In anticipation of the Mike bomb’s manned sampling mission, the pilots practiced at the airfield at Indian Springs, thirty miles due south of Area 51. These pilots, including Stockman, then flew sampling missions through the kiloton-size atomic bombs being exploded at the Nevada Test Site as part of a spring 1952 test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “Up to this time,” Stockman explains, “the scientists had put monkeys in the cockpits of remotely controlled drone aircraft [at the test site]. They would fly these things through the [atomic] clouds. Then they began to be interested in the effects of radiation on humanoids. They realized that with care and cunning they could put people in there.”
The Air Force worked hard to change the pilots’ perception of themselves as guinea pigs, at least for the historical record. According to a history of the atomic cloud sampling program, declassified in 1985, by the time Stockman and his fellow pilots left Indian Springs for the Marshall Islands to fly missions through megaton-size thermonuclear bomb clouds, the men accepted that they “were doing something useful…not serving as guinea pigs as they seriously believed when first called upon to do the sampling.”
Stockman offers another perspective. “In those days, I didn’t think much about the moral questions. I was young. The visual picture when these things go off is absolutely stunning. I was very much in awe of it,” Stockman recalls. “The [atomic bombs] that were going on in the proving grounds in Nevada were minute in comparison to these [thermonuclear bomb] monsters out there in the Pacific. Those were big brutes. When they went off they would punch right through the Earth’s atmosphere and head out into space.”
After finally arriving in the Pacific, pilots flew “familiarization flights and rehearsals” in the days leading up to the Mike bomb. But nothing could prepare an airman for the actual test. Stockman’s colleague Air Force pilot Jimmy P. Robinson was one of the six pilots who “volunteered” to fly through the Ivy Mike mushroom cloud. Because the physical bomb was the size of a large airplane hangar, it couldn’t be called a weapon per se. The bomb was so large that it was built from the ground up, on an island on the north side of the atoll called Elugelab. Given the extraordinary magnitude of the thermonuclear bomb, it is utterly remarkable to consider that shortly after Robinson flew his F-84G straight through its mushroom stem, he was able to radio back clear thoughts to his commanding officer, who was located twenty-five miles to the south, on Eniwetok. “The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace,” the record states Robinson said. He then described how his radio instrument meters were spinning around in circles, “like the sweep second hand on a watch.” After going inside the cloud a second time, Robinson reported that his “airplane stalled out and gone [sic] into a spin.” His autopilot disengaged and his radio cut out, but the courageous pilot flew on as instructed. He flew around in circles and finally he flew back into and out of the mushroom stem and the lower part of its cloud—for nearly four more hours. Only when it was time for Robinson to refuel did he realize that the electromagnetic pulse from the thermonuclear bomb had ruined his control beacon. This meant that it was impossible for him to locate the fuel tanker.