Mayday!

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.

The first leg of the trip was an uneventful trans-Atlantic flight to the air base in Goose Bay. After an overnight stay for rest, refueling, and a buying spree at the commissary, the following day it was on to Nebraska, where the crew planned to surprise Lincoln’s mayor with a “best wishes” letter and package from his English counterpart.

On ranger flights, the normal five-man crew grew by one with the addition of a crew chief, whose duties ranged from overseeing all ground maintenance to ensuring sausages, ale, and contraband were stowed safely on board. The crew chief on this particular flight was an old hand: Edward “Taff” Evison, 39, who had joined the RAF in 1937.

Evison had the dry, absurd wit many Brits appreciate. Charles Bland, who boarded with Evison when they were training at the Avro works, remembers his roommate merrily waving to perfect strangers as they drove past. “The first time he did it, I asked who it was he was waving to,” Bland says. “Taff’s reply was, ‘I have no idea, but he will go to work wondering all day who was in the car that waved to him this morning.’ ” Evenings, Evison enjoyed a pint and a tall tale at the local pub. “Taff used to concoct the most fantastic stories. We went from being nuclear scientists to secret agents. He would always warn people not to repeat what he had told them. It was all very serious. He liked the idea of somebody going home and saying he had just met with some very special chaps, but that he was not to breathe a word about it.”

Wearing their flight suits and “bone domes” (flying helmets), Evison and his adopted crew left Goose Bay in the XA908. The tremendous roar from its four turbojet motors built into a throbbing crescendo as the bomber quickly climbed through the gray Canadian sky before leveling off some nine miles high. The Vulcan — designed to carry one thermonuclear warhead or 21 conventional 1,000-pound bombs — was unarmed, though its tanks held about 9,000 imperial gallons of aviation fuel.

For the first couple of hours, the flight was routine. Evison sat among the rear crew in a small pull-down seat; all were hooked up to oxygen hoses. The Vulcan whisked along at subsonic speed, covering one mile every six seconds in the thin, freezing reaches of the bright blue stratosphere. The plane was due to arrive in Nebraska at 5:23 p.m., Detroit time. At 3:18, Willoughby-Moore reported to a ground station in Erie, Pa., that he was flying on instruments at 47,000 feet. He expected to be over Flint’s Bishop Airport 30 minutes later.

There were no more transmissions until 3:40, when the cry of “Mayday! Mayday!,” was picked up by a radio operator at Cleveland’s municipal airport. Willoughby-Moore reported he was flying at 35,000 feet over Dresden, Ontario, about 50 miles northeast of Detroit. He requested an emergency “steer” to Kellogg Field in Battle Creek. Before the operator could respond, the pilot anxiously asked for directions to any airport.

Investigators would later determine a short circuit in the Vulcan’s electrical system had caused all four generators to shut down. The emergency battery was intended to provide auxiliary power for 20 minutes, enough time to find an airfield at which to land. However, the backup battery quickly failed. This locked the flying controls in neutral, and the Vulcan helplessly rolled over and fell into a steep dive. “The plane had a total electrical failure,” Bland says, “and as all the controls were electro-hydraulic, it did not stand a chance. It had no gliding ability at all. It just went straight down.”

According to Tony Regan, a former Vulcan crew chief who lives in Devon, England, evacuation was out of the question for the rear crew. As the bomber plunged at a 70-degree angle, the immense pressure exerted by the rushing air on the hatch “made it impossible for them to leave the airplane.” With the jet flipped over on its back, the pilots would have had a brief, baleful view of Detroit’s topography rushing up to meet them. At some point, the canopy blew off. Willoughby-Moore “may have ordered Peacock to eject,” Regan says. “We will never know.” By the time a score of witnesses looked up and saw the Vulcan tearing out of the soggy sky, the men on board had only seconds to live.

At 477 Ashland — part of a neighborhood of narrow lots, crowded boatyards, and winding canals in the vicinity of Harbor Island and Windmill Pointe — 4-year-old Curt Kurshildgen and his mother were in the kitchen. Suddenly, some mighty unseen force gripped their two-story home. Fifty years later, Kurshildgen can still see the growing look of terror in his mother’s face. “The sound overhead kept getting louder and louder,” he recalls. “The windows were rattling and the dishes were shaking inside the glass cabinets. The engines were so loud and screaming that I could feel them rumbling right through me.”

