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From the Bush Family Album:



Oh hell, the Air Force is going to kill me for this!!!

In one of the more bizarre stories about the F-106 ... on 2 February 1970, four F-106As flew out of Malmstrom AFB, Montana, to "mix it up" among themselves as an air combat training exercise. One had to abort when its drag chute opened before takeoff. During the resulting sequence of dogfights, one of the F-106As, piloted by First Lieutenant Gary Foust, went into a flat spin at altitude. It wasn't easy to get the Dart out of a flat spin; Foust stayed with the machine, trying everything he could, but finally decided he was getting too low and ejected.

However, the ejection knocked the F-106 out of the spin and it took off towards the horizon. Major Jim Lowe, who had been following Foust in one of the other two Darts and giving him suggestions, had to shout out: "Gary, you better get back in it!"

Of course, even though Montana contains a great deal of uninhabited land, it was worrisome to think about where the aircraft might come down. However, Foust had set the machine to takeoff trim in one of his attempts to get it out of the spin, and takeoff trim was similar to landing trim. It descended gradually and performed a very neat belly landing in a snow-covered field near the town of Big Sandy, missing a rockpile before it slid to a halt. A local law enforcement officer called Malmstrom and asked how to turn off its turbojet engine; he was told to just let it run out of fuel, which it did less than two hours later.

The F-106 had an ugly gash in its belly but otherwise was structurally intact. The aircraft was disassembled, trucked to a railroad flatcar, and sent to California to be repaired and reassembled. It went back into operation and in fact was one of the last Darts in ADC service.