LUCKY STRIKES

An excerpt of the story told by Robert "Lucky" Luedke, Flight Engineer
Originally published by Westword Mar 19, 1998
Written by Harrison Fletcher

After he turned eighteen, Lucky moved to Los Angeles with his older brother and took a job building airplanes for North American Aviation. A few years later he was flying most of the planes he built.

By then, World War II had started. Lucky signed up as soon as he could, zigzagging between California, Utah and Arizona, learning to fly Black Widow night fighters. Not long afterward, he survived his first plane crash.

"Wasn't nothing," Lucky says. "Another plane hit me on the runway. Neither one of us were going fast enough to hurt anything."

Soon Lucky was trained as a mechanic, flight engineer and pilot, but he'd watched the war pass him by. Finally he was assigned to a B-29 bomber and given a mission in the Pacific in August 1945. A few weeks later the war ended. "Of course we were disappointed," he says. "We couldn't wait to fight. That's how stupid we were."

As soldiers were discharged and sent home, an officer strolled through Lucky's unit seeking recruits for Alaska. Most of the men laughed; Lucky volunteered. "It was exciting," he says. "A chance to see something new."

Off he went, flying with the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron over the North Pole, conducting some of the first spy missions of the Cold War. To the public, Lucky and his crew were testing equipment. In reality, they were scouting the Soviet border for secret bases. "Oh, we had a couple of [Soviet planes] on our wingtips once or twice," he says, sucking his teeth. "Nothing too dramatic."

In December 1946, Lucky guesses, he earned his nickname. He was piloting a B-29 through heavy ice and fog, lost two engines and crash-landed in a field, barely scrambling away before the plane burned. One of the crew members snapped a photo of the charred flight cabin. "Boy," he said. "You're lucky."

The name stuck. "In front of us we had 64-below weather, and behind us we had a 500-degree inferno," Lucky remembers. "There were some broken bones, but no one got killed. I was black-and-blue. Nothing to complain about. We went back to the barracks, changed clothes and went to a bar."

Two months later they crash-landed again.

Shortly after midnight on February 21, 1947, a B-29 set out from Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, for an eighteen-hour circle flight to the North Pole. The plane was nicknamed "Kee Bird," after a mythical creature that stays in the cold weather while smarter birds fly south.

The crew was testing a gyroscope navigation system. Lucky was the flight engineer. This mission, like the others, was secret. Radio silence was crucial. Once the crew left the base, no one knew exactly where they were.

The plane rounded the North Pole, conducted its test and turned back. As it did, a heavy storm hit. Then the crew saw something they didn't expect.

"We picked up land before we were supposed to pick up land," Lucky says. "We couldn't identify it. We had no reason to run into land yet."

Lucky thinks the gyro must have malfunctioned; others suggest the plane was misdirected by bogus Soviet radio signals. Whatever it was, the crew couldn't determine their position. They tried to read the stars, but the plane couldn't rise above the thick cloud cover. The crew circled over what was then uncharted Greenland, lost.

"We didn't know where we were," Lucky says. "We thought we were in Russia. We couldn't find a place to sit down. There ain't any smooth places up there. We were running out of light. We had to land."

Eventually the pilot spotted a frozen lake, and the plane skidded on its belly 800 feet along the ice before coming to a stop near the shore. Miraculously, the plane didn't spin out or burn, and no one was hurt. One of the crew members knelt on the ice and made the sign of the cross.

The temperature was 49 degrees below zero. Lucky and the other ten men dragged supplies from the plane, pitched makeshift tents and huddled in sleeping bags. They took turns draining gas from the Kee Bird, keeping a fire going, melting snow for drinking water and maintaining the generator and radio. A few men climbed a nearby hill and discharged flares, but the signals didn't shoot high enough.

"We didn't have any cards. We didn't have any booze. There wasn't much to do," Lucky says, "except survive."

When the clouds dissipated, the navigator determined their position from the stars, give or take 500 miles, and transmitted a coded message to base. The Ladd Field radio operator asked, "What are you guys doing in Greenland?" A crewman responded, "We came down to shoot a few polar bears."

Then they waited. At that time of year, darkness lasts eighteen hours at the polar ice cap. Lucky and the others hunkered down in flight suits, parkas and mukluks. Their only food: the K rations of canned pork loaf and crackers. Lucky went hunting once, but he didn't find anything more than the remains of a rabbit.

"There wasn't anything alive out there that I could find," he says. Eight planes searched for the Kee Bird. When the wreck was found, rescuers dropped a load of supplies, including a girlie calendar from a Fairbanks bar.

Three days after the crash, a C-54 transport plane slid along the frozen lake and gathered up the Kee Bird crew. The rescue earned the team captain a personal commendation from President Harry S. Truman.

The Kee Bird was left behind, with broken wheels, bent propellers and no fuel.

In 1989 a retired Florida pilot named William Schnase called Lucky with an idea: retrieve the Kee Bird from Greenland.

The plane had been discovered four years earlier by a British pilot on an Arctic expedition. By now, only one of the 4,000 B-29s built during WWII was in flying condition. The Kee Bird, partially frozen in ice, was remarkably intact; Schnase wanted to repair the plane and fly it back to the United States.

"Why not?" Lucky said. Over the next few years, he and Schnase (mostly Schnase) developed a detailed, three-phase renovation and retrieval plan, wading through red tape and preparing a packet titled "The Snow-Bird Project." Then Lucky had back surgery, and Schnase disappeared. His phone was disconnected, and mail addressed to him was returned. Lucky thinks Schnase suffered a heart attack and died. "That's all it could be," he says. "I never heard from him again."

In the meantime, another Kee Bird project had been launched by several California businessmen, who planned to restore the plane and sell it to a museum or private collector. The partners spent more than $500,000 coordinating the endeavor and meticulously restoring the plane to flying condition.

As the project gained international attention (it was documented on Nova), the original Kee Bird crew reunited. Lucky, who'd been assigned a minor role, traveled to Greenland and stood beside men he hadn't seen in 47 years. "I wanted to be the pilot, co-pilot or flight engineer," he says. "I could have done it. I had the original manual somewhere."

But in May 1995, as the Kee Bird was about to take flight, Lucky was sidelined in a Greenland hospital with a blood clot in his left leg. He hated to miss the action. "Checking myself into the hospital was the hardest thing I've ever done," he says. "But if I got sick, I didn't want them to go through what they went through with Kriege."

(A year earlier, Rick Kriege, the restoration crew's 39-year-old chief mechanic, had become ill at the restoration site in Greenland. He died two weeks after being evacuated.)

While Lucky was recovering from surgery, his wife visited the hospital with bad news: The Kee Bird had caught fire and burned. The renovation crew had forgotten to replace a defective connection to the plane's auxiliary power unit in the tail. When they fired up the engines, the $10 component broke and spewed fuel over a hot generator. The crew sat on lawn chairs and watched the plane disappear in flames.

Lucky was devastated. "It was a terrible loss," he says. "It was worse than losing your wife. You can replace your wife, but you can never replace that plane."

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