[HunterICX]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

My Air Force contacts just informed me that this plane has the very rare status of never having a single crash! Wow!

-S

Right....what kind of fantasy are those guys living in?
google a bit and you have the answers.

Although the escape capsule was credited with saving a number of crew members, Bob Norton, who flew the B-58 out of Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana, remembers one instance in which it contributed to a fatal crash. “One of our guys was flying in western Texas and some hail blew the windshield out. He encapsulated himself—you could still fly the airplane with the capsule closed but you could not control the throttles. Anyway, when the windshield blew, he pulled the throttles to idle before he closed the capsule. The trouble was, he couldn’t get [the capsule] open again when the hail stopped,” he says. “With the throttles pulled back, he was going down, so he told the other crew members to bail out. Unfortunately, the navigator’s parachute didn’t deploy and he was killed. After that they installed a cable so the pilot could quickly pull the pod open in flight.”

Even in its operational life, the Hustler maintained its reputation as a dangerous airplane to fly. Darrell Schmidt, a B-58 pilot from 1966 to 1970, says, “There were 116 aircraft built, 26 of which were destroyed in accidents, with 36 crew members killed. If that doesn’t fit the definition of ‘dangerous,’ I don’t know what would.”

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-o...tml?c=y&page=1

HunterICX