San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Randolph air crash in 1951 was one of many
I have not been able to find anything about a plane crash near the Taj Mahal at Randolph in the early 1950s when my father was stationed there. My sister and I recall it coming right over our apartment prior to crashing. As best we recall, there were fatalities.
— William “Sonny” Mayfield
One reason you may have had trouble finding details of the crash you remember is that, sadly, there were so many in those years.
Randolph Field (now Joint Base San AntonioRandolph) was known as “the West Point of the Air” for its mission of training military pilots. The flying field east of San Antonio, near Schertz, was named for one of those aviators: Capt. William M. Randolph, who died Feb. 28, 1928, when his plane crashed on takeoff from the former Gorman Field.
Four years later, Lt. William L. Parham became the first Randolph student pilot killed when, on his first solo flight, his BT-2 suddenly took a nosedive, crashed and burned near Marion.
Through the 1930s and ’40s, there were more accidents, including some fatalities involving air cadets and their instructors. With the beginning of the Korean War, Randolph stepped up its training mission. By the end of 1950, its pilots were clocking an average of more than 1,000 flying hours most days.
In January 1951, there was a bizarre incident involving an “unauthorized flight” (stolen airplane) crashed by a French aviation cadet who had washed out of pilot training because he couldn’t learn to land. His intentions weren’t clear from the wreckage of the T-6 trainer, found in a Burleson County field.
Later that year, the planes got bigger and so did the crashes, when Randolph was assigned to train combat crews for the B-29 bomber Superfortress used on airstrikes in Korea. If the model name
sounds familiar, it might be because the Enola Gay, which dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, to end
World War II, was a B-29.
Classed as a medium bomber, the Superfort flew at speeds of more than 350 mph at altitudes up to 25,000 feet.
Within a year, there would be four separate crashes involving B-29s flying out of Randolph.
The one that sounds closest to the incident you remember was the third. On June 21, 1951, one of the big aircraft was returning from an instrument training flight and was coming in for a ground-controlled approach landing when one of the engines caught fire.
The pilot pulled up to gain altitude, make a wider circle of the base and give his crew a chance to escape. Five managed to parachute out safely, but three airmen were trapped in the plane’s rear compartment when it hit the ground at about 5:45 p.m.
The plane had approached a farm field a mile south of Austin Highway “in a shallow glide,” according to farmer Otto Friesenhahn, who saw its right wing tip snag the ground on landing. The big bomber cartwheeled and caught fire as it exploded. Another witness said the blast on impact “looked like pictures of an atomic explosion. … A great mushroom, and flames shot high into the air, and then there was a puff of smoke and that was all,” as reported in the San Antonio Express, June 22, 1951.
Debris from the wreck was strewn at least 300 yards. One conjecture based on physical evidence was that the three men who perished in the rear of the plane didn’t make it out because the first to reach the door activated his chute prematurely, and it blocked their escape hatch.
Two previous B-29 crashes had happened elsewhere — one with a death toll of six in January 1951 near Seguin and another claiming four lives in July 1950 near Oakley, Kan.
The fourth Randolphrelated B-29 crash happened only weeks after the deadly third, again on a routine training flight, but this time the pilot and all crew members landed safely when their plane dropped into a field 2 miles south of their home field.