In the early days of the B-52 flying at Fairchild AFB, way back in the late l950's, we were participating in a routine training flight. The weather at our home base was deteriorating as clouds and rain moved in over Eastern Washington. Ordinarily that would not have been of great concern as we were equipped with excellent navigation equipment, radio aids to navigation and multiple ultra-high frequency (UHF) radios.

On this particular flight, however, something was amiss. Our UHF radios failed ... all of them. We could neither talk to nor receive messages from the ground or any other aircraft. And we were flying in the clouds.

Our predicament was more of a nuisance than a life-threatening situation. The Air Traffic Control people were aware of where we were, because they were tracking us on radar. They knew we were still flying around and had not executed the flight maneuver of a triangular flight pattern to signal an emergency compounded by radio failure. And they would surely clear others out of our way, knowing we would be expected to follow the last instructions received and our flight plan. But it was greatly inconvenient not to be able to communicate.

As the Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO) on the crew, sitting next to an array of special radar and radio jamming equipment, I knew that I could tune in to the Air Traffic Control frequencies and hear them at my station. But I could not, through normal means, transfer those voice communications messages directly to the pilots. Nor did I have a UHF voice transmitter to use to talk.

What I did have, however, was a crazy idea of something to try out of the ordinary. In the days of those early B-52D model aircraft we did not have solid state electronics. Our radios and ECM equipment used vacuum tubes and much different electronics than today's transitorized systems. It occurred to me that since my ECM gear could operate for jamming purposes in the UHF frequency spectrum, it might be modified somehow to transmit voice instead of jamming noise.

I decided to risk electrical shock and remove the protective covers from the equipment around me to see if I could rig up a method of changing the systems to send and receive voice. I was much more intent on rigging up a communications system than at all concerned about damaging the equipment or electrocuting myself.

The AIC-10 intercom system on the aircraft had an electrical output of ten or twenty volts, accessible at the back of the control box beside me. The UHF jammer transmitter, located close to the intercom box, had a 6D4 noise generator tube used to serve as the source of noise to be amplified through the transmitter and impressed upon the selected transmit frequency. It was not very elegant, but I borrowed some wire from the cockpit lighting system and fashioned a path for the output of the intercom to be fed to the empty socket of the removed noise generator tube. Then I tuned the ECM receiver to Tower frequency, tuned the jammer transmitter to the same frequency and talked over the intercom.

Darned if it didn't work! It didn't work very well, but it worked at close range to the tower. We were able to communicate enough to safely get the airplane on the ground. And then I had the job of putting all that equipment back together before touchdown, for I didn't particularly want to land with a lap full of active and exposed electronic equipment.

After landing and during the debriefing with maintenance people, I explained what I had done. The maintenance people just shook their heads and said I was wrong. You can't do that .. it won't work. No way !

Now my dander was up. Not only could it work, but it had worked. I had done it! Why couldn't they understand?

A few days later I submitted a written description of the process I had followed and a checklist of how to do it. This report was sent to the Wing Commander, who in turn referred it to the factory representative of the equipment manufacturer and to the chief of maintenance.

Soon I received a telephone call requesting my attendance at a meeting to discuss my report. I proceeded to the appointed office and met with several Sergeants, maintenance officers and the factory representatives. Again I explained what I had done and why. They all shook their heads and said it was impossible and couldn't work. My arguments fell on deaf ears, but they agreed to witness another demonstration.

A few days later I was allowed to demonstrate my jury-rigged radio system to the doubting assemblage of experts. We arranged for a B-52 to be parked at the outer part of the flight line, a couple of miles from the control tower. Electrical power and equipment cooling carts were connected to the airplane so that I could operate the systems and duplicate my methods. Next to me in the cockpit was the factory representative and several sergeants. They weren't too thrilled when I again took the covers off the active equipment and variously held pieces and parts in my lap. But I did again demonstrate that I could hear and talk to the Control Tower even with the primary UHF radios turned off.

They shook their heads in disbelief .... and again expressed surprise and dismay at the somewhat unsafe way in which I used a jumper wire and worked inside the opened high voltage equipment. But they couldn't argue with the results. It did work.

Several weeks later I got two letters. One was a letter of commendation for resourcefulness and demonstrating a method of effecting emergency communications under adverse flight conditions. Some mention was even made that perhaps I had contributed to the safe landing of our valuable B-52 and the crew. But the second letter was an outright rejection of the idea becoming a published emergency procedure available to other crews. The powers that decided such things did not want to risk having others mess with potentially hazardous exposed electrical equipment in flight.