For three Albuquerque families, the Cold War was far colder than it was to most Americans. While some of us remember school drills during which we ducked under our desks to protect ourselves from a feared Soviet bomb attack, Rachelle Luna and Jeff Payne remember growing up without their fathers, and Glenn Fellows recalls how devastated his mother was over losing her firstborn son. Their loved ones - Capt. Paul D. Fellows Jr., 1st Lt. Kenneth L. Payne, and Staff Sgt. Helmut Christ - were declared dead 50 years ago Saturday after their B-52 Stratofortress mysteriously disappeared over the Atlantic during Sky Shield II, part of the largest air exercise in history. The three Sky Shield exercises, during the height of the Cold War in 1960, 1961 and 1962, were conducted to test U.S. defense systems against a Soviet air attack. During each exercise, all commercial and private air travel in the continental United States was suspended for the first time in history. Such massive groundings did not occur again until 9/11. The Sky Shield exercises involved 6,000 sorties flown by United States, United Kingdom and Canadian military planes that simulated Soviet bomber and fighter attacks against major East Coast cities. Sky Shield II, which lasted from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Oct. 14, 1961, was the longest of the three exercises, and the only one during which an aircraft was lost. A giant bomber disappears Early that morning, a B-52G Stratofortress, with the call sign Pogo 22, lifted off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, N.C. On board were the pilot, Capt. Roland C. Starke Jr., Fellows, Payne, Christ, and four other crewmen. Their mission was to fly toward Newfoundland with five other bombers, rendezvous with KC-135 Stratotankers for aerial refueling, then fly toward the East Coast to simulate Soviet bombers attacking New York; Washington, D.C.; and other key Eastern cities. Pogo 22 refueled at 3 p.m., then turned southwest toward its strike zone, a corridor between New York City and Philadelphia. Pogo 22 and another B-52 from the 73rd Bomb Squadron flew in a lateral formation 10 miles apart. Starke made radio contact with the other plane at 4:15 p.m. as they descended through clouds to 1,000 feet above the water to evade radar. Pogo 22's last radio transmission occurred about 5:45 p.m., according to published reports. The bomber, one of the largest military aircraft of its time, was never seen or heard from again. "It disappeared quietly and very quickly," said Roger A. Mola, an aviation journalist and consulting researcher for Air & Space/ Smithsonian who has done extensive research on the Sky Shield program and the missing B-52. "This was a massive machine ... but there were no reports of debris being recovered."
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