Amazing Aerial Stories: A TISIT Digest
In the last 4 years, we’ve covered some amazing stories about aviation. In this special digest episode of The Internet Says it’s True, we take a look back at four of these stories:
– An American pilot flying for the French that most people have never heard of
– A very humorous and downright ballsy stunt by one of the world’s most famous aviators
– The time we almost dropped a nuclear bomb on South Carolina
– An impossible tale of a woman who fell from the sky
- The Black Swallow of Death: The Tale of Eugene Bullard
Eugene Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1895. His father was a free black man and his mother was an Indigenous woman from the Creek tribe. Together, they had 10 children. Eugene’s father had come to America from the Caribbean and avoided slavery by living with the Native Americans. The Creek Tribe took them in, and kept them safe from the ravages of slavery and civil war in America. But as the 7th child of 10, Eugene wasn’t happy. He ran away from home several times and the most recent time had been found by his father, who brought him home and beat him. But something else happened around that time that made an impact on the young boy. His father had been attacked and hit a white man in self defense. In retaliation, he was severely beaten and almost lynched by a group of drunken white men in Georgia. At 1906, at the age of 11, Eugene decided he wasn’t safe in his current situation. He ran away for good.
For the next six years, Bullard wandered the American South, searching for a freedom and happiness he imagined was out there for him. And in 1912, he found it in the form of a German freighter. He stowed away on the ship bound for Hamburg Germany and traveled throughout Europe. From Germany, to Scotland, he made his way to London. He earned money as a comedy performer in an all-black entertainment troupe and as a boxer. One of the boxing matches brought him to France, and he loved Paris. Bullard’s father came from the French Colony of Martinique and spoke French in his childhood home. In fact, his father’s family lived in Martinique after escaping slavery in nearby Haiti. Both were French colonies at the time, so the French language didn’t sound foreign to Bullard. Nor did their way of accepting people with a different skin color. He had been told that a black man and a white man could succeed just the same in France and was once quoted as saying “it seemed to me that French Democracy influenced the minds of both black and white Americans there and helped us all act like brothers.”
World War 1 had begun in the summer of 1914 and Bullard decided to sign up with the French Foreign Legion and fought in some of the war’s most historic and deadly battles. With the casualty figures as high as they were, it was miraculous that Bullard survived through them. As his French Foreign Legion regiment was decimated, he was allowed to join the French Army in the 170th Infantry Regiment.
Soldiers in 170th Infantry were known as the “Swallows of Death.” Their symbol depicted this swallow on their patch and logo. He was the only black member of the regiment and soon became known as “The Black Swallow of Death.” The 170th was an elite unit – but soon saw death all around him in the Battle of Verdun. In that 10 month battle, the French suffered 850,000 casualties. Eugene Bullard came out of the battle badly wounded. He had lost all his teeth, and survived a hole in his thigh from shrapnel. He was awarded both the Croix de Guerre (Cwa de gare), or Cross of War and the Medal Militaire in June 1916. Though his days of foot soldiering were over, he hadn’t yet embarked on the part of his life that would make him famous.
While recovering from his wounds from the ground war, Eugene Bullard was having drinks with an American friend in Paris who bet him $2,000 that he couldn’t enlist in the French Flying Service. Bullard took the wager to heart and trained for 7 months to become an aircraft gunner in the French Air Force’s Lafayette Flying Corps. This was a volunteer air force in France made up of All-Americans. It didn’t take long for him to work his way forward to the cockpit and in 1917, Bullard earned his wings in the Aeronautique Militaire in a unit called the Escadrille 85. He was now the world’s first black fighter pilot.
Bullard never claimed to be a great pilot. He had trouble mastering the difficult-to-fly Caudron G4, which was a twin engine fighter. Despite that, it’s said that he scored 2 aerial victories, shooting down a Fokker Triplane and Pfalz D 3. He and his monkey Jimmy – yes, he had a pet Rhesus monkey named Jimmy, who often accompanied him in the airplane, flew over 20 combat missions and remained only one of 2 black fighter pilots in World War 1.
Around this time, America was entering World War One. Many of the Lafayette Flying Corps pilots – remember these were Americans – were leaving the unit to fly with the American Military. And while his American flying friends were leaving to do this – Bullard was not accepted. The American Military wouldn’t agree to have a black pilot.
Eventually, Bullard found himself back on the ground, fighting the grueling battles with 170th Infantry again until the end of the war. By the end of World War One, he was one of the most decorated soldiers in France.
This story sounds like something from a movie. But it’s not over! After the war, Eugene worked as a jazz drummer in the 1920s and 30s. He eventually opened a jazz club of his own and called it the Escadrille – an homage to the name of his French air squadron. He became very well known in France and rubbed elbows with celebrities like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Charlie Chaplin and Langston Hughes. Near the end of the 1930s, the world was spinning into war again – and Bullard was there for it.
In the beginning of World War II, he worked with the French military in their espionage division. There was a faction of French Citizens that supported the Nazis. Bullard embedded himself within them to report their clandestine activities back to France. Later in World War II, he fought as a machine gunner in the 51st infantry and was severely wounded by an artillery shell. France was being invaded by Germany and he feared being captured by the Nazis, so he escaped through Spain and made his way back to America.
The America he returned to in the late 1940s wasn’t much different than the one he left as a boy. He had found work doing odd jobs, but had trouble succeeding in a world that only saw his skin color. He worked with New York civil rights leaders to take up the cause of fighting for the rights of African Americans, but became disheartened to the cause when he was beaten by police when he and his friends had become the target of a racist attack at a concert.
In the 1954, this war hero – who was unknown to Americans – who at the time was being forced to sit in the back the bus in New York – was personally invited back to France by French President Charles de Gaulle himself to be given the honor of lighting the flame on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. A few years later, he was officially made a Chevalier de la Legion dHonneur for his service in two world wars. Despite all of this – despite 15 military decorations as an American fighting in France, he had never been recognized by the United States for any of his amazing achievements.
Eugene Bullard – an American War hero who is largely unknown to Americans – died in 1961. He was laid to rest with Full French Honors in the Federation of French War Veterans Cemetery in New York. He had a special request. He was buried in the uniform of a French Foreign Legionnaire.
In 1994, 33 years after his death, he was finally given his due recognition in The United States. President Clinton posthumously commissioned Eugene Bullard, “The Black Swallow of Death” as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force.
2. Flying Under the Bridge: A Chuck Yeager Legend
Chuck Yeager grew up in Myra, West Virginia and joined the Army Air Force in 1941. He started as an aircraft mechanic, but quickly rose up through the ranks and became a pilot. He had a natural talent both as a pilot, but also had unusually sharp 20/10 vision. It was said Yeager once shot a deer at 600 yards.
He trained as a fighter pilot flying a P-39 Airacobra, but shipped off to fight in World War II to fly the legendary P-51 Mustang. One story that’s in Yeager’s book – he recalls that when he was training on the P-51, he’d fly so low that the airplane would leave prop marks on the dirt roads and wire fences were a flight hazard. This is the aircraft that is said to have saved the day. Allied bombers were being shot down by the German Luftwaffe at an all time high, and the P-51 fighter plane was introduced as a bomber escort. Often, the P-51s would break away from the bombers they were escorting to dog-fight with German fighters deep inside German territory. Chuck Yeager racked up 12 and a half aerial victories in his P-51. He called his airplane “Glamurus Glen” after his fiancee, Glennis.
He was promoted to captain during his tour in the European theater and, by the time he was ready to return home in 1945, he had flown a total of 64 combat missions – a total of 270 hours in his P-51. He came back to the states and married Glennis the next month.
If you look up Yeager’s record during WWII, it’s pretty incredible. It’s more fascinating and interesting than I can possible fit into this podcast, but it includes many amazing stories, including being shot down over France and escaping thanks to the French resistance.
But Chuck Yeager’s legacy in world war two would be overshadowed by his legacy as a test pilot later in life. On October 14, 1947, he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier. It was a Bell X-1 aircraft, and he flew it at mach 1.05 (that’s 5% faster than the speed of sound, or 805 miles per hour). He went on to break numerous other flight records, both in speed and altitude.
As a full colonel in the 1960s, he commanded the fighter wing a clark air base in the phillipines, where he accrued more than 400 more hours of combat flight time. In 1969, he was promoted to Brigadier General and was named vice commander of the 17th air force.
But let’s go back to that time after the war. The test pilot days. It was 1948, just one year after he had achieved fame by breaking the sound barrier. And he decided on a spur of the moment trip to visit his parents in West Virginia in a brand new aircraft. The Air Force didn’t even know about it.
He zoomed under the downtown bridge – some say as low as 6 feet off the water and saw people were jumping off their boats into the water as he approached. He pulled up and in his words, “got the hell out of there.”
Yeager didn’t think twice about it. The whole thing took less than a second. He didn’t realize that he had just done something that would create a legend for decades to come.
