B-52 crash site still haunts after 54 years (Elephant Mountain Crash) Jan 1963

The B-52C plane wreckage hanging from trees, scattered about the ground on top of Elephant Mountain in Greenville, stays with me as much as any Maine “place of interest” I’ve visited. The site haunts me.

A while ago, spending a weekend in Greenville, Marlene and I, over breakfast at Kelly’s Landing, searched local newspapers and brochures for things to do around Moosehead Lake. I found a short paragraph about U.S. Air Force plane wreckage, left much as it was on January 24, 1963.

The brochure description didn’t make sense. A B-52 bomber practicing low-level flying, with a crew of nine on board, crashes. Seven crew members die, the pilot and navigator survive. In my life, every high-profile air disaster like this was followed by meticulous collecting of every bit of debris, and re-assembling it in a warehouse to determine what went wrong, and to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Why in the world was a B-52C Stratofortress, designed — if need be — to penetrate Soviet air space and drop nuclear bombs, left on top of Elephant Mountain?

Marlene and I drove along Plum Creek timber land dirt roads to the head of the trail leading to the crash site. It was a quintessential Maine summer day. Warm, blue sky, slight breeze, plenty of sunshine. Had we not been looking for the crash site, we could’ve easily driven, unaware, past the trail entrance. As it was, we were prepared to hike into the woods, keeping eyes peeled for obvious signs of plane wreckage.

Instead, a few feet along the trail we saw a small, white sign with a thin blue striped border. Its blue wide horizontal stripe across the middle divided the sign into three sections: horizontal white areas on top and below the horizontal blue stripe.

The white sign areas display logos of the organizations who maintain the site: Moosehead Riders Snowmobile Club, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, American Legion, MAINEiacs (Maine Air National Guard), and the U.S. Department of the Air Force. White uppercase letters against the sign’s blue stripe read: “This area holds parts & pieces of the B-52C that crashed here January 24, 1963. They were once removed and have thankfully been returned to their resting place.”

There was no full-scale removal, reassembly, disassembly and return of the wreckage. News accounts indicate the cause of the crash was quickly apparent. The vertical stabilizer, the tall part of the tail, broke off amid turbulence. The “parts & pieces… returned” refers to souvenirs presumably taken by hikers and curious people drawn to the site.

This site isn’t just a place in the woods, left alone, like an abandoned family dump, for hikers to discover. It’s a memorial, a sacred place. One part of me felt like a rubbernecker driving past a bad car wreck. Another part of me felt like I was walking through a Universal Studio attraction; where set designers did an amazing job recreating a mountaintop plane crash.

Had I not lived through double-digit below-zero temperatures, in Iowa and Maine, I’m not sure I could have imagined, even a little, how cold and terrifying it was for surviving crew members Lt. Col. Dante Bulli and navigator Capt. Gerald Adler, and locals who braved godawful winter weather, to rescue crash survivors. Bulli recently died.

Mostly I remember the kindness, bravery, endurance, and love of the first responders and crew members on Elephant Mountain. And the reverence with which this site is maintained.

There are, of course, YouTube videos of this crash site online. But they do not do the site justice. You have to be there. You have to experience it with all of your senses.

Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.

24 January 1963

January 24, 2019Aviation1963 Elephant Mountain B-52 Crash, 53-406, 99th Bombardment Wing, Aircraft Accident, B-52C-40-BO, Boeing Airplane Company, Boeing B-52C Stratofortress, Dan Bulli, Dante Bulli, Frosh 10, Gerald Adler, Herbert L. Hansen, Joe R. Simpson Jr., Michael F. Space Museum)

24 January 1963: A Boeing B-52C-40-BO Stratofortress, 53-0406, call sign “Frosh 10,” of the 99th Bombardment Wing, Heavy, was conducting a low-altitude training flight using terrain-following radar. Eight crewmen were aboard. Flying at or below 500 feet (152 meters) above ground level (AGL) and at 280 knots (322 miles per hour, 519 kilometers per hour) the bomber encountered wind gusts of up to 40 knots (21 meters per second).

As the turbulence became severe, the aircraft commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dante E. Bulli, began a climb to avoid it. At approximately 2:52 p.m., EST, however, the vertical fin attachment failed and the B-52 began rolling to the right and pitching down. Colonel Bulli, unable to control the airplane, ordered the crew to abandon the bomber.

B-52C 53-0406 crashed into the west side of Elephant Mountain, a 3,774 foot (1,150 meters) forest-covered mountain, 6 miles (10 kilometers) from Greenville, Maine. Only three men, Colonel Bulli, co-pilot Major Robert J. Morrison and navigator Captain Gerald J. Adler, were able to get out of the B-52, but Major Morrison died when he hit a tree. Lieutenant Colonel Joe R. Simpson, Jr., Major William W. Gabriel, Major Robert J. Hill, Jr., Captain Herbert L. Hansen, Captain Charles G. Leuchter and Technical Sergeant Michael F. O’Keefe were also killed.

Large sections of Frosh 10 are still on Elephant Mountain. The crash site is a popular hiking destination.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress had been designed as a very high altitude penetration bomber, but changes in Soviet defensive systems led to a change to very low altitude flight as a means of evading radar. This was subjecting the airframes to unexpected stresses. Several crashes resulted from structural failures during turbulence.

Less than one year later, Boeing was conducting flight tests of the B-52 in turbulence, using a highly-instrumented B-52H. That airplane also lost its vertical fin when it encountered severe turbulence in Colorado. The Boeing test pilots aboard were able to save the bomber and landed it six hours later.

Dante E. Bulli was born at Cherry, Illinois, 17 July 1922, the second child of Italian immigrants Giovanni Bulli, a salesman, and Anna Gareto Bulli. He attended Hall High School before working on the aircraft assembly lines of the Lockheed Aircraft Company in California.

Bulli enlisted as an aviation cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant, Army of the United States, 5 December 1943, and promoted to first lieutenant, 5 December 1946.

In 1947 Lieutenant Bulli married Miss Evelyn Lewis, also from Cherry, Illinois.

“Dan” Bulli was a combat veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He flew B-24 Liberators, the B-29 Superfortress and B-52 Stratofortress. He retired from the Air Force in 1974.

Colonel Dante E. Bulli died at Omaha, Nebraska, 30 December 2016, at the age of 94 years.

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