The frightened youngster jumped into his mother’s arms, just as the shuddering roar became a thunderous boom. “The explosion shook the house so badly, it was like an earthquake. My mother ran with me to the bedroom, yanked a blanket off the bed, and covered us with it as she ran out of the house with me in her arms. I remember peeking out and seeing nothing but flames and smoke down the street, this before she covered my eyes.”

The free-falling Vulcan was traveling at tremendous speed at the moment of impact. It tore through treetops before burying itself among houses on Ashland near Scripps, leaving behind a trench 100 feet long and 40 feet wide. Inside 179 Ashland, Otto Ewald, a 77-year-old retired patternmaker, was watching television while his 65-year-old wife, Emily, was ironing. “Then — BLOOM!” Ewald later told a Detroit News reporter. “Everything seemed to be afire all at once — carpets, walls, furniture, everything. Flames went shooting all through the house.” Emily came rushing out of the kitchen, screaming, “I’m on fire!” Otto tried breaking through the buckled front door, but it wasn’t until a couple of neighbors heard the cries for help that the elderly couple were able to escape the burning house. Moments later the roof fell in and the porch collapsed. Meanwhile, the family collie, Lassie, jumped into the canal behind the house, her hindquarters ablaze.

The house next door, 175 Ashland, was flattened. “The only things I could recognize were a bathtub and a sink in the middle of the street,” a neighbor said. Fortuitously, the homeowners were at the music shop they operated on John R. Later that afternoon, Ivan and Florence Kay got a call from Otto Ewald. “Come see what’s left of your house,” he said.

Mud, red-hot debris, and jet fuel rained down on Harbor Island, the one-street island directly across the canal from Ashland. Splintered boards and timbers from the shattered seawall flew like giant matchsticks. “A car got blown from the foot of Ashland across the canal,” Schwartz says. “The transmission was stuck in the seawall.” C.C. Gallagher rushed out with a garden hose to battle the flames licking at his boatyard.

Pieces of the plane and crew were scattered over a seven-block area. A 6-foot wing section landed on a porch, while a 1-pound fitting hit the back of a terrified paperboy. For blocks around, the force of the explosion cracked plaster walls, blew out windows, and even ripped a garage door off its hinges.

The first alarms went out at 3:40, a minute before the Vulcan hit the ground. There quickly were more than 200 Detroit policemen and firefighters on the scene, as well as three fire trucks from Grosse Pointe Park. Thousands of spectators flocked to the site, snarling traffic. Priests and nuns from nearby St. Ambrose hurried to the scene. “The Gallaghers’ roof was covered with small body parts,” Schwartz says. Father Tom McWilliams “administered the last rites to remnants of one of the plane crew,” the Grosse Pointe News reported. Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe Park police “gathered fragments of burnt flesh and bones and twisted metal in a bushel basket, taking them to their station, where the grim remains were tagged … and later turned over to Selfridge Air Force authorities.”

Aviation experts, including a panel of British investigators who arrived several hours later, set up shop at the air base near Mount Clemens. There they tried to reconstruct the plane and the accident.

Over the next few days, military police and Detroit cops roped off the crash site, allowing only residents with identification tags to enter and leave the area. Search teams sifted through the wreckage. Authorities asked souvenir hunters to turn in anything they had picked up. Inside the heated garage used as a collection center, Schwartz saw “the end of a flight shoe with a couple of toes,” among other items. A hearse was parked outside, but the county medical examiner said the fragments were too small to help him identify the airmen. “I don’t know how they ever sorted out what few remains they did find,” Schwartz says. “There was no DNA testing back then, so there must’ve been a lot of guesswork.”

