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Final Seconds – Bud Holland’s Last Flight (The Fairchild B-52 Disaster)
I’m going to start this video off with a couple of facts that should be obvious to anyone who’s got a pair of eyes in their head. Fact number one, the B-52 Strata Fortress Strategic Bomber, the subject of today’s video, is a big plane. In fact, it’s a huge plane.
Wingspan 185 ft. That’s wider than a football field and length just short of 160 ft. Range 8,800 mi. Without cargo, it weighs around 85 tons, but it can carry an extra 35 tons of munitions. If
this were a ship, it would be a battleship or an aircraft carrier. It’s a massive cold war behemoth designed to fly for days, if necessary, to circle the globe carrying tons of missiles or bombs. It’s a super sized bomber for a Cold War superpower. Okay, fact number two. The B-52 is not designed to be an air show stunt plane. Now, I know that second fact is glaringly obvious, but for one man in particular, that fact was not going to get in the way of what he wanted to do with this plane.
That man was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Bod Holland, aircraft commander and chief of the 92nd Bomb Wings Standardization and Evaluation Branch. For those unfamiliar with US Air Force rankings, Lieutenant Colonel is a pretty senior position, outranked only by colonels and generals.
The standardization and evaluation part meant that Bud Holland was in charge of overseeing the flying standards for all the pilots in the 92nd Wing. In this position, reporting directly to the top brass, he should have represented the gold standard of what an Air Force pilot should be. Now, there’s no doubt that Bud Holland was an excellent pilot. To get where he had, you needed to be one of the best, but therein lies the rub.
He was one of the best and he knew it. And this knowledge, this confidence would ultimately be his undoing. Bud Holland was known as the man who could make the B-52 Strata Fortress do things other pilots simply couldn’t pull off. In some ways, he was the epitome of the Chuck Jagger hotst stick pilot. A guy who, even though now he was a lieutenant colonel and in charge of safety, he couldn’t resist the real, you know, seat of your pants flying that you saw in movies like Top Gun. Except he was doing all this in a flying battleship. You know, it’s not an F-16.
Away from the pilot’s seat, Bud seemed to be every bit the cool pilot in real life as well. Writer Eric Eel remembers being a teenager in Bud’s neighborhood.
I remember Bud coming over to collect his girls before the family headed out to eat. He’d injured his forearm in some frightening way, and it was held together by a plastic medical brace with a dozen metal pins punching through his skin and screwed into his bones. It was terrifying to look at, but the man acted like this was just an everyday occurrence. He was always nice to us and
I remember thinking how much he reminded me of Chuck Jerger. Well, the Chuck Jerger character played by Sam Shepard in the movie The Right Stuff.
Some anecdotes of Holland’s incredible but risky flying include how at the 1992 Aerospace Day at Fairchild Air Base, he made a low-level runway pass and then put his B-52 into a steep climb and wing over before a huge crowd of spectators. This aerial maneuver known as a hammerhead gives the audience a view of the upper part of the aircraft as it appears to be flying on its side. It caused so much stress on the plane that the fuselage reportedly popped over 500 rivets and fuel flowed from the vent holes on top of the wind tanks due to the degree of bank that Holland had put on the plane. Apparently, Bud often talked about rolling a B-52, a feat which has never been done, and apparently called those who urged caution [ __ ]
Another time, Holland reportedly put the B-52 into a death spiral above the local school where his daughter was playing softball. And on another occasion, he made a super low pass over the parade ground where a base ceremony was being held. It was so low that people ran off the ground in panic. Now, he got a verbal warning for that one. But it was this incident with the low flying out in the desert that really put Holland in the eyes of his fellow pilots into the league of brilliant but dangerous. Some air enthusiasts had organized a photo shoot, a B-52 low flyover. Now, Holland totally obliged them, flying below the ridge lines and at one point clearing a ridge with just 30 ft of altitude to spare.
Now, there’s absolutely no margin of error when you’re flying that close to the ground with a B-52 bomber. After all the other stunts, this was too much. His crewfiled a complaint of dangerous flying, and Lieutenant Colonel Mark McGee on went to the base commander and requested that Holland be permanently grounded. Holland was verbally reprimanded again, but with over 5,000 flying hours logged in the buff and coupled with his senior position, nobody was going to go as far as to actually ground Holland. And so he kept on flying. All McGee could do was try to make sure that none of his men flew with him. And whenever possible, McGee tried to make sure that he was Holland’s co-pilot. He reasoned that having at least one sensible senior manin the cockpit was better than having Holland flying alone.
