Why the U.S. Air Force Ejected Bears Out of Supersonic Jets
An equipment testing program that could only have come out of the Cold War
On March 21st, 1962, the United States Air Force tested the ejection seat system on one of its newest bombers, the B-58 Hustler. At an altitude of 35,000 feet, a scarlet pod burst out of the top of the B-58’s fuselage, riding a tongue of rocket fire and smoke. The pod’s trajectory crested 225 feet above the plane, before gravity took over and the parachutes bloomed. After a seven-minute descent, the pod came to rest in the Texas desert. Air Force technical personnel rushed to the landing site and cracked open the pod’s clamshell casing.
Inside, limbs and snout bound with safety harnesses, sat “Yogi,” a 2-year old female black bear.
The Convair B-58 Hustler was made for one thing: swift destruction. As the world’s first supersonic bomber, it was meant to ensure U.S. air superiority during the Cold War. With an innovative delta-wing frame and no fewer than four powerhouse GE J79 engines, the Hustler could deliver a nuclear payload to a Soviet target at twice the speed of sound. On the ground, pilots spread the myth that the plane could move so fast that it would tear its own wings off.
The B-58’s interior was just as impressive, boasting separate cockpits for each member of the three-man crew. Each cockpit held a wraparound dashboard with state-of-the-art electronics. The Northrop Corporation believed that young men in stressful situations were more likely to pay attention to a woman’s voice, so singer Joan Elms was hired to record the B-58’s voice warning messages. Crewmen eventually nicknamed Elms’ disembodied voice “Sexy Sally.”
Unfortunately, soothing voice and paint-blistering speeds aside, the Hustler had its fair share of problems. For one thing, the bomber was difficult to control. Landing and take-off required the plane to be angled at 12 degrees, nose up, hiding the runway from view. The angle of the wings’ leading edges made it easy for pilots to accidentally enter a spin or dive. Sometimes, the shifting of the fuel in the plane’s balance tanks caused the center of gravity to change location uncontrollably.
And then there was the problem of bailing out. Ejecting out of an aircraft at supersonic speeds is an exceedingly dangerous maneuver. A plane moving at mach 2 is moving twice the speed of sound. In normal atmospheric conditions, this clocks in at over 1,500 miles per hour. Throwing a human pilot out at that speed is akin to dropping him into the path of an oncoming train.
The first man to survive a supersonic bail-out was George Smith, an Air Force test pilot. In 1955, when Smith ejected from his F-100A, his body was subjected to a 40g deceleration, instantly increasing his relative body weight to 8,000 pounds. His internal organs slammed against their cavity walls, his body bruised all over, and air pressure forced blood from his ears. His eyeballs hemorrhaged before nearly popping out of his head. And when the secondary charge went off, to separate Smith from his seat, the resultant turbulence ripped his socks, shoes, helmet, gloves, and wristwatch off. Smith only survived thanks to a lucky gust of wind, which inflated the remains of his parachute and shredded clothes. He regained consciousness five days later, having been rescued by a pair of nearby fishermen.
Considering how badly pilots like Smith could be mauled at a relatively “sluggish” Mach 1.05, the Air Force knew that a Mach 2 craft like the B-58 would require a new ejection system. Their solution was the Stanley Encapsulated Ejection Seat, which was less an ejection seat than an escape pod. To bail out, a pilot first pulled a pre-ejection handle, which yanked his legs in and pulled the pod’s segmented shell closed around him. Even after the pod closed, the pilot retained some basic control of the B-58. Only once the ejection handle was pulled did the capsule fire out of the plane, propelled by small rocket boosters. The capsule was pressurized in order to protect the pilot from atmospheric changes, and held survival supplies and food in case immediate recovery was not an option. It could even float in a water landing.
Understandably, the Air Force was not keen to test a new ejection system on human pilots, especially when that system could easily become a rocket-propelled coffin if anything went awry. Live black bears, however, were roughly the size and weight of a man and were readily available for testing, thanks to the state of Cold War-era animal rights regulations. Prior to each test flight, bears were heavily sedated and then wired up with instruments which collected biometrics like respiration rate and EKG data. A human pilot would fly the B-58 for each test, with the bear’s pod secured inside one of the other two crew cockpits.
Yogi was the first bear to fly in the B-58’s encapsulated ejection seat, at a supersonic speed of 850 miles per hour. A few weeks later, she was followed by “Big John,” who was ejected at an altitude of 45,000 feet and a speed of 1,060 miles per hour. Overall, the B-58 capsule testing program involved as many as six bears (and one chimpanzee), launched at a variety of speeds and altitudes. For the most part, the ursine passengers landed safely — only one bear perished during flight, due to an undetected brain condition. Two others suffered minor fractures and bruising from whiplash, injuries which official Air Force footage cheerily described as “reversible.”
Unfortunately, the bears’ final debrief was less reversible. In order to ascertain whether the test “pilots” had received any internal injuries, Air Force medics chose to euthanize them and conduct thorough autopsies.
For the world’s first supersonic bomber, the ending of the story was just as grim. The B-58 Hustler never dropped a bomb in anger, nuclear or otherwise. Not that there weren’t plenty of conflicts to choose from. The reality was that the operational need for a supersonic medium bomber had begun to rapidly diminish even as it entered production. Despite its speed, the bomber lacked range — a higher-up in SAC once described the Hustler as a “short-legged plane.” This, compounded with exorbitant maintenance costs (three times as high as those for a B-52) and a high accident rate (22.4% of all Hustlers ever manufactured were lost) meant that the B-58 didn’t even last a decade.
