The Fall of the Valkyrie

From the first of the 95 flights made by the Air Force's two XB-70 Valkyrie bombers since 1964, the mighty, 2,000-m.p.h. experimental craft has been gremlin plagued. On Valkyrie 1's maiden flight, a runaway engine had to be shut down and four tires blew out. Two months ago, Valkyrie 2 was saved when its copilot used a paper clip to short-circuit a crazed computer and free its locked-in landing gear (TIME, May 13).

Last week Valkyrie 2's luck ran out. The cobra-cowled bird lunged into a cloud-flecked morning sky from California's Edwards Air Force Base with Alvin White, 47, North American Aviation's chief B70 test pilot, at the controls. After 2 hr. 15 min. of routine tests, the B70 readied for a less serious assignment, a formation flight with four other jet craft whose engines were made by General Electric Corp. Aim of the maneuver: color photographs for G.E., a Madison Avenue routine that routinely wins Pentagon approval.

"Your Tail Is Gone." Up to the Valkyrie's starboard side sidled a needle-nosed F-104 Starfighter flown by the nation's--and perhaps the world's--finest test pilot, Joseph A. Walker of NASA, who in 25 flights in the X-15 rocket plane had flown higher (354,200 ft.) and faster (4,104 m.p.h.) than man had ever gone in a winged ship. Walker, who was preparing to join the B70 program, had been flying "chase" behind the Valkyrie to observe it in operation. Next, an Air Force F-5 fighter-bomber tucked into position behind Walker. To the B-70's portside came a T-38 supersonic trainer with Colonel Joseph F. Cotton, the chief B70 Air Force test pilot who had saved Valkyrie 2 with the paper clip, riding as observer and officer in charge of the formation. Behind the T-38 hunched a droop-snoot Phantom, the delight of Navy and Air Force pilots in Viet Nam.

For half an hour the formation held tight for the clicking shutters. Then, in an unobserved second, Walker's Starfighter evidently plowed into the right side of the Valkyrie's delta wing, rolled leftward across its top, damaging the B-70's tall, right vertical stabilizer and snapping off the left one. Over the intercom to ground control crackled Cotton's voice: "Midair, mid-air"--Air Force shorthand for collision. Then, sounding almost laconic, Cotton radioed guidance to the stricken ship's two-man crew: "O.K., it looks like your tail is gone . . . You'll probably spin." And as the B70 did wind into a flat spin: "Bail out." Then: "One capsule has ejected, I don't know which one." Seconds later: "It's the left capsule. Al is out."

Missing Helmet. Al White had indeed managed to escape in an ejection capsule that parachuted him to earth, where he walked away with only bruises. But his copilot, Air Force Major Carl S. Cross, 40, a Viet Nam veteran who was making his first checkout flight in the craft, inexplicably failed to get out. Down from 25,000 ft., followed by Cotton's T-38, the giant bomber plummeted like a felled eagle. It smashed belly-down into the Mojave Desert, exploding into a thousand pieces. The long, proud neck was broken off and hurled 50 yds.; the heat was so fierce that much of the fuselage melted into rivulets of metal. Cross's body was found in the unblown copilot's ejection capsule.

A few miles away, the flaming, disintegrating F-104 slammed into the ground; Walker's shattered corpse was also inside his craft--minus his helmet, leading to speculation that he might have been killed as the B70 sheared through his canopy.

For Walker, 45, a self-effacing onetime Pennsylvania farm boy, the tragedy spelled the end of a daredevil career that reached its climax with the 1963 X-15 record altitude flight in which he touched the skirts of space, buttressed the theory (now under investigation by NASA) that man may be able to leave and return to the atmosphere in fixed-wing craft.

"Indefensible." At week's end, as the Air Force convened a 62-member board of inquiry, few thought that Walker could have carelessly rammed the bomber; there was speculation that turbulence or the B-70's backwash may have caused the collision. But the circumstances surrounding the crack-up raised other questions. Though it is standard procedure for manufacturers of Air Force equipment to take pictures of their craft in flight, both for publicity and research purposes, even Pentagon officials conceded that last week's spectacular line-up was hardly standard.

In Washington, Chairman George Mahon of the House Appropriations Committee, declared: "The loss of these men, and an aircraft in which more than $500 million has been invested, while accommodating the public relations department of a private company, is indefensible." Actually, the B70 cost closer to $750 million. Not measurable in dollars were the lives of two pilots and the future hours of supersonic research that were lost in the Mojave.

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