BACKROADS • NOVEMBER 2021
Page 11
Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s
MYSTERIOUS AMERICA
THE CRASH OF AMERICA’S FIRST NUCLEAR BOMBER… A FORGOTTEN PIECE OF MYSTERIOUS AMERICA
The AJ Savage was the first U.S. bomber designed specially to carry the atomic bomb. It was North American’s first attack bomber specifically for the U.S. Navy and was designed shortly after the end of World War II. This plane was designed with one specific purpose – to deliver a nuclear bomb. But, one flight of this aircraft has gone virtually forgotten by our citizenry. In mid-June of 1950 Commander Willard Sampson, age 33, from Niagara Falls, New York, James A. Moore Jr., flight engineer from Santa Ana, California and Holiday Lee Turner from the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, a Baltimore, Maryland native boarded U.S. Navy North American AJ-1 Savage (BuNo 122590) to simply ferry the aircraft from Edwards Base in California to the Patuxent Naval Air Station on the Patuxent River in Maryland. My brother-in-arms Mark Byers is a Flight Engineer at this base today. Although the aircraft had already been deployed around the world on carriers, this particular aircraft was the first prototype built and was being brought to the east coast for other duties. With a range of 1,600 miles, the craft had made stops along the journey to refuel and all was going “nominally” as they say… until it was not. Date: June 22, 1950 • Location: A.J. Laughlin Farm Huddleston, Virginia It had rained most of the day but began to clear with a blood-red sunset. As they say … “Red sky at night, sailors delight” and tomorrow looked to be a better day. Larry Lynch was 13 years old on June 22 of that year and after daily chores, he was sitting down with his father and a neighbor admiring the sunset. According to a report in the News & Advance, a local newspaper by Sarah Honosky: “They heard the plane before they saw it, which wasn’t unusual, but Lynch remembered the sound — high-pitched and fluctuating, an abnormal whine of the engines, the only warning that preceded its power-dive plummet to the ground below. Then, they heard the explosion. Now in his 80s, Lynch is one of the last surviving firsthand witnesses of a plane crash that killed three men: a production model AJ-1 Bomber, the Navy’s first strike plane designed to carry the nuclear bomb, crashed en route to a naval air station along the Patuxent River in Maryland.
