Two Crewmembers Vanish in RB-57F Crash With a Fluctuating Date
By Marcus Boone ·
Their disappearance over the Black Sea was managed with professional precision, shifting the official record by three years to leave the loss unresolved.
December 14, 1965. Or perhaps 1968, depending on which account the government trusts. A surface-to-air missile finds an RB-57F over the Black Sea near Odessa. Two crewmembers vanish. This is the kind of erasure the state manages with professional precision—a plane gone, two men missing, and a date that fluctuates in the record by three years.
The FAS Intelligence Resource Program records the history of this aircraft not as a series of triumphs, but as a progression of physical expansions. The B-57 began as a license-built version of the British English Electric Canberra, which first flew in 1949. By 1951, the U.S. Air Force was looking for a jet medium bomber to replace the Douglas B-26 Invader. In a move that broke a long-standing tradition, the USAF opted to purchase a foreign military aircraft to be manufactured in quantity domestically. The Glenn L. Martin Company took the contract, and by 1959, 403 Canberras had been produced for the USAF.
A 126-Foot Surface
While the standard B-57 was a tactical tool, the government soon found that the Canberra's frame could be stretched to suit a more voyeuristic purpose. The RB-57 variants were designed for stratospheric reconnaissance, and the engineering reflected a desperate need for altitude. The RB-57D saw the wingspan grow from the original 64 feet to 106 feet, powered by J-57 engines capable of 11,000 pounds of thrust. This pushed the aircraft's ceiling to 65,000 feet, placing it far above the reach of most contemporary defenses.
But the RB-57F took this appetite for scale further. Converted by General Dynamics from B-57E airframes, the RB-57F boasted a wingspan of 126 feet and a total wing surface of 2,000 square feet. To keep this massive surface aloft, the Air Force installed Pratt-Whitney TF100 turbofans and a larger vertical tail. These were not bombers in any traditional sense; they were platforms for observation, designed to linger in the thin air of the upper atmosphere where they could watch the world without being seen.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
Air Samplers and Atomic Tests
Surveillance, however, is not always about sight. The FAS mirror notes that the RB-57 also served the Atomic Energy Commission as air samplers. Their mission was to monitor foreign atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, literally breathing in the fallout of other nations' secret programs to determine the yield and composition of their warheads.
This turned the RB-57 into a biological sensor for the Cold War. While the EB-57B electronic warfare version was dispensing chaff to jam hostile radar transmissions, other B-57s were orbiting the stratosphere, turning the air itself into a ledger of nuclear ambition. Even the bomber variants of the B-57 possessed a peculiar, almost clinical piece of engineering: a rotating bomb bay door. Rather than dropping bombs through a hatch, the weapons were loaded directly onto the door assembly, which would rotate completely inside the bay before release.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
Black Sea and mainland China
There is a coldness to the way the FAS catalogue entry lists the aircraft's specifications alongside its casualties. It notes a max speed of 582 mph at 40,000 feet, then immediately pivots to the shoot-downs. On December 24, 1957, Soviet fighters brought down an RB-57 over the Black Sea. Later, in February 1958 and October 1959, RB-57Ds operated by the Chinese Nationalists were shot down over mainland China.
These losses underscore the limits of the B-57's stratospheric shield. The belief that altitude equals immunity is a recurring delusion in Washington. Whether it was the RB-57D over China or the RB-57F near Odessa, the reach of the opposition eventually caught up to the wing-span.
Related files on the 67th Cyberspace Wing and State Department telegrams from the late 1950s suggest a broader context of tension, but the FAS record remains focused on the hardware and the gaps it left behind. The document leaves the finality of the Odessa mission unresolved, offering two different years for the crash and noting simply that the two crewmembers remained missing.