BUFF’s
- Ramon C Purcell
- Jul 1
- 1 min read
Check out the e BUFF’s at Pima Air and Space Museum #b52 #usaf #pimaairandspacemuseum #boneyardsafari #aviationsafari #aviationpreservation #aviationadventures
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“Near-Death Experiences
Around the time my two pilot training IPs died in aircraft crashes, I nearly did, too—twice.
The first episode took place on a routine takeoff from Loring and proved a near replay of the 1969 crash described earlier. As we rolled down the runway, we barely made our acceleration check, a certain speed that must be reached by a certain elapsed time or the takeoff must be aborted in order to stop in the remaining runway.
This alarmed me because we usually beat the time easily. After eating up eight thousand feet of the eleven-thousand-foot runway, we remained thirty knots below rotation speed and were barely accelerating. Something was terribly wrong. I had pulled several…
Bomb Run, 1973
When asked if I killed anyone during the Vietnam War, I have to answer that I don’t know. I may have, and probably did, since my B-52 bomber crew dropped many thousand pounds of bombs on the Cambodian jungle, but I will never actually know.
I only flew two live bombing runs in March 1973, before President Nixon’s final bombing halt prior to the negotiations that ended our involvement in the war a few months later. But the first mission captured all the terror, anticipation, wonder, and angst of flying into a war.
The mission began after dark at Andersen AFB, Guam, in the western Pacific Ocean. The crew bus dropped us at the…