THE JET NO ONE WAS FLYING:

THE PILOTLESS LANDING NEAR BIG SANDY, MONTANA

A COLD WAR OUTPOST ON THE HIGH LINE

By the winter of 1970, Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls had been a fixture of Montana’s northern plains for two decades, home to intercontinental ballistic missile crews and, less famously, to the fighter squadrons of the Air Defense Command. Among these was the 71st Fighter Interceptor Squadron, which flew the Convair F-106A Delta Dart, a single-seat, delta-winged interceptor built to climb fast and destroy Soviet bombers before they could reach American cities. The F-106 was, by most accounts, an excellent airplane, but a demanding one. A historian at the McClellan Aviation Museum in California, writing on the aircraft’s development, described it as having what the Air Force itself once called the most task-loaded cockpit of any fighter flown in that era, an aircraft that rewarded a proficient pilot and punished any lapse in attention (Carey, qtd. in Grier). Montana’s stretch of the northern border was serious business during the Cold War, patrolled around the clock against the possibility of Soviet bombers slipping through polar airspace, and the pilots of the 71st trained accordingly, practicing the aggressive maneuvers that a real intercept might require.

On the morning of February 2, 1970, three of the squadron’s Delta Darts left Malmstrom for what should have been a routine, if demanding, air combat training mission over the empty country north of the base (Grier). A fourth aircraft had been scheduled to fly as well, but its drag chute deployed prematurely on the ramp before takeoff, reducing what was meant to be a two-versus-two exercise to a two-versus-one engagement (Grier; f106deltadart.com). Flying the “one,” in the role of lone aggressor, was Captain Tom Curtis. Opposing him were First Lieutenant Gary Foust, at the controls of aircraft 58-0787, and Major James Lowe, an instructor pilot flying as Foust’s wingman.

THE ENGAGEMENT

The three aircraft split apart to opposite ends of a designated training airspace roughly twenty miles across, then turned back toward one another under the direction of ground radar controllers, passing nose to nose at a thousand feet of separation before the mock combat began (f106deltadart.com). Curtis came through the pass in full afterburner at nearly twice the speed of sound, then pulled his aircraft into a steep vertical climb toward 38,000 feet, drawing Foust into what pilots call a rolling scissors, a tightening series of reversals in which each aircraft tries to force the other out in front. Curtis applied a hard rudder reversal, and Foust, attempting to match him, lost control (f106deltadart.com). The Delta Dart entered what Curtis later described as a post-stall gyration, a violent snapping motion, before settling into a flat spin, a condition in which an aircraft rotates nearly level around its own vertical axis while descending, and one that Air Force instructors generally regarded as unrecoverable in the F-106 (Grier).

Foust rode the spinning aircraft down from 35,000 feet while Lowe, flying alongside as best he could, talked him through the prescribed spin recovery procedures, among them a command to jettison the drag chute (Grier). According to the account later published in the Oneida County, New York, newspaper the Mohawk Flyer, the chute failed to deploy properly and instead wrapped itself around the tail (qtd. in Grier), a detail that does not appear in the other sources consulted for this article and should be read as a single-source claim. By around 15,000 feet, with none of the standard procedures working, Foust had run out of options.

AN EJECTION AND AN EMPTY COCKPIT

Accounts differ slightly on the exact altitude, with Foust himself recalling the figure as roughly 14,000 feet, or about 8,000 feet above the ground (f106deltadart.com), while other tellings round the number to 15,000 feet (Grier). What is consistent across every source is that Foust ejected, and that in the last moments before doing so, following standard spin recovery procedure, he had pressed the aircraft’s takeoff trim button, setting its control surfaces to a configuration nearly identical to that used for landing (Grier; f106deltadart.com). This detail, seemingly a minor technical footnote, turned out to matter more than anyone flying that day could have anticipated.

The moment Foust’s ejection seat cleared the airframe, the Delta Dart’s nose dropped, and the aircraft, now empty, began to fly (f106deltadart.com). Whether this was the direct result of the trim setting, the sudden shift in weight and balance from the departing pilot and seat, or the physical jolt of the ejection rocket itself, remains a matter of informed speculation among the pilots and engineers who later discussed the incident; no source consulted here claims certainty on the mechanism (f106deltadart.com). What is not in dispute is the result. Major Lowe, watching from his own cockpit, is reported by multiple sources to have keyed his radio and told Foust, dangling now beneath his parachute, “Gary, you’d better get back in it” (Grier; f106deltadart.com; “9 Astounding Facts”). Foust could only watch as his airplane leveled its wings and flew on without him, settling into a stable, controlled glide at roughly 175 knots, a speed and configuration close to a normal landing approach (Grier; White Eagle Aerospace).

Foust himself came down safely in rougher, higher ground away from the flight path of his own aircraft and was retrieved, according to several accounts, by local residents on snowmobiles (Grier; f106deltadart.com). He was uninjured.

THE LANDING NEAR BIG SANDY

The pilotless Delta Dart continued on, wings level, descending gradually across the snow-covered wheat country toward the town of Big Sandy in Chouteau County. As it neared the ground, the cushioning effect of air compressed between the wings and the earth, known to aerodynamicists as ground effect, appears to have further slowed and steadied its descent (White Eagle Aerospace). With its landing gear never lowered, the aircraft made what witnesses and later chroniclers alike described as a remarkably gentle belly landing in a snow-covered field, sliding several hundred yards before coming to rest. The Blaine County Journal News-Opinion, reporting on the incident’s fifty-fifth anniversary in 2025, placed the field north of Big Sandy, not far from the community of Box Elder, and noted that locally the event has become, in the newspaper’s own words, the stuff of local legend in the Big Sandy area (Blaine County Journal). The F-106 Delta Dart Association’s archive adds a specific and unverified detail, that the aircraft slid to a stop after skidding around a small rock pile in the field and coming within a few hundred yards of a paved road, a claim that appears only in that source and in a 1978 Mohawk Flyer article it draws upon (f106deltadart.com; Grier).

What every source agrees on is what happened next. A local sheriff arrived to find an Air Force fighter sitting in a farmer’s field with no one aboard, its jet engine still running and, more strikingly, its radar scope still sweeping for targets inside the cockpit (Grