On Mar. 21, 1962, a 2-year-old black bear named Yogi had a rough day — he was ejected from a supersonic bomber at an altitude of 35,000 feet, supposedly to test the effectiveness of the bomber’s escape system for human flight crews.
Tucker Fagan, retired U.S. Air Force colonel and former commander of F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily that he’d never heard of that particular test, although it made him chuckle.
“This was American ingenuity at its best,” he said.
Yogi Survived The Test, But Still Died
Yogi was used to test the ejection pod on a B-58 Hustler bomber. The hapless bear was sent flying out of the plane while it was screaming along at 870 mph.
The speed alone must have been brutal to endure, Fagan said.
A human test pilot, George F. Smith, had to do an emergency ejection at a similar speed in 1955, and ended up in a coma for five days, according to Air Force accounts.
And given the 35,000-foot altitude, Yogi almost certainly would have been equipped with an oxygen mask during his test ejection, Fagan added.
“They must have hooked him up with oxygen, but they probably had to restrain his front paws” to keep the bear from ripping the mask off in a panic, Fagan said.
According to accounts of the test, Yogi landed safely, and apparently unharmed, 7 minutes and 49 seconds after he was ejected.
Unfortunately for the bear, he was later euthanized so his internal organs could be examined for possible damage.
A Meaningless Test
It’s likely that Yogi endured his ejection ordeal and later died for no reason, retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal of Cody told Cowboy State Daily.
That’s because using a bear to test human survivability under extreme conditions doesn’t make sense, Neal said.
“This test would not have any practical value to be of use for human survival standards,” he said. “Other than the fact that we (humans and bears) are both mammals, the ursid physiology and anatomy differs greatly.
“Examples are the layer of body fat on the typical bear. And the fact that they can go 4-6 months without eating, drinking, urinating, defecating (during winter hibernation) and not lose any bone mass during that four-to-six-month period is enough to make one think that they must be from another planet.”
He said maybe this was a case of overthinking with a dubious solution.
“Put this test down to the military having too much time on their hands,” he added. “A chimpanzee would have been a closer analogy. But thankfully they did not throw some poor chimp out the plane.”
Bear Testing, B-58 Both Short-Lived
Fagan said that not only had he never heard of the Yogi high-speed, high-altitude ejection test, he was unaware of the Air Force ever using bears for any other tests.
He said remembered B-58 bombers from early in his Air Force career.
To his knowledge, that bomber’s service tenure was short, unlike that of its legendary cousin, the B-52.
Fagan said that as he recalls, the B-58 had great performance specifications. But it was too much of a fuel hog to have a practical flight range, particularly back then when the Air Force didn’t have many in-flight refueling tanker planes.
Fagan said he recalled an Air Force officer saying of the B-58 that it was “the best damn airplane I ever strapped my butt into — if we were to go to war with Canada.”
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
