The XB-70, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), was all that remained of General LeMay’s once-beloved B-70 bomber after it had been canceled by Congress, despite the four billion dollars invested in it:
The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-engined aircraft in the world.
On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”
It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’ s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”
Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.
“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”
Ron Rogers discusses the accident: