Showing results for "Broken Arrow" in History

Douglas Webster was a young pilot from Ohio, newly married and with 17 combat missions under his belt. On December 5, 1965 he strapped into an A-4 Skyhawk bomber for a routine weapons loading drill and simulated mission. After mishandling the maneuver, the plane and its pilot sunk to the bottom of the South China Sea, along with a live B43 one-megaton thermonuclear bomb. A cover-up mission began.

On the night of April 11, 1950, a B-29 Superfortress bomber took off from Albuquerque, New Mexico and crashed three minutes later, killing the entire crew. The incident was a designated a "Broken Arrow," an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons components. The crash was the second Broken Arrow in U.S. military history, and the first to occur within the Continental United States. "Boomtown" is a limited podcast series that will investigate the crash, the aircrew, the aircraft and everything in between. Using declassified military records, along with newspapers, personal ...