Legacy: Genesis of Aviation Greatness

A B-52H aircraft lost all hydraulic power - no rudder or elevator control - while airborne over thirty years ago. The seven crewmembers onboard did everything they could to live through the incident. In the early morning hours of May 30, 1974, Charlie Brown, an evaluator pilot, managed to gain control and fly the 200+ ton craft, even though 65% of all flight control surfaces had been lost. The flight manual provided no documentation to assist the crew in handling the failure. The "impossible" situation had never occurred. Four separate systems covered the hydraulics on the big aircraft. The odds against total failure were exceedingly high, but the odds against landing the B-52 in that condition were higher. Yet Charlie attempted the impossible. The story begins by establishing Charlie's direct flying ancestry. The flashback begins with Orville and Wilbur Wright, ties directly with Henry "Hap" Arnold, relates further with James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle, and links with the unit Doolittle flew on his famous Tokyo raid. The SPA 12 mission with Charlie Brown unites all of them. The reader discovers how the lives of great flyers intertwined with each other. The Wrights taught Hap, Hap sponsored Jimmy, and Jimmy passed his greatness to his unit. Finally it was passed on to Charlie Brown. The force of the landing was 13Gs. A man's eight-pound arm under that force would weigh over a hundred pounds. A 160-pound man would weigh over a ton. Over 1,000 tons of force met the landing gear at touchdown. Every crewman onboard should have been killed. No one should have walked away. Legacy is the story of how something that never should have happened, did; how a flyer took a contraption that shouldn't have flown and learned to fly it for the first time, did; how everyone onboard SPA 12 that fateful night should have died; and how it wasn't unique for a flyer to accomplish the impossible.