Brian Linder is a native Vermonter who grew up in Stowe and Waterbury. He is retired from National Life Group but remains as their corporate historian. He is now enjoying retirement as a ski patroller at Stowe Mountain Resort where he also is the historian for the resort. He lives in Waterbury and is working on two books about World War II aviation. Starting with the Camels Hump crash, he has have studied and researched the history of plane crashes in Vermont.
It could have been the plot directly from a Cold War thriller. A lone U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber on high alert during 1960 routinely carried atomic bombs as part of America's deterrent to Soviet aggression. Now imagine a routine mission suddenly going horribly wrong as panic and confusion rapidly engulf the crew.
Despite the desperate screams of the instructor pilot telling the crew to stay on board and fly the bomber, the crew abandoned their plane thinking it was about to crash. As they floated down in their parachutes the B-52 with its lights aglow in the night sky over upstate New York flew away — empty. Hours later the unmanned bomber blew up in a massive explosion when it hit a hillside near Barre. It's not fiction. It happened.
It was in the middle of the night on Dec. 9, 1960, when B-52 No. 55-114 played out this exact scenario except they thankfully didn't have any weapons on board. When one crewman panicked he set off a chain reaction leading the pilots to believe their plane was about to crash. It remains as one of Vermont's most spectacular aviation disasters yet few today remember the state's No. 1 news story of 1960. The city of Barre barely escaped having the massive and empty plane come down inside the city itself.
A huge crater and trench created by the crashing bomber still exist on private land that 54 years later is still littered with small bits of broken wreckage. With varying injuries all of the crew survived except the tail gunner who died when his parachute failed to open. His remains were found in a remote area of the Adirondacks during the following spring.
Story and Photos: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com
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