FLYING Magazine
At lunch several weeks ago, I told a story of a B-25 that crash-landed at Lunken Airport in the 1960s with a cargo of wild reptiles, snakes and alligators. Some of these guys were old hands at Lunken, but they simply didn’t believe me.
It was way back when the original control tower was still in the main terminal building, manned by a bunch of really great FAA controllers, and the tower chief was a good friend, Wes Schaeffer.
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At age 19, I was commuting to a “streetcar college” across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in Covington, Kentucky. This involved transferring buses downtown to reach Villa Madonna College (now the much more prestigious Thomas More College) across the river. In freshman year I studied and earned a straight-A average. As a sophomore and learning to fly in an Ercoupe at Lunken, my grades, uh, sagged a little. It still amazes me that students majoring in aviation technology, or whatever they call it, earn college credits for ground school and flying lessons. I was hiding an E6B inside my French textbook and reading Wolfgang Langeweische’s Stick and Rudder tucked inside the cover of an Anglo-Saxon literature textbook.
Maybe it wasn’t the wisest policy that Villa Madonna allowed unlimited cuts from classes after freshman year. When I’d reach downtown on the Harrison Ave. bus, if the flag flying over Cincinnati’s Carew Tower wasn’t whipping too strongly, it was awfully tempting to switch from the bus over to school and instead hop on the Eastern Ave. bus that let me off a block from Lunken.
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My first stop before hiking down Airport Road was often a visit to the control tower in the terminal building. It was the 1960s, so there were no keys, buzzers, or prior requests. You just opened an unmarked door on the second floor and climbed up a ladder to the tower cab. And it was wonderful.
Well, it was a Thursday afternoon in February 1963, when I climbed the ladder but hesitated. “Something” was going on, so I kept quiet and backed out of the way in the tower cab.
There were fire trucks and police cars lining the sides of Runway (then) 20R and a large airplane on final approach with a 24-knot crosswind. No landing gear was visible as it touched down and slid several hundred feet down the hard surface. I saw no fire as I watched a man eject himself through a cockpit overhead exit and run over toward Runway 24.
The pilot, Leonard McGee, had reported to the tower from about 10 miles out and 6,000 feet that he’d shut down a failed right engine, and then a “hydraulic issue” prevented him from lowering the landing gear. As he circled to burn off fuel he advised the tower his cargo was over 2,000 mostly poisonous snakes and four alligators for a Wild Cargo show downtown. Then he ordered his copilot to bail out from 4,000 feet north of the airport and, with that strong 24-knot crosswind, he ended up dangling safely in a tree a few miles north in Newtown, Ohio.
On final McGee reported that he appeared to also be losing the left engine but would try to make the runway. After a surprisingly nice touchdown, the airplane slid about 400 feet on the hard surface and, before it completely stopped, he hurled himself out of an overhead hatch and began running.
By this time, a bunch of fire department and police vehicles were on the scene as well as (more importantly) every TV news station reporter and photographer…and me, trying to be inconspicuous in the tower cab. One of the firefighters noticed electrical system smoke in the cockpit and disconnected the battery, but there was no actual fire. That was fortunate, but it meant the firefighters were tasked with unloading the alligators, snakes, and reptiles from the cabin.
The whole thing was certainly spectacular but did meet with a little suspicion. Here’s the rest of the story.
In the 1960s there was a TV show called Wild Cargo featuring animals owned by an interesting guy in Slidell, Louisiana, named Arthur Jones. Jones was quite an entrepreneur and developed Nautilus and other exercise equipment as well as being a pilot and lover of creepy crawlies. He regularly flew his jet to Africa and South America, where he captured alligators, snakes, turtles, and reptiles, and hauled them back to his wildlife park in Louisiana.
Some he sold to zoos around the country. Others he featured in his TV show. Slidell also sponsored large traveling Wild Cargo exhibitions and charged a healthy admission price for tickets to view these creatures in cities across the country.
After a rather anemic profit from a December 1962 show in Chicago, Jones was determined to put on a similar but more profitable event at Cincinnati’s Music Hall. When advance sales for that show were proving less than impressive, Jones concocted a scheme where he loaded one of the three B-25s (N7947C) he owned with nearly 2,000 reptiles, including hundreds of venomous snakes, turtles, reptiles, and four alligators.
He later admitted: “I wanted to make damned sure that everybody there knew about the show (so) I hired McGee to crash the B-25 at Lunken. But it had to be done in a way that the news cameramen and reporters would have enough advance notice to be on the scene.”
It certainly was successful. The Cincinnati show sold out for 10 straight days.
The B-25 was dragged off the runway after the firefighters unloaded the trussed alligators and crates of “things,” and then spent three days hunting other escaped snakes. I stayed away from the airport until all were accounted for.
The airplane went into Cincinnati Aircraft’s maintenance hangar, where the gear was extended and engine inspections conducted. Jones didn’t want it back, and it sat forlornly near the terminal building until it was sold in a sheriff’s auction for $500 in September 1964 to famed aircraft collector Walter Soplata (a story in himself).
Soplata and his son dismantled it and hauled the whole thing to his farm in Newbury, Ohio, where it remained a wreck for 25 years. Finally, it was sold to members of the EAA Vintage Aircraft Association for restoration to flying status. Unbelievably, on November 19, 2005—15,613 days after it last flew—N7947C took to the skies again.
What a wonderful rebirth for this rather abandoned, abused, and mistreated classic bomber—all for a PR stunt.
This column first appeared in the July Issue 972 of the FLYING print edition.