Since then, just like most legends, the story has become embellished and changed. One man claims he arranged the flight as a publicity stunt for his newspaper – Yeager says that’s not true. Other people report seeing the jet do a victory barrel roll after flying under the bridge – the jury is still out on that one. Someone else said they saw the airplane do three slow rolls.
To Chuck Yeager, a man who escaped capture after being shot down in WWII, a man who had broken the sound barrier, who was known as the fasted man in the world, who once parachuted out of a failing aircraft at 8,500 feet wearing a high-altitude suit, who flew hundreds of combat missions – this was just a blip. Just a meaningless moment of fun. But it created a legacy that’s still talked about today. The Bridge over the Kanawha River is really named after the legacy that Chuck Yeager created for air flight and the honor that he brings to his home state of West Virginia. But now that you know this story, you won’t be able to drive through Charleston without thinking about this quick 1948 flight.
General Chuck Yeager is now 97 years old. I found his email and contacted him to see if he would like to talk with me for this episode. And to my amazement, the world’s fasted man – the man whose name appeared on the video game my brother and I played as kids actually wrote me back. What I got in response were three words. “Thank you, no.”
3. Broken Arrow: The Time We Almost Nuked South Carolina
Remember that movie, Broken Arrow? John Travolta and Christian Slater as a couple Air Force pilots whose job it is to locate some missing dropped nuclear warheads? Fun film – well it turns out Broken Arrow is the official term the military uses for an accident involving nuclear weapons. And in the 76 years since the invention of nuclear weapons in 1945, we’ve had at least 32 Broken Arrow scenarios.
For this week, we’re just going to be talking about one particular aircraft. The Boeing B-47 Stratojet. Even before the end of World War Two, the Air Force had asked manufacturers to start drawing up plans for a long range jet-powered bomber. Remember the airplane that really ended World War Two by dropping atomic bombs in Japan was the B-29, a propeller aircraft. The United States never did put any jet aircraft into combat in that war. It was still very early in the development of jet-powered flight.
The B-47 was finally put into service in 1951. It was a swept wing sleek looking bomber aircraft with 6 engines carried under its wings. And if I had to describe the problem with these aircraft, it would be that they suffered from growing pains.
There were the growing pains of jet-propelled flight itself. While the aircraft was incredibly fast and powerful, it took a very long time to accelerate. The newly designed swept wing caused structural issues. New design elements like the sweep wings and power elements like jet engines were being put on an aircraft essentially using outdated metallurgy and construction techniques. And there were a lot of limits on its capability. It was a difficult plane to fly for airmen who were used to a 10-man crew. The B-47 flew with only 3. So every moment of flight – every issue – every warning – was happening faster and with less men to tend to it. The slightest lapse in attention could now be catastrophic. Then there were the growing pains of a quickly growing air force. Ramping up mass production on the aircraft led to a few manufacturing issues. By the time they were produced, the existing refueling infrastructure didn’t meet the demands of these new long-range bombers.
They started retiring the B-47 just 18 years after it was introduced. To give you a frame of reference, the B-52 Bomber was introduced in 1955 and has yet to be retired from service 66 years later. So the B-47 Stratojet was a short-lived bomber designed to face a very real and serious threat of nuclear war. It was designed to carry nuclear bombs and could fly all the way to the Soviet Union with them.
There were just over 2,000 Stratojets manufactured. And a staggering 10% of them – 203 to be exact – were lost in crashes. And when you look at the timeline of when this aircraft was in its peak duty, it coincides with the time when aircraft started carrying nuclear weapons. That leads to the horrible events of 1957 and 1958 that we’ll get to in just a moment.
The reason we spent so much time learning about the B-47 is that out of the 32 Broken Arrow events in history, 9 of them involved this aircraft. Now think back to what we learned about how short-lived this airplane’s operational lifespan was – this gives you a pretty good idea of how dangerous it really was. And it’s even crazier than that. Those 9 potential nuclear accidents happened in a period of just 3 years, from 1956 to 1958. And in 1957 and 1958, 49 of these aircraft crashed, killing a total of 122 airmen. As many problems as there were with the B-47, neither of the two stories we’re going to talk about were the fault of the aircraft.
