1950 British Columbia B-36 crash

B-36B 44-92075 was a United States Air Force Convair B-36 bomber that crashed in northern British Columbia in 1950 after jettisoning a nuclear weapon. It was the first time in history that a nuclear weapon was lost.

The flight began the evening of February 13, 1950. The plane took off from Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, with sixteen crew and one observer on board. The plan was to fly down the Pacific coast of Canada before heading inland over Washington state and Montana. It would then launch a simulated attack on San Francisco, California, before landing at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. The flight was to have been part of the first full-scale practice for a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The 24-hour flight was not intended to enter Canadian airspace. The plane carried a Mark IV atomic bomb. The bomb contained a substantial quantity of uranium and conventional explosives, but according to the Air Force, it did not contain the plutonium core necessary for detonation.

Along with other planes on the maneuver, 92075 was suffering from the cold of the northern winter and some minor difficulties were noted before takeoff. Seven hours into the flight the number one, number two, and number five engines began shooting flames and were shut down. The remaining three engines suffered reduced power. An investigation blamed ice buildup in the carburetors.

With reduced power and heavy payload, the B-36 could not stay aloft. The crew decided that the plane would have to be abandoned. First, the atomic weapon was dropped and detonated in mid-air, causing a large conventional explosion off the coast of British Columbia. According to the Air Force, the fake practice core on board had already been inserted into the weapon.

The captain took the plane over Princess Royal Island so that the crew would not have to bail out into the freezing North Pacific. The crew members jumped, then the captain set the autopilot in a turn to take the descending plane back out into the open ocean, and bailed out himself.

The crew had remained in radio contact with Strategic Air Command and within minutes of the bailout the Canadian military launched Operation Brix to search for the missing men. The Canadians were never informed of the atomic nature of the payload. Poor weather hampered the search efforts, but a day later the men began to be found. Eventually twelve of the seventeen were found alive. The five others had mostly been those who bailed out first, and it was presumed they landed in the ocean and drowned.

An exhaustive search was not launched for the plane as it was believed to be at the bottom of the Pacific. Three years later, however, a USAF flight involved in the search for missing millionaire Ellis Hall spotted the wreckage of the plane on the side of Kologet Mountain in the isolated region north of Smithers, British Columbia, about fifty miles from the Alaskan border.

The USAF quickly launched an effort to investigate. A team was sent in September 1953 but was not given a high priority. After nineteen days of trudging through the wilderness they failed to reach the site. The effort was resumed the following year with better equipment, and in August 1954 a new team of USAF personnel with a local guide arrived at the wreckage. They recovered important components and then used explosives to destroy what was visible above the snow. The American and Canadian military kept the location of the wreck secret, though the operation had been run openly and the general details were known to the public. Strangely, when the U.S. military first released information about the crash decades later, the documents said the wreck was found on distant Vancouver Island.

In 1956 two civilian surveyors came upon the wreck and noted the exact location, which otherwise remained unknown for the next 40 years. In 1997 one of the surveyors provided the coordinates to two expeditions, a U.S. researcher and also the Canadian Department of National Defence, who planned to conduct an environmental analysis of the site. Both expeditions arrived around the same time, and were apparently the first to set foot there since 1956. The environmental mission found no unusual radiation levels. The activity led to public knowledge of the site location, and local salvage operations began. Many items went to local museums. In late 1998 the site was announced as protected by the government.

It remains uncertain just how the B-36 ended up in northern British Columbia. The plane had flown for some hours and cleared terrain higher than the altitude when the crew bailed out. It had also gone north instead of crashing at sea. One possibility is that the autopilot turn setting caused the abandoned plane to fly in circles and it was carried by the wind to the crash site. Rescue and weather records show the winds were blowing strongly in this direction. The remaining engines must have recovered from icing for the plane to stay up at all, and could have given enough power to climb.

Another theory is that one of the crew members did not abandon the plane with the others and instead tried to fly it back to Alaska. This action is normally credited to Captain Ted Schreier, one of the five whose body was never recovered. In Smithers, local legend has it that the USAF recovered a body from the wreckage in 1954.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed that the plane carried an actual plutonium core. This is unlikely; contemporary tests and practice were always conducted with a lead dummy, due to the possibility of an accident. The Air Force did not even control the cores, which were in the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission. Nor, as noted, was unusual radiation found at the site.

External links

• Broken Arrow - BC Aviation Magazine
• Site with links to news stories and DND report
• Site with pictures of the crash site