavy-bomber pilot who pioneered in the daringly low-level B-29 raids against Japan in World War II, and as Curtis LeMay's operations officer planned the first A-bomb drop on Hiroshima, then spent 15 years helping to build the Strategic Air Command, all of which earned him four stars at the age of 48; of a heart attack; in Washington...
...three Phantoms were flying northwest, into the evening sun, escorting a slow, radar-laden RB-66 reconnaissance bomber close to the Red Chinese border. To Major Wilbur R. Dudley, 34, of Alamogordo, N. Mex., the first hint of trouble was the wink of cannon fire beneath his Phantom fighter. It came from four "silver, swept-wing and well-kept aircraft"-Communist MIG-17s, presumably Chinese. "I broke to the right," recalled Dudley after last week's action, "and pickled [dropped] my fuel tanks, and then I came up on this MIG just as it was making a firing pass...