MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

THE CRASHOF AMERICA’SFIRST NUCLEAR BOMBER…

A FORGOTTENPIECEOF MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

The AJ Savage was the rst U.S. bomber designed specially to carry the atomic bomb. It was North American’s rst attack bomber speci cally for the U.S. Navy and was designed shortly after the end of World War II. This plane was designed with one speci c purpose – to deliver a nuclear bomb.

But, one ight 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., ight 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 rst 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 uctuating, 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 rsthand witnesses of a plane crash that killed three men: a production model AJ-1 Bomber, the Navy’s rst strike plane designed to carry the nuclear bomb, crashed en route to a naval air station along the Patuxent River in Maryland.

He said some people will say the plane exploded in the air. Others will say they could hear the pilots screaming. But Lynch said neither is true.

“All you could see was red,” Lynch said, and the explosion was loud enough to be heard within a ve-mile radius, and it cratered the earth on impact, several feet deep, the footprint of a large house.

Armed with ashlights, Lynch and the others rushed about two miles to the crash site where they joined a handful of other bystanders, cars parked in a semicircle to direct their headlights at the strewn mess of the wreckage.

“There was really nothing you could do,” Lynch said.

Still, he can remember pieces of the plane and body parts lying across the ground, the smell of burning jet fuel and esh. There was a parachute and parts of a body in a tree close by, and until a deputy and a re truck showed up from Bedford, and the state police came to turn people away, there was nothing to do but stare.

“I had never seen a crash like that before,” Lynch said. “Living on a farm you see death, but you don’t ever see it like that.”

The plane went down in a hay eld on A.J. Laughlin’s farm off Falling Creek Road. All three of the pilots were killed in the crash after the engines exploded.

We were riding up through Virginia and stopped for fuel and food at a local gas station.

My ever-vigilant friend Jeff Caruana spotted the memorial rst. We all stopped our bikes and read the plaque. None of us had ever heard of this incident. Even Mr. Byers had never heard of this and, as he said, anyone he could ask is “either retired, dead or both.” As there were no Flight Recorder on this craft the reason for the crash is still a great question for aviation a cionados and the U.S. Navy. Did something cause an explosion or radical engine failure or was some other aircraft gremlin responsible? Considering the clearing weather and the talent of the yers – pilot error seems highly unlikely. The eye-witnesses said that the Savage power-dived straight into the ground. How can that happen? No one will ever know, but we do know that three great men of our military were lost. All this makes this terrible incident and, other than patriotic locals, an unheard story which is part of Mysterious America. O'Life Out! ,