Every Position Inside a 6-Man B-52 Bomber Ranked From Safest to Deadliest

Six men sat inside a B-52 bomber at thirty thousand feet, and every seat had its own way of killing a man. Fifteen B-52s are commonly listed as lost to North Vietnamese air defences in the eleven nights of Operation Linebacker II in December 1972. This video ranks each crew position from the safest to the deadliest: the copilot, the electronic warfare officer facing backwards, the aircraft commander, the two navigators who ejected downward through the floor, and the tail gunner who had no ejection seat at all, yet was the only man aboard who could shoot back. It follows Charcoal One, the first bomber lost on the first night, and the two MiG-21 kills credited to B-52 gunners, with the Vietnamese side of the story. Where accounts differ, the video says so. Which crew position would you have taken? Tell me in the comments. Archival photographs and film: U.S. National Archives (NARA), U.S. Air Force and U.S. Department of Defense, public domain; copies via Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive. Some scenes are illustrated with AI-generated images of period settings; the facts, names and dates come from the historical record.