Mayday!

Fifty years ago, a British bomber crashed into an east-side Detroit neighborhood

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Illustration by Christian Northeast

It was a rainy Friday afternoon when the crippled jet bomber came howling out of nowhere, rattling windows, lifting rooftops, and blowing birds out of trees.

“It looked like a huge gray bat, something quite fast,” said a lady who had been shaking out drapes on her second-story dust porch. “It had a sharp point in front and sort of tapered back. It looked like it was going to land on me.

“I started to scream. …”

Moments later, before startled residents of Detroit's east side had a chance to fully comprehend the disaster rushing their way, the Delta-winged Vulcan aircraft smacked nose-first into Ashland Street like an 80-ton lawn dart tossed from the heavens, burrowing itself deep into the spongy ground and exploding into tens of thousands of little pieces.

One man was sitting on the upper terrace of his home, seven blocks away in Grosse Pointe Park, when he was rocked by the concussion. He saw flames shoot into the sky, followed by a mushroom cloud of dirt, smoke, and debris — “just like an atomic bomb.” A group of schoolchildren dropped to the ground and huddled near a fence, fearing it was the Russian nuclear attack they had been preparing for through Civil Defense drills and government films for as long as any of them could remember.

Thirteen-year-old Fred Schwartz, just home from Guyton Elementary, was changing clothes when the suction from the blast six blocks away ripped open his bedroom’s crank-style windows. “There was this huge ball of fire,” remembers Schwartz, who hopped on his bicycle and pedaled to the sound of sirens, where his father, a battalion chief, commanded the first firefighters on the scene.

It was an astonishing sight. Thick smoke and flames poured out of a giant crater where moments before two houses had stood. Dazed neighbors wandered out of their blast-shattered homes, through streets littered with smoking wreckage and body parts. Some were crying or screaming for help. Trees were on fire. Flames shot up from a broken gas main under the buckled sidewalks. Nearby canals were littered with debris. A utility pole was protruding through the roof of a cabin cruiser. In what could only be described as a true miracle, nobody on the ground was killed. But there were six British airmen on board the stricken jet, and nobody who heard the crash or saw the devastation doubted their fate. Nearly every newspaper report and sidewalk conversation that followed used the same expression: The crew had been “blown to bits.”

Among the ghoulish finds turned over to authorities was a finger with a ring attached to it, a discovery that inspired a prank a few days before Halloween. “Some kids came to school the next week and showed this teacher a finger they said came from the crash,” Schwartz says. “One of them had cut a hole in the bottom of a small jewelry box and poked his finger through it, then packed cotton around it. It was a gag, but she just about fell over.”

Schwartz followed his father into the Detroit Fire Department, retiring as a senior chief. He now lives in Sterling Heights. And, although his recollections of the crash have remained vivid over the last half-century, he admits: “I’ve never really thought about the fellows who were in that plane.”

The crew that climbed into the Vulcan XA908 at Goose Bay, Labrador, on Oct. 24, 1958, was a plucky bunch of cold warriors. The four-engine jet — developed for the Royal Air Force by the venerable British aircraft manufacturer Avro in the early 1950s — was an integral part of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, designed to deliver an atomic payload against the Soviet Union in the years before intercontinental missiles made this form of delivery obsolete. Flight Lt. John Willoughby-Moore and other Vulcan pilots were told that in a first-wave attack on Moscow, more than half of them wouldn’t return.

Willoughby-Moore, the 34-year-old father of two young children, Nigel and Judith, wasn’t dissuaded by such a grim prospect. As the captain of the aircraft, he fully enjoyed flying the “tin triangle,” though his wife, Julia, sometimes grew nervous. It was sleek, powerful, and menacing, painted a brilliant “anti-flash” white to reflect thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion. With its uniquely shaped wings measuring nearly 100 feet across, the Vulcan was as large as an airliner but surprisingly nimble. It soon became a popular symbol of British might, and was later featured in the James Bond film Thunderball.

The captain and his co-pilot, 27-year-old Flight Lt. Brian Peacock, were perched in the windowed “blister” above the Vulcan’s nose. The flight deck was so crowded with gauges, switches, throttles, hoses, wires, and other equipment that the pilots used “fighter-style” control sticks instead of the conventional handlebar found on large aircraft.

Squeezed into the drop-down section behind the cockpit were three officers: navigator Harvey Skull, 35; radar navigator Jim Watson, 34; and electronics officer Tony Baker, 23. They sat shoulder to shoulder, facing backward, their work area 4 feet below the flight deck. Like a tribe of atomic-age cave dwellers, the “rear crew” inhabited a clammy, claustrophobic world of glowing dials, flickering needles, and jammed chart tables. Their only view of the outside came through a pair of small portholes high above them. Even their method of escape was primitive when compared to the pilots’ ejector seats. In an emergency, they were expected to force open a floor hatch and then slide down the door into the slipstream, a static line pulling open their parachute. Unfortunately, the hatch was directly in front of the main wheel; if not retracted, an exiting crew member risked being blown straight into it.

The crew had been together since September 1957, when the XA908 was delivered to Squadron No. 83 at the RAF base at Waddington, just outside Lincoln, England. Since then, they had visited such exotic stations as Tripoli, Entebbe, Bulawayo, and Embakasi, where they helped to ceremoniously open Nairobi’s new airport before embarking on a goodwill tour of Rhodesia.

Crews were social units whose bonds grew tighter on “ranger” missions — solo overseas flights that separated a plane from the rest of the squadron for several days of training and public relations. On Thursday, Oct. 23, 1958, the XA908 embarked on its first “western ranger” to the United States. The bomber was scheduled to fly from Waddington to the Offutt Air Force Base near Lincoln, Neb., home to the Strategic Air Command. They were to return home the following Monday.

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