The B-58 Hustler viewed from the Grissom Air Museum guard tower.
About a month ago I got the chance to visit the Grissom Air Museum which sits just over an hour away from Purdue. I was very excited because the museum boasted a variety of neat planes from fighter jets to commercial planes to a Lockheed D-21. It was a very neat museum, and really wonderful because most of the exhibits are out in a grassy field with a winding walkway through the planes. This gives you the ability to really get up close and personal with the planes. If you’re ever in the vicinity of Peru Indiana, I would highly recommend stopping by!
Besides the D-21, there was a very interesting exhibit in the outdoor park that wasn’t a plane: a supersonic rocket-powered test sled. This test sled is pictured below:
The B-58 Supersonic Test Sled
As you can see, it’s pretty much just a mock-up of the cockpit of a B-58 but put on rails. The special thing about this test sled though, is the tests it was utilized for.
This sled, known as the ‘Texas Hustler’ was designed and tested at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in the 1950’s. Its purpose was to test the emergency ejection system for the Convair B-58 Hustler, which was the first operational bomber that was capable of flying at Mach 2. This speed poses various engineering challenges from the standpoint of an emergency egress system, and they ran into nearly all of them. A standard ejection system, in which the crew-person’s seat is blasted out of the aircraft ensured nearly certain death at such speeds. To resolve this issue, the Stanley B-58 Escape Pod was developed.
The Stanley B-58 Escape Pod (Source)
In the event that the cabin became depressurized or an emergency ejection was necessary, this capsule would encapsulate the crew-person in a clamshell fashion. The telescoping doors you see on the right would close, and then the capsule would pressurize, a hatch would be blown off of the cockpit, and the capsule would be ejected. The system then became a little survival capsule for the crew-person, with a parachute, food, water, and oxygen. A similar system was made for the XB-70.
But this isn’t the end of the story. The real kicker of this whole experiment is how the Air Force chose to see if such an escape system was survivable. Such an unproven system cannot be tested on humans, and unfortunately the technology at the time meant an animal would be subjected to see if it would work. Like me, you might figure that they used a monkey, or maybe a pig to stand in for a human. Well, like me, you would be totally wrong and most likely very surprised that the Air Force instead tested this system using two bears, one named Yogi and one named Big John.
To conduct a test of the capsule, they would first drug Yogi or Big John, and then load one of them into the test sled. From there, the test sled would roar down a 4 mile long track, boosted by rocket motors to supersonic speeds, at which point the bear would ejected. Once these tests were verified, the bears were sent up in a B-58 fitted with the capsules. Yogi boasts an ejection speed of over 800 mph at 35,000 feet, while Big John boasts one over 1000 mph at 45,000 feet. From everything I can dig up on the internet, it seems that thankfully both bears survived and validated the emergency ejection system. To top off the whole experience, the Grissom Air Museum gift shop even has little toy stuffed bears that pay homage to Yogi and Big John.
So, I’ll reiterate: if you’re ever near Peru Indiana, I would highly encourage you to go see the rocket-powered B-58 test sled that ejected some bears at supersonic speeds. It certainly seems to be one-of-a-kind.
Recently I got the chance to go back to the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It’s also a wonderful museum that is packed with all types of planes and really cool things, including many X-planes. Among the planes in one of the densely packed hangars however was a familiar friend: the B-58 Hustler, and its escape pod. Below is a picture of the one in Dayton:
The Stanley B-58 Escape Pod