Bradford Runyon Interview, 25 February 2005
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| TT | So there's just a blip on their radar screen identifying your location and it basically identifies your code. | |
| BR | Right | |
| TT | How long does that remain on their screen? For a while and then fade out, or does it just flash up? | |
| BR | I think it just flashes for a few flashes maybe. I don't know for sure. It does not continually flash I'm pretty sure of that. | |
| TT | Yeah. | |
| BR | So then they received that, but we still couldn't talk to them and so they just said if we were having an emergency or having any serious problems then to squawk another code and we didn't, so they figured we were all right. But we had had several B-52's crash and so they were concerned. | |
| TT | Yeah, they had one two weeks prior to this incident, one that crashed out in front of the runway coming in on a penetration. We have the report on that. | |
| BR | OK. That was, I don't remember which one that was that was. That was probably Colonel Poole, my first aircraft commander, that's the one I told you that the co-pilot shut the boost pumps off to the engines on one side. | |
| TT | Yeah, yeah that's what they said in the documents, they were interested in your radio communication problems because of that. | |
| BR | Right. | |
| TT | Never quite understood what that meant. Maybe there were some radio communications problems with their flight too? | |
| BR | Well, they did have problems and Colonel Poole had gotten out of the aircraft commanders seat to go back and work on things. He reset some circuit breakers and got their communications back, he repaired you know, with his knowledge, he was able to correct whatever the problem was. And the co-pilot, who really wasn't fully checked out yet, was left in the seat by himself. So Colonel Poole really didn't see him make some of the changes that he did, and well, anyway it caused them to crash. Colonel Poole had been overworked which, he was supposed to have retired a year earlier but they were short of instructor pilots and they wouldn't let him out even though he already had 22 years in. So he had to stay another year and the last couple of weeks that he was there he flew just about every day as an instructor. I'm sure he was worn out and his fatigue might have been a contributing factor to this. But they were making penetration in weather and the attitude indicator went out so he had to fix that, because its hard to fly an airplane in weather you know, not knowing whether you're level or... | |
| TT | So how long did it pace your airplane? | |
| BR | Well, it was several minutes. It was with us going out away from the base and it was with us for a few minutes anyway. | |
| TT | You say going out from the base, but actually, at what point did you pick it up, and then you had to do a 180 to come back. Do you recall it being with you that whole time? |
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