Overview

Air Force navigators and bombardiers have long labored under the shadow of pilots-their contributions undervalued, misunderstood, or simply unknown to the general public. This was especially the case with the non-pilot officer aircrew in the Vietnam and Cold War-era B-52 Stratofortress. Of the six people who operated the bomber, three wore navigator wings-two of those men were also bombardiers, the other an electronic warfare officer. Without the navigator-bombardiers in particular, executing the nuclear war strike plan or flying Southeast Asian conventional bombing sorties would have been impossible. This book reveals who these men were and what they did down in the ""Black Hole,"" a story told by one of their own.

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9781591143864

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Reviews

Combining his technical savvy with a brand of humor that is distinctively Air Force, Harder gives the layman a good primer on the navigator's role before showing how he and his colleagues put it to wartime practice. As such, Flying from the Black Hole earns a place in any Vietnam or U.S. Air Force scholar's library. --HistoryNet originally published in the February 2010 issue of Vietnam Magazine

Author Information

Robert O. Harder was an Air Force ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He served in the Strategic Air Command and flew 145 combat missions during the Vietnam War as a B-52D navigator-bombardier, later becoming a commercial pilot and certificated flight instructor. He lives in Chicago.

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