“It was a good bomber when it had power, but when it didn’t it flew like a brick,” he said.Ī B-47 strategic six-engine jet bomber climbs into to the sky in a hurry with rocket-powered assist pods attached to its fuselage. “A B-47 would fly at 600 knots and could reach 50,000 feet or more on a bombing mission. “My job aboard the B-47 when it was in the air was to monitor all the controls and talked to the pilot and copilot about what was happening with the engines and other equipment on board,” Gatrell said. The President had time to call off our a catastrophic counterattack by America on Russia. They thought it was incoming Russian missiles.īefore it was too late, SAC got its radar communications monitoring potential enemy air traffic over the top of the world up and running. Just before it went off the air someone spotted something on radar. This time communications between SAC and its base in Thule, Greenland, part of the “Dew Line,” had gone down. He also had a special code to call off an attack in progress,” Gatrell explained. SAC had a system set up with a special radio only used by the President to launch a nuclear attack. “Some of the other SAC squadrons had already taken off to deliver their nuclear bombs to prearranged targets. An hour later we were still sitting there, engines running. “We took off out to the flight line, cranked up our B-47s and sat on the runway with our engines running ready to takeoff. This was the real thing, not a drill,” the 72-year-old former Airman 2nd Class explained. horns on our SAC base at Little Rock Ark. “It was the morning after Thanksgiving Day 1961. One mission stands in his mind after more than half a century. was a crew chief on a B-47 “Stratojet” six- engine nuclear bomber during the early 1960s. Photo providedĭonald Gatrell of Port Charlotte, Fla. He was 21-years old when the picture was taken. Donald Gatrell had just arrived at SAC, Strategic Air Command, in 1960 to become a crew chief on a B-47 “Stratojet,” six-engine jet bomber.
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