The Routine Flight

One bright California morning last week, bomb-shaped General Curtis Emerson LeMay, boss of the Strategic Air Command, landed at March Air Force Base near Riverside, stepped off the ramp, glanced at his watch, then stared dourly at the calm, brilliant sky, and waited. Soon three big, eight-jet B-52 SAC bombers streaked into view in tight formation, peeled off and landed a minute apart, their huge brake parachutes billowing from their tails. Throttled down, the planes sedately taxied two miles to the base-operations building, their high-pitched, throbbing scream searing the air. Then, abruptly, the planes were silent, immobile in a neat line, each engine coughing up a puddle of unused fuel. With equal abruptness, 600 onlookers broke into a wild cheer. The three swept-wing planes, carrying 27 crewmen in all, had just completed the first round-the-world nonstop jet flight in record-breaking time: they had flown 24,325 miles in 45 hr. 19 min. at an average speed of about 550 m.p.h.

The Conquest. The momentous trip, announced the happy LeMay with transparent modesty, was "just another training mission, no different from dozens and dozens of others." In some ways, this was true. The crews were as carefully briefed and seemingly as routinely inured as for any long-distance trip. Yet as they proved once again SAC's enormous everyday striking power, it was also clear that SAC's able flyers had made the kind of history that would soar to the top of man's unending catalogue of conquests over nature.

Five planes began the mission from California's Castle Air Force Base; one, after a mechanical failure, dropped out in Labrador, and another landed by prearrangement in England. Every detail had been attended to: worldwide communications and weather services, precisely timed geographical check points, State Department clearance, stand-by refueling planes. For the flyers themselves, there was steak (cut into bite-size pieces), canned chicken, ice-cold milk, fruit juice, soup, freshly baked cakes, candy bars. At four or five strategic places along the route (the exact number is secret), the jet-age birds dropped down from their 40,000-ft.-plus altitude to drink in tons of fuel, delivered at prop-age altitudes by four-engined KC-97 Stratotankers,* then, with great--but wasteful--surges of power, climbed back to their more efficient heights.

The Coordinator. Soaring high into the clean, quiet void -- where at times the visibility stretched for more than 200 miles -- the planes streaked counterclockwise around the earth -- eastward across the U.S., over Newfoundland, past North Africa, Saudi Arabia and Ceylon (giving the Soviet Union a wide berth), made a mock bomb-run off the Malay Peninsula, cut back over Manila, then Guam, headed across the wide reaches of the Pacific to California (see map). Below, in daylight hours, the world spun like a giant relief globe; sometimes at night the planes butted their way through air so charged and turbulent that static electricity (St. Elmo's fire) leaked off the wing tips. The few crewmen who slept managed little more than brief dozes ("You can't relax," said one crewman. "Too many things on your mind.").

Commanding the flight from the lead plane was 50-year-old Major General Archie J. Old Jr., who coordinated the trip, kept in constant radio contact direct with LeMay's headquarters in Omaha. Texas-born Archie Old, like Curt LeMay, is no West Pointer, was an auto dealer with a reserve commission in the Air Corps until he was called to active duty in September 1940. Squarejawed, blue-eyed, thoroughly able, he rose with phenomenal speed in wartime to command the Eighth Air Force's 96th Bomb Group at a ripe 36, led the first shuttle-bomb raid (from England to Russia and back), the famed Schweinfurt raids, flew 43 combat missions, became LeMay's director of operations in 1953, is now commander of SAC's Fifteenth Air Force.

The Tensions. "The airplanes ran like sewing machines," Archie Old said on landing. Few others present felt so offhand. Reporters crushed around as LeMay stitched through the line-up of glad SACs and pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on each man. Families of some of the crewmen swarmed in to greet them. Newsmen herded one and all into a briefing room. Did Russia know of the mission? "Certainly, Russia knew about it," replied the general. Were the bombers armed? "This was an unarmed mission," i.e., no bombs aboard, but radar-controlled tail guns carried ammunition.

"Now," Archie Old said at last, "I've got to go. We went through four nights and three days in the air while you people were going through two nights and two days,-and I guess I aged a little faster than usual."

*By midyear, SAC will take delivery on its first Boeing KC-135 jet tankers, which, had they been in operation last week, would have cut about six hours off the round-the-world mission. *Since the flyers traveled at about half the speed of the earth (1,000 m.p.h. at the equator), the time span between sunrises was compressed to 16-hr. "sun days," half light, half dark. They caught their first sunset over the Great Lakes, a few hours after their i p.m. takeoff, thereafter saw the sun rise and set at eight-hour intervals, i.e., sunrise over the Atlantic, sunset over Saudi Arabia, sunrise over Malaya, sunset over Guam, sunrise in California. Total: three sunrises, three sunsets in a period just a few hours short of two full normal-sized days.

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