Fifty-year anniversary of a B-52 crash

Fifty years ago, the dateline, "TRACY, Calif.,"topped news stories that circled the globe.

On Feb. 16, 1956, a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber exploded in mid air over the Central Valley, and pieces of the giant plane came crashing into fields just east of Tracy.

Five crewmen died and four parachuted to safety in the explosion and crash that were reported around the world. It was the first crash of a B-52 bomber, which had become the nation's principal deterrent in the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

No nuclear weapons or conventional bombs were aboard the B-52 when it began to come apart that late February afternoon as the plane headed south over Sacramento at 40,000 feet toward its home at Castle Air Force Base near Merced.

It was believed an oxygen-system malfunction triggered two explosions on the plane at the conclusion of a training flight.

The parachute of one of the jumpers, a full colonel who was deputy wing commander, caught fire as he exited the plane, and his chute didn't fully deploy. His body was found three days later in a field on Union Island north of Tracy.

The four survivors were found in fields stretching from Holt, west of Stockton, to the Tracy area. Tracy farmer Ted Baskette, who himself had parachuted out of a B-17 bomber over France during World War II, found one survivor in a field off Linne Road.

A large piece of the fuselage and parts of a wing landed at about 5:30 p.m. in a field at the southeast corner of 11th Street and Chrisman Road.

A tail section landed farther east near Rhodes Warehouse on Highway 33. Tracyites who heard the explosions and saw pieces of the plane falling from the sky rushed to the crash scene.

Buck Wootten, then a motorcycle officer with the Tracy Police Department, was on his bike just east of the overpass when he heard the second explosion and saw pieces of the plane falling about half a mile away.

Billows of black smoke rose into the air.

"I couldn't believe it, but it was happening right in front of me," Wootten recalled this week. "I immediately got on the radio and reported it to the station."

Doug Brodie, then a newspaper reporter covering Tracy, recalled later that 11th Street was jammed with traffic.

"There were some Tracy cops and rural firemen already there, but they couldn't control the crowd," Brodie said. "People ran right up to the plane parts, especially the fuselage, to get a close look."

No one on the ground was struck by any of the falling pieces of the plane. It wasn't until about three hours after the crash that Air Force personnel from Castle AFB arrived to secure the scene.

An investigation of the crash revealed that leaked oxygen had caused the first explosion of the plane over Sacramento. When the flames came in contact with hydraulic fluid, the combination caused a second, larger explosion just west of Stockton.

In downtown Tracy, the force of the second explosion knocked out windows in a dozen stores on the west side of Central Avenue.