Death In Mid-Air

With stubby flames spitting from its four jet pods, the B-36 roared down the runway at Carswell Air Force Base outside Fort Worth, Tex., and lumbered heavily into the air. Up in the cockpit, Major Charles E. Crecelius, 30, the plane commander, ran crisply through his in-flight checklist and settled into the routine of a 17-hour combat training mission. He and his 16-man crew had been briefed to fly a series of dogleg courses around the U.S. Halfway through the mission, they would simulate a bombing run on Oklahoma City. Four F-51 fighters of the Oklahoma Air National Guard would try to intercept them over the target, make a series of camera gunnery passes at the huge, ten-engined bomber.

The B-36 was just swinging into its bomb run ten minutes from the target when the first fighters flashed down. Major Crecelius' gunners lined up the sights of their radar-controlled 20-mm. cannon. The fighters bored in, slipped under the B-36's tail and banked around for another pass. Suddenly, something went wrong. Screaming down at the "hostile" bomber, an F-51 went out of control, slipped over on its back, and, with a thundering explosion, ripped into the B-36 amidships.

Startled farmers looked up to see the giant bomber split in half and come spinning down in flames from 20,000 feet. Four men tumbled out and parachuted to safety, but the other 13 crew members, including Major Crecelius, were killed. All anyone found of the fighter was a propeller and the pilot still strapped to his seat.

It was the fourth fatal B-36 crash since the $3,500,000 bombers went into service almost three years ago. Three of the crew members aboard had survived the crash of a B-36 which, crippled by ice and fire, was ditched off British Columbia a year ago.

One of the three, Technical Sergeant Dick Thrasher, gunnery chief, also survived the latest crash, parachuting to the ground unhurt.

Two other air crashes last week took the lives of 54. At Key West, Fla., a twin-engined Navy trainer practicing blind flying rammed into a Cuban airline's DC-4. The Navy plane disintegrated; the airliner flew on minus part of a wing for almost a minute, then plunged into the sea. All 43 aboard the two planes were killed.

At Fort Wayne, Ind., a United Air Lines DC-3 swung off its course to avoid an electrical storm. A few moments later, cruising in turbulent air, it went out of control at 1,000 feet, crashed to the ground, burst into flames. Dead: all aboard --eight passengers, three crew members.

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