In the dark early morning of February 5 of 1958, a B-47 Crew commanded by Air Force Colonel Howard Richardson left from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to conducted a simulated combat mission for training. It was carrying a 7,600 pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb. In airspace nearby, Air Force Lt. Clarence Stewart was piloting his F-86 fighter jet. He didn’t see the B-47 on his radar and at approximately 2am, the two aircraft collided. With the wing missing from his small fighter jet, Lt. Stewart ejected and parachuted to safety in a swamp. For the B-47 bomber, their fuel tanks had been heavily damaged and were leaking fuel. Colonel Richardson didn’t know if he could land the bomber without the nuclear bomb detaching and detonating. He made the choice to ditch the bomb in the waters off Tybee Island in Georgia. He was able to land the plane safely at Hunter Air Base in Savannah. But that bomb landed in the Atlantic Ocean near Wassaw Sound. And as far as we know…that’s where the bomb rests, undetonated, today.
Just over one month later, on March 11 of 1958, it was the middle of the afternoon in Mars Buff, South Carolina, when six year old Helen and nine year old Frances Gregg were playing in their yard with their cousin Ella. Suddenly, a whistle from the sky and a huge explosion.
Here’s what happened. Captain Earl Koehler was piloting a B-47E Stratojet 15,000 feet in the sky over South Carolina. The crew was scheduled to fly to the United Kingdom and continue on to North Africa. This was part of an ongoing training mission to track the accuracy of mock bomb drops. Except the bombs on board were very real. Tensions with The Soviet Union were at a height and the Cold War was becoming less cold by the day. For this reason, the aircraft taking part in this training mission, ominously dubbed Operation Snow Flurry, carried live nuclear bombs in case war broke out during the missions. The bomb being carried by Captian Koehler’s B— 47 that day was similar in size to the one lost in the Atlantic in February – a 7,600 pound Mark 6 nuclear bomb.
The first indication of a problem that day was when Captain Koehler noticed an indicator light telling him that a bomb harness locking pin did not engage. This wasn’t the mechanism that held the bomb in place – it was an added safety measure. It was one of a few steps to secure it to the plane. When he noticed this indicator, the bombardier and navigator, Captain Bruce Kulka scrambled to the bomb bay area of the aircraft to check it out. As he reached around the bomb to lift himself up, he accidentally grabbed hold of the one thing he shouldn’t have. The bomb’s emergency release mechanism. <audio?> This dropped the full weight of the ten foot long, 7,600 pound bomb, along with Captain Kulka, onto the Bomb bay doors. The bombardier desperately reached his arm out to grab onto something. The bomb, however – weighed too much for the doors. He looked down through the open doors and watched in horror as the bomb started falling 15,000 feet to the land below.
The three children playing below at the Gregg house would have had no idea that the bomb was coming toward them. The Mark 6 nuclear bomb detonated 200 yards from the children. All three were injured, but none were killed. Luckily for those children, and for Mars Bluff, South Carolina, and for the South Eastern part of the United States, the nuclear capsule was not on the bomb. The capsule, which contained the fissile nuclear core, was still on-board the aircraft and hadn’t been loaded into the bomb housing.
Even so, that bomb was carrying enough explosives to blow a crater into the ground that was 70 feet wide and 30 feet deep. In addition to injuring the three girls playing, it obliterated their playhouse, injured their mother, father and brother, and damaged seven nearby buildings.
After the incident and the victims’ recovery, the Gregg family sued and was awarded $54,000 in damages. If you visit Mars Bluff, South Carolina, you can still see the crater today. It’s overgrown with trees and brush, but the site is marked with a historical marker.
As for the bomb dropped outside Tybee Island in the Atlantic Ocean? Throughout the years, the military has mounted efforts to locate the bomb – even as recently as 2004. But to this day, it’s one of 6 American nuclear weapons that have been lost and never found.
In 1968, German biologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Kopekah bought an abandoned cabin in a lowland rain forest in Peru. It was at the western foothill of the El Sira mountain range and their purpose in buying the cabin was to establish a new research station to study the local flora and fauna. They had worked for the Museum of Natural History in Lima and had decided to embark on what was only meant to be a 5 year mission at the research station, which they named Panguana. It was there that Maria and Hans-Wilhelm’s 14 year old daughter Julianna got an unusual education.
4. The Woman Who Fell From the Sky and Lived
Instead of being in school in the bustling city of Lima, she was homeschooled in this Amazon rain forest research station. She would go out with her parents on their many trips into the wild. She learned things that a 14 year old girl normally doesn’t get to learn – How to identify various types of insects, plants and animals in the rain forest. And how to survive among them. Even though this education was great for her, the school back in Lima eventually said she had to return. And so she went back to the city to finish high school.
