Crew Chief Thomas E Murray
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was my bird at Little Rock AFB, 43rd Bomb Wing, 43rd OMS, 1964 to
end of 66. I joined the Air force in 1960 , 7 years I worked on the
B-58. I spent one year in Thailand as a crew chief on the KC-135.
Crew Chief position was the person in charge of all maintenance and
flight preparation on a single aircraft. My history on the B-58 was
quite interesting as I was assigned to the test force at Carswell
AFB. In those early days we had 25 or 30 men assigned to one aircraft,
as we had only 9 birds to work and train on. and as the fleet grew
we ended up with 6 to a crew on average. The whole Wing was moved
to Little Rock AFB in summer of 1964. I was assigned to several aircraft
during my tour on the B-58, most notably A/C 451, it was the first
bird we sent to the Paris air show in 1961. As you might know she
crashed during a performance in which the pilot, (Maj. Murphy), was
ordered to roll the airplane during his pass-by. Unfortunately the
B-58 was never designed to be rolled, as he rolled it into the clouds,
they figure he lost his horizon and pulled back on the stick thinking
he was right-side-up when actually he was up-side down. A sad day
for all. As for me I've been in the Aircraft industry for 40 years now. I've worked for General Dynamics on to Lockheed Martin sense Dec 1967. I'm an artist now for 33 years and still love the aviation business. I do most everything on the computer nowadays, MAC of course... [If you want to see some of Thomas E Murray's artwork, take a look at three examples of his work.] B-58 Hustler Photogallery The following pictures were taken by Thomas E Murray himself during the seven years in which he worked on the B-58 from 1960 till 1967. His pictures show some historic remarkable events from the Hustler era. The top row first three pictures show the crew of the Firefly on May 10, 1961 before and after their record flight. The fourth picture shows the Firelefly refuelling on its way to Paris. On departing Paris to fly back home, the same crew of the record flight of May 10, crashed in the Firefly. For some more background information regarding this dramatic crash, take a look at this page. You can enlarge the following pictures and read the info by clicking on these thumbnails. All copyrights are reserved to Thomas E Murray.
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