Warbird Information Exchange

Found this on Landings.com
http://www.landings.com/evird.acgi$pass ... h-soc.html

I'll have to keep an eye on Deep Sea Detectives webpage for this episode:

b-36-crash-soc
Thanks to deep-sea diver Steve Donathan, the story of a civilian-flown B-36D's crash off the coast of Mission Beach, Calif. on Aug. 5, 1952 may soon be featured on the History Channel's "Deep Sea Det-ectives" TV series.
Donathan, a dive instructor from the Loma Portal area of San Diego, found the wreckage of the massive Convair B-36 Peacemaker nearly 50 years after it crashed. But he kept its location secret for fear that scavengers would desecrate it.

So says Diane Bell, a columnist in the San Diego Union.

On June 13th, Donathan finally broke his silence and led Dan Crowell, a History Channel videographer, to the wreck. Along with veteran underwater explorer Joel Silverstein, they filmed the remains of the B-36 on the ocean floor.

Donathan hopes that publicity generated by the show will inspire steps to guard the wreckage. He has shared his findings with the military and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

He found the B-36 after hours of research and interviews with eyewitnesses. One of these was Myron Smith, who was just 15 when he watched the crash from the boardwalk on South Mission Beach, Bell reported.

Donathan's first find was a jet engine that had fallen off the bomber and sunk in 57 feet of water near La Jolla's Bird Rock. After combing a site about three miles from shore with sonar and underwater drop cameras, he spotted the plane in about 260 feet of water.

Even at that depth, the ghostly outline of the B-36, with its 162-foot fuselage and 230-foot wing, was unmistakable, he recalled. After charting the location, Donathan returned several times to explore the wreck.

What he found was a pile of crumpled, twisted metal encrusted with marine life. He cut off a section of the plane's skin to verify what he had found.

Six of the eight crew, delivering the plane for the Air Force, jumped from the burning craft and survived; a seventh drowned and the body of pilot Dave Franks was never found. Military divers retrieved parts of the plane from a wide debris field but halted salvage efforts because of the dangerous depth of the diving.

Looking Back

The B-36 (s/n 49-2661A) was the 121st B-36 built by Consolidated Aircraft in Fort Worth, Tex. Originally a B model, it had been returned to San Diego for conversion to a D model, which included the addition of two jet engines on each wing.

The crew was pilot Dave Franks, copilot Roy Adkins, first flight engineer Walt Hoffman, second engineer Don Maxion, radar technician Bill Wilson, engineers Kenneth Rogers and Bill Ashmore, and radioman Roy Sommers.

As the B-36 was heading south along the coast near La Jolla, enroute to land at San Diego's Lindbergh Field, an engine on the right wing caught fire. As flames engulfed the plane, Franks banked out to sea to keep it from crashing into homes after the crew bailed out. (Only Adkins, Ashmore, Maxion, Rogers, Sommers and Wilson made it; Franks and Hoffman died in the crash.)

The cause of the fire was never proven but an engine alternator that overheated and ignited its magnesium alloy housing was the most likely culprit.

Smith, now a retired CHP officer, recalled that the wing burned like tissue paper and that an engine fell off north of Tourmaline Canyon in the city of La Jolla. When it hit the water, he said, there was a large ball of fire that burned for a few minutes, then disappeared.

Maxion, the last survivor of the crew, died in 2002. Earlier this year, with the permission of his widow, Donathan entombed some of Maxion's ashes inside the plane.