At Launch Complex 533-7, about an hour southeast of Wichita, Kansas, the final stages of a missile recycle were being completed. A Titan II had been removed from 3–7 and returned to McConnell Air Force Base, where it would undergo routine maintenance checks. A replacement missile had been lowered into the silo. On the morning of August 24, 1978, a PTS crew arrived at the complex to pump oxidizer into the tanks. The fuel would be added the following day, and then the warhead would be placed atop the Titan II, finishing the recycle. On the main floor of the control center, the head of the PTS crew, Staff Sergeant Robert J. Thomas, briefed the missile combat crew commander, First Lieutenant Keith E. Matthews, about the work that would be done that day. A trainee, Airman Mirl Linthicum, would be acting as PTS team chief, supervising the procedure from the control trailer topside.
Oxidizer lines were attached to the stage 1 and stage 2 tanks, and both were full in about an hour. The lines were thick, heavy hoses through which the propellant flowed. Airman Erby Hepstall and Airman Carl Malinger put on RFHCO suits and entered the silo to disconnect the lines. Malinger had never been inside a Titan II silo before. He was nineteen years old and new to the Air Force, accompanying Hepstall that day for on-the-job training. The removal of the stage 2 lines, near the top of the missile, went smoothly. Hepstall and Malinger rode the elevator down to disconnect the lines from stage 1. Standing on a platform near the bottom of the missile, they unscrewed one of them. A powerful stream of oxidizer, like water suddenly released from a fire hydrant, hit Malinger’s chest and the faceplate of his helmet and knocked him down. Hepstall tried to reconnect the line, but it wouldn’t screw back on. Oxidizer poured from the missile, fell into the W below it, and then rose as a thick, reddish brown cloud of vapor.
Inside the top level of the control center, Lieutenant Matthews was preparing his lunch when a Klaxon sounded. Down below, the deputy commander, Second Lieutenant Charles B. Frost, sat at the launch control console. Frost wore a headset and monitored the PTS team on the radio. He pushed a button on the console and turned off the Klaxon, assuming that a puff of oxidizer had set it off when the lines were disconnected. That happened all the time. The Klaxon sounded again, and Frost heard screams over the radio.
“Oh my God, the poppet.”
“What was the poppet?” Frost said into his headset. “What’s wrong?”
Matthews came down the stairs as warning lights flashed on the console: OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT, VAPOR SILO EQUIP. AREA, VAPOR OXI PUMP ROOM.
“Get out of here, let’s get out,” a voice yelled over the radio.
“Where are you?” Frost asked. The sounds on the radio were chaotic. People were talking at the same time, they were shouting and screaming and drowning one another out. Frost pushed the override button, blocking everybody else’s radio transmission, and ordered: “Come back to the control center.”
“I can’t see,” somebody said.
Lieutenant Matthews walked over to the blast door protecting the control center. He tried to open the door and see what was going on. The blast door wouldn’t open. And Matthews got a whiff of something that smelled a lot like Clorox bleach. It smelled like oxidizer.
In the control trailer topside, Airman Linthicum, the trainee running his first recycle, heard the shouting on the radio but couldn’t understand what was being said. Linthicum ran out of the trailer, trying to get better reception on a portable headset, and saw a reddish cloud rising from the exhaust vents. Another member of the PTS crew left the trailer, found Sergeant Thomas — the most experienced technician at the site — and told him something had gone wrong. Thomas was twenty-nine years old. He saw the oxidizer, ran to the access portal, and asked the control center for permission to enter the launch complex.
Lieutenant Frost granted the permission, unlocking the outer steel door for Thomas and then the door at the bottom of the entrapment area. All the hazard lights on Frost’s console seemed to be flashing at once, including FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT, which made no sense. Frost kept asking the PTS team chief where they were in the checklist when the accident happened, hoping to find the right emergency checklist for dealing with it. But the radio still didn’t work properly. Frost pulled out different tech manuals and flipped through their pages. He wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do.
“Hey, I smell Clorox,” Matthews said. He told the missile crew to set up a portable vapor detector in front of the door, to close the blast valve and the blast damper, protecting the air supply of the control center.
