On April 30, 1966, one of those test flights turned into a problem no engineer had imagined. Test pilot Al White and USAF Col. Joe Cotton took off from Edwards Air Force Base on a mission meant to push the Valkyrie to Mach 3 for half an hour. But just after lifting off, they noticed the landing gear wasn’t behaving normally.
A short-circuit froze the nose gear halfway into the compartment, and because the gear was jammed against the door, the tires were shredded. When the pilots tried lowering the gear again, the hydraulic system wouldn’t respond. Even the backup electrical system-meant to save the day-was dead.
That’s not a small issue. A small general-aviation plane such as a Cessna might survive a landing without nose gear, though it would still be risky. The Valkyrie couldn’t. Its shape, its height above the ground, the structure of its underside-everything pointed toward a breakup on landing. So the crew tried what pilots sometimes attempt with stubborn landing gear, making a couple of hard touch-and-gos maneuvers-briefly landing and lifting again to try to free the gear. Nothing worked. They stayed airborne for over two hours, running out of ideas and slowly facing the possibility that they might have to eject, sacrificing the aircraft and possibly not surviving themselves.
Fortunately, the aircraft still had plenty of fuel, so they kept circling. Down on the ground, engineers dug through wiring diagrams and sensor data. After nearly two hours, they found the issue, a failed circuit breaker that had killed the electrical backup for the landing gear. The only way to recover it was to short the terminals manually. That’s a simple instruction if you’re standing in a hangar with a toolbox. But inside a sealed test bomber at altitude, White and Cotton had nothing except their flight gear and a briefcase.
Cotton opened it, searching through papers and notes, and found a small binder-style paperclip. That was all they needed. He put on a glove, reached into the electrical panel, and used the paperclip to bridge the faulty breaker. The crew heard the satisfying click-nose gear locked. A 39-cent piece of office stationery had revived a $750-million experimental aircraft.
The landing was still difficult. When the Valkyrie touched down at almost 173 knots (roughly 320 km/h), three of the four main landing gear brakes were still under full hydraulic pressure, so the wheels locked instantly. Tires burst, fire flashed along the underside of the aircraft, and the drag chutes snapped open. Fire crews raced in, expecting the worst, but the aircraft rolled to a stop intact. It even flew again two weeks later.
That same XB-70 would be lost six weeks later in a mid-air collision during a photo flight, ending its brief career. But the story of that April day stayed behind as a moment when a supersonic aircraft, built from exotic metals and flown by some of the best pilots alive, was saved in mid-air by a bit of quick thinking and an ordinary paperclip pulled out of a briefcase.
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