Too Close for Safety

It took just three seconds last June for the U.S. to lose two ace test pilots and more than $700 million worth of aircraft when the Air Force's XB-70 Valkyrie, a supersonic flying laboratory, collided in mid-air with an F-104 Starfighter over the Mojave Desert. The crash occurred during a flight arranged for General Electric, maker of the Valkyrie's YJ-93 engines. G.E. got Air Force officers to approve a photo-shooting session in which the XB-70 flew in close formation with four other planes, all G.E.-powered.

Last week the Air Force issued a report on the tragedy. Its findings: NASA Test Pilot Joseph A. Walker, whose formation flying was rusty, inadvertently allowed the Starfighter he was piloting to drift into the air vortex swirling around the Valkyrie's drooping wingtip. From that moment, a crash was inevitable. Trapped in the raging eddies, the fighter brushed its tail plane against the Valkyrie's wingtip, then pitched up and rolled onto its back, shearing off one of the XB-70's twin rudders as it went. Both planes then plunged, out of control, to earth.

The formation flight should never have been permitted, said Air Force Secretary Harold Brown. In the first place, it was "of questionable propriety" because it violated a Defense Department directive that all requests for Air Force assistance in taking commercial or advertising pictures must be cleared at a high level. Moreover, the XB-70 was such a highly valuable plane that it should never have been placed in such a potentially dangerous situation. Brown singled out for blame the officers who authorized the picture-taking mission. He relieved Colonel Albert M. Gate from his job as deputy for systems testing at California's Edwards Air Force Base and reprimanded two other colonels; all of them had unaccountably ignored orders to clear all such flights with their top superiors.

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