A noble action, but one that would end up costing him his life. On Friday, June the 24th, 1994, the B-52Strata Fortress and a KC135Strato tanker took off from Fairchild Air Force Base to practice maneuvers for an air show which was scheduled for the coming Sunday. At the controls of theB-52 was our man Bud Holland, and in the co-pilot seat was the man who wanted him grounded, Lieutenant Colonel Mark McGee on. Radar operator that day was Lieutenant Colonel Ken Houston. And making up the four man crew there as safety observer was Colonel Robert Wolf. Now he was vice commander of the whole of the 92nd wing. Four very senior officers, all experienced flyers thereto practice some routine runway flyovers and circuits of the air base perimeter.
At just after 2:00 in the afternoon, ast he B-52 made an approach to land, Holland was waved off and given the instruction to go around for another landing. What should have been an easy maneuver for a pilot of Holland’s skill ends in disaster.
All four men on board were killed. McGeeon attempts to eject as you can see here, but it’s too late. He died along with the three other men. His wife and two young children were watching from the backyard of the family home and they eyes.
Aviation experts had no trouble identifying the cause of the crash. TheB-52 was banked into a 90° tight left turn at relatively slow speed. Now aB-52 traveling faster can turn at around60° of bank, but even there there’s no room for error. Holland’s turn of 90°meant that there was simply not enough air moving over the plane’s wings to keep it airborne. It simply stalled and fell sideways out of the sky, crashing in an enormous fireball and just narrowly missing a munitions bunker and a three-story brick building housing the Force Survival School where some 300students, instructors, and staff members were all enjoying a farewell party for a squadron commander.
So, four men were killed, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Why Holland performed that turn the way he did, we’ll never know for sure, as for security reasons, there are no cockpit voice recorders on military aircraft. Some have speculated that he did it to avoid flying over the base munitions bunker, an offense that could have gotten him grounded. But let’s face it, getting grounded would have been infinitely better than what happened. Having read reports of his flying and previous antics, I’m guessing that he knew not to fly over the bunker, but instead of flying around the long way, he probably just felt so comfortable at the controls that he just assumed he could pull it off Bud Holland style.
Like they say, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. And Bud Holland would seem to be a testament to that saying.
In the wake of the crash, the accusations of reckless hot stick flying and the attempts of the other pilots to have Holland grounded were front adCenter in the investigation into the crash. Incredibly, Air Force Secretary Sheila Whidnull, in an utterly dumb example of denying responsibility and reality, asserted that the B-52 was only practicing routine takeoff and landing, and that no acrobatics had been performed and that any stories countered to that narrative were purely speculative. Now, she obviously hadn’t been given the memo that a videotape of the accident existed and had already been broadcast on local TV. She must have assumed that all the footage of the crash had been seized on the day. Uh there is apparently other footage, but the Air Force did indeed confiscate all those of the videotapes. Widnol was later forced to admit that normal operating limits had been exceeded.
The top brass of the Air Force closed ranks on this one. The only person caught marshaled was a Colonel Pellerin who was charged with three counts of dereliction of duty. failure to obtain proper approval for the air show maneuvers, failure to ensure a safe routine, and failure to ground Holland after repeated violations of Air Force safety regulations. Each count carried a maximum sentence of 6 months in prison, a loss of pay for 6 months, a fine, a loss of pension and benefits, and a dishonorable discharge from the AirForce.
Pellerin pleaded guilty to the first two counts, and the third was dismissed. In the end, he was fined $7,500and given an official reprimand in light of his 25 years of service. Many saw this as a whitewash, a tacit acknowledgement that deep down Bud Holland’s style of flying was widely accepted by the top brass as real flying. And uh yeah, you know, sometimes that’s going to come with a price attached, which is little comfort to the family of Lieutenant Colonel Mark McGee, the man who put his life on the line to prevent something like this happening and ended up going down in flames right alongside the man that he tried to have grounded.