When Julianna was 17, her mother had the idea to fly Julianna back to Panguana to visit her father for Christmas. Maria returned to Lima to pick up her daughter and the two of them would fly together. The plan was to fly from Lima to the small Iquitos airport on the 19th or 20th of December, but young Julianna was about to graduate high school. She wanted to attend her graduation ceremony and a dance and leave after that. So the two were forced to fly out on Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1971. And the only airline that they could book was LANSA – that stood for Lineas Aéreas Nacionales Sociedad Anonima – a struggling Peruvian airline with a poor reputation. Hans-Wilhelm protested the decision to fly with LANSA, but it was all that was available.
At noon on December 24th, LANSA Flight 508, a Lockheed L188A Electra Turboprop carrying 86 passengers took off from Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport. The final destination of the flight was Iquitos, Peru, with a scheduled stop happening at Pucullpa. But the airplane would never arrive.
17 year old Julianna and her mother Maria Kopekah were on board LANSA flight 508 and it had just taken off for Pucullpa, Peru. The first half of the flight was relatively smooth, but as the flight with 86 passengers and six crew members flew over the Puerto Inca province, it encountered severe turbulence and heavy thunderstorms at 21,000 feet.
The plane shuddered, dipped, dropped and bounced in the horrible storm. Items were thrown around the cabin and the passengers began to scream. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning…
The lightning struck the right wing of the L188A and ignited the fuel tank, blowing a hole in the aircraft. When Maria exclaimed “That’s it. Now it’s all over,” it would be the last words that Julianna would hear her mother say.
The plane fell from an altitude of 9,843 feet. As the plane broke apart, Julianna’s seat stayed connected in a row of three, which may have helped to slow it down during its descent. It fell through tall trees, further slowing her down. When she came to a stop in the mud, still strapped to her seat, she had suffered a broken collarbone, and gashes to her left leg and right arm. Her right eye was swollen completely shut. But somehow, despite falling nearly 2 miles from the sky – she was alive. For the next day and a half, she laid there, fading in and out of consciousness until she gained enough strength to start moving around and begin looking for her mother, who had been seated right next to her. She couldn’t find her.
Not being able to find her mother, and suffering from wounds on her body, she made the decision to start trying to find help. She had one sandal left from the crash and would throw it ahead of herself to scare off any dangerous animals that might be in front of her. She stumbled upon a small creek and began following the water. It led to a bigger creek, and eventually to a river. She remembered something her dad had taught her in her days at Panguana. Following a river downstream will always lead to civilization. So downstream she headed.
She lived by drinking rain water off of leaves and a bag of candy she had found in the plane’s wreckage. Her wounds began to become infected and infested with bugs and larva. She continued on, even after she ate the last piece of candy from the bag. Her watch had stopped working. At one point, she came across an empty boat on the river, but no one was around it. She passed the boat to find a path to a small hut. That’s where she found temporary shelter and a gas can. Despite the stinging pain, she poured the gas on her wounds and disinfect them. Or at the very least, to clean them of infestation. Julianna had no idea of how many days it had been. She used that small hut for shelter for the next day and a half.
As the sun started to set the following evening, she heard voices approaching the cabin. It was three Peruvian fishermen who discovered her laying in the hut. They were amazed. This white girl in the middle of the rain forest appeared from nowhere. They brought her to the nearest village. The nearest village had a pilot who flew the 17 year old to Pucullpa where she was taken to a hospital and reunited with her father. Julianne had been walking through the rain forest of Peru by herself for 11 days.
She was the only survivor out of 92 people on board LANSA flight 508. Her mother’s body was found 2 weeks later.
There were many investigations and inquiries into why the plane crashed. Examining the wreckage showed that the plane was mostly made up of spare parts. LANSA had a poor safety record to begin with. And it’s thought that the pilots felt pressure to push through the hazardous weather conditions because of the holiday. LANSA was stripped of their operating authority. They never flew another flight after the crash.
Experts aren’t entirely sure how Julianna survived the almost 10,000 foot fall to earth. As I said earlier, one of their theories is that her row of seats stayed together and may have acted as sort of a parachute to slow her rate of descent. They also believe that falling onto a tall tree allowed her impact to be lessened by breaking through so many branches on the way down.
Julianna’s story has been made into several books and movies, most notably the film “Wings of Flight” by director Verner Hertzog, who was interested in the story because he was originally scheduled to be flying on LANSA flight 508 that day.
As for Julianna, she honors the life of her mother through a long and successful career as a biologist. She’s currently the director of a thriving research station that’s now grown into a small camp responsible for publishing more than 180 biology research papers. She’s the director of Panguana – the very place her parents founded and the place that taught her how to survive.
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