The crash crater, flooded because of the shattered seawall, had to be pumped before the twisted remnants of two engines could be pulled out. A power shovel dug 70 feet deep into the muddy ground in a futile attempt to find the cockpit or identifiable remains of the pilots. The Coast Guard searched Lake St. Clair as far north as Harsens Island on reports that an airman may have parachuted into the water. A chute was found tangled in a boat propeller, but there was no body.

When the first calls went out, the assumption was that there had to be many casualties. Emergency staffs were on standby at all area hospitals awaiting a flood of victims that, to everybody’s surprise and relief, never arrived. Several people on Harbor Island were slightly injured by the blast, but 73-year-old Victoria Ozelski was the only one who agreed to go to a hospital; she was treated for minor cuts and soon released. Emily Ewald was the most seriously injured. She was taken to Bon Secours Hospital and treated for third-degree burns on her face and upper body. She survived, as did the Ewalds’ scorched collie, Lassie.

Over the coming weeks, residents slowly rebuilt their wrecked homes and interrupted lives. All told, five houses were either destroyed outright or had to be torn down. Scores of additional residences were damaged, most of them in an area bounded by Manistique, Alter, Scripps, and the Detroit River. Several boats had also been lost or damaged.

In time, investigators issued their report. Upon their findings, the electrical systems in all Vulcans were modified. However, escape procedures for the rear crew remained the same until the final Vulcan squadron was phased out of service in 1984. By then, Charles Bland had been retired from the RAF for several years.

Now 82 and living in Lincoln, England, Bland has recently been doing some housecleaning. “I have got rid of a lot of old photos because my kids will not be interested,” he explains, “and at my time of life most of the people are dead and gone anyway.”

One memory is impossible to discard. Not long before the accident, he crossed paths with Evison at Goose Bay. Evison was on his way back to England after a six-week assignment while Bland was working on a Vulcan with a failed engine. British Bomber Command wanted Evison to stay and assist. But Bland told his homesick friend — a “real family man” with a wife and son waiting for him — that he could manage on his own. “That was the last time I saw Taff,” Bland says. “He had not been home long when he went off in XA908. I have often wondered that, had he stayed with me, he would not have been in the plane that day. But fate deals out all sorts of hands.”

The day the bomber fell out of the sky was a quickly forgotten footnote of Detroit’s Cold War era. The injuries and damage, while considerable, were not nearly as catastrophic as they could have been. “Can you imagine if that plane had come in on a flatter angle?” Schwartz says. “It would’ve wiped out an entire block or two.” Guyton Elementary was only two blocks away, while the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at the foot of Alter Road was just 1,000 yards south of the crash site. “The death toll could have been tremendous,” more than one official on the scene was quoted as saying.

Instead, no citizens were killed. The injured quickly recovered, the wrecked houses were soon replaced, and more than 100 claimants had their property losses covered by private or government insurers. The airmen’s deaths were tragic, of course, but as faceless flyovers with no connections to the city, their loss failed to truly resonate with the public or media.

Moreover, mere hours after the crash another major news event with far greater local implications pushed the Vulcan out of the headlines. Cardinal Edward Mooney — the longtime spiritual leader of Detroit’s 1 million Catholics — unexpectedly died in Rome while participating in the election of a new pope. Meanwhile, developments in the bomber crash received short shrift.

The following spring, the body of Lt. Peacock was recovered from the Detroit River. The only non-swimmer in the crew was found still strapped into his ejector seat. British military tradition calls for service members to be buried in the country where they fall. The crew of XA908 was laid to rest at Oak Ridge Cemetery, joining the 11 British airmen killed in training accidents at nearby Grosse Ile during World War II. Each Memorial Day, small Union Jacks are planted at this corner of a distant graveyard that lies in Flat Rock, but is forever England.

The hellish roar of the doomed Vulcan still resonates in Kurshildgen’s mind. “I was haunted by the memory for a long time,” he confesses. “I could never stay in a room when I heard an airplane flying near. I always covered my ears or wanted to go outside. My nightmares were always of airplanes crashing.”

Ironically, the former Detroiter learned to fly a helicopter and now works in corporate aviation in Texas. “I became less phobic about loud approaching noises,” he says. “But to this day, I still pause and listen to make sure aircraft engines sound normal as they fly overhead.”