Training Realism = Combat Readiness

When B-52F 70173 departed Carswell Air Force Base (AFB) at 1830 CST on 28 February 1968 for a nine-hour practice-bombing mission in support of the US’ nuclear war plan, her bomb bay was empty. Nevertheless, the aircrew’s training profile that night called for them to hone their aerial-bombing skills on nine make-believe targets located south of Houston, Texas. Three of those targets would be attacked from an altitude of 35,000 feet and six from an altitude of 1,700 feet.

Instead of dropping real bombs on those nine fictitious targets, the aircrew simulated the release of a gravity weapon from their empty bomb bay by transmitting a high-frequency tone from one of the two UHF radios installed in the aircraft. When a B-52 aircrew did this, Air Force personnel operating a specially designed ground-based radar system were able to accurately compute where that “radio-tone bomb” would have impacted the surface of the earth. Those highly trained radar operators, referred to as “autotrackers” and considered the best in the trade, were assigned to remote RBS sites operated by the Strategic Air Command (SAC).

In 1968, SAC operated approximately ten fixed and three train-based RBS sites spread out all over the US with three overseas sites in Guam, Germany and Korea. The mobility of those RBS sites enabled SAC to quickly relocate them so their bomber aircrews could train realistically in the same topography and climatic conditions they would expect should they ever be called on to attack and destroy targets in the Soviet Union.

On the night of their ill-fated training mission, all nine of the aircrew's simulated weapon releases were to be scored by a crew of 12 autotrackers stationed at an RBS site located on a Gulf of Mexico barrier island south of Houston. That RBS site, known to SAC’s manned-bomber aircrews simply as “Matagorda Bomb Plot,” sat on the edge of an abandoned aircraft parking ramp at Matagorda Island AFB.

Other scoring/non-scoring radar systems at Matagorda simulated Soviet-era target-defensive systems like surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA). When deployed against attacking US bombers, those defensive-threat radars allowed aircrews to practice and perfect electronic counter measures (ECM) and aircraft-maneuvering tactics to prevent radar lock on, the equivalent of being shot down.

Less than an hour before Leap Day 1968, the Matagorda RBS site lost radar and radio contact with B-52F 70173 shortly after the aircrew had completed their second of three scheduled low-altitude bomb runs.

No one knows what caused MEAL88 to crash that night or where she and her aircrew are currently at rest on the seafloor somewhere offshore Matagorda Island, but one fact is indisputable. That night, and along a stretch of barren coastline between Galveston and Corpus Christi Texas, one B-52 aircrew and one RBS crew were doing exactly what the American public expected of them. By keeping the cutting edge of America's terrible swift sword of nuclear deterrence razor sharp, both crews were doing what needed to be done to maintain the fragile peace that existed between two of the world’s foremost-nuclear adversaries during the Cold War.