Col. Michael McCoy and the crash that shook Orlando
On the morning of October 9, 1957, Col. Michael Norman Wright McCoy took off from Pinecastle Air Force Base on what should have been a routine training flight. It was also his 52nd birthday.
A veteran of World War II, McCoy had flown combat missions in Europe and the Pacific and had become one of the Air Force’s foremost authorities on the new Boeing B-47 Stratojet. Now he commanded the 321st Bomb Wing at Pinecastle, the Strategic Air Command base on the south side of Orlando where flight crews trained for nuclear warfare.
The B-47: Bomber for the Nuclear Age
Developed in the years following World War II, the B-47 was the world’s first large swept-wing jet bomber, designed specifically for nuclear missions. Its six jet engines and thin, 35-degree swept wings gave it a speed approaching that of contemporary fighters. By the mid-1950s, the Stratojet had become a major component of Strategic Air Command’s nuclear deterrent program.
The Crash
At 10:12 that morning, McCoy climbed into a B-47 with three other experienced fliers: Lt. Col. Charles Joyce, his co-pilot; Maj. Vernon D. Stuff, the navigator; and Group Capt. John Woodroffe of Britain’s Royal Air Force, who was visiting Pinecastle as commander of an RAF V-bomber detachment preparing for a strategic bombing competition.
The B-47 flew north and west of Orlando before turning back toward the city. Witnesses later recalled seeing the bomber flying unusually low as it approached the Orlando area. Then, in a matter of seconds, the aircraft broke apart in the sky.
Burning wreckage scattered across a wide area near U.S. Highway 441, Ben White Raceway and the surrounding farms. The explosion shook buildings miles away. At a nearby citrus packinghouse, employees felt the heat from the burning aircraft and watched as pieces of the bomber fell onto the highway. Children at Lake Silver Elementary School and students at Robert E. Lee Junior High and Edgewater High School saw the aircraft come apart overhead.
Yet the catastrophe could have been immeasurably worse. The wreckage came down in an area that, despite being close to schools, businesses and homes, was still largely open country. The four men aboard the B-47 were killed. On the ground, remarkably, a cow was the only fatality.
For Orlando residents, the tragedy immediately became a story of McCoy’s final act: the veteran pilot had fought to keep his crippled aircraft away from the populated areas of Orlando and toward open ground. His bravery in those final moments was celebrated in the months following by renaming the base McCoy Air Force Base. Today, Orlando International Airport, located on the site of the former Air Force base, still retains the designation MCO.
At left: Col. Michael McCoy (in dark glasses) Commander of the 321 bomb wing at Pinecastle air base, Orlando. Image courtesy University of Central Florida.
What Really Happened?
Almost immediately, an Air Force investigation began. But what the investigators concluded remained hidden. For the next half-century, the official findings were not available to the public. The secrecy surrounding the accident eventually became part of the story itself. The accident records remained classified for decades. Even the families of the men who died were not given the complete findings.
In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the crash, the Orlando Sentinel obtained the Air Force accident records through the Freedom of Information Act. What they revealed was different from the heroic version of McCoy’s last flight.
The Air Force concluded that the primary cause of the accident was operator error. According to the finding reproduced by the Sentinel, an attempted recovery by the pilot — believed to have been Col. McCoy — produced an abrupt left bank and excessive aerodynamic loads. Those loads caused the B-47’s lower longerons to fail, after which the aircraft disintegrated and caught fire.
The later Sentinel account suggested that Cold War-era secrecy surrounding the B-47 and its vulnerabilities played a role in keeping the findings from public view.
A Legacy That Survived the Investigation
The 2007 revelation inevitably complicated the legend of Michael McCoy. As subsequent letters published in the Sentinel attest, those who witnessed the crash never forgot what they saw. Fifty years later, Orlando residents still remembered the explosion, the falling wreckage and the terrible realization that the bomber had come down frighteningly close to schools, businesses and homes.
One eyewitness recalled that hundreds of lives might have been lost had the aircraft come down only seconds earlier or in a different direction. Another remembered the tremendous heat and the pieces of the B-47 that fell onto U.S. 441.
The official report tells us what the Air Force believed happened. But Orlando’s memory tells us what McCoy’s final flight came to mean.