How B-52 Bombers Tried to Chase the Russian Navy

Dario Leone

History,

They weren't just bombers after all.

Jay Lacklen is a former B-52 pilot with 12,500 flying hours and the author of two books, Flying the Line: An Air Force Pilot’s Journey and Flying the Line: An Air Force Pilot’s Journey Volume Two: Military Airlift Command. He’s working on the last book of the trilogy.

In 1976, my crew flew as three-ship cell lead across the Atlantic to train in a mock scenario with the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal, their sole carrier, which would gain fame six years later in the British/Argentine Falklands War in the South Atlantic. This war displayed that America is not the only civilized country that can stride into a conflict half-cocked and for prideful reasons. In retrospect, I can’t imagine what the Brits and Argentines were thinking at the time. However, I can’t imagine what the two sides in the American Civil War were thinking, either.

Reality seized the Falkland combatants when, over two days, the Brits sank the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano with submarine torpedoes, and the Argentines sank the HMS Sheffield with a long-range Exocet missile fired from an Argentine fighter. The burning Belgrano killed 320 Argentines, and the sinking Sheffield claimed twenty Brits. Both populations recoiled in horror that their easy little war had produced such carnage.

But this event happened years later; in 1976, the Ark Royal was the pride of the vastly reduced British fleet that once ruled the waves for Britannia. A small ship by American standards, it could not catapult-launch state-of-the art fighters but instead relied on launching vertical takeoff/landing Harrier fighters off an up-sloped ramp.

We were supposed to fly to the eastern Atlantic near the British Isles to fly approaches to the Ark Royal as a training exercise. This proved a physically taxing mission.