How The B-52 Lost Its Tail Guns & Its 6th Crew Member

On October 1, 1991, the only enlisted airman aboard America’s most enduring bomber stopped flying with it, and he has never come back. He wasn’t a pilot or a navigator. He sat alone, facing backward, with a radar scope and a trigger, and he is the reason a 1950s jet bomber once shot MiG fighters out of the night sky. Then, within months, the United States Air Force (USAF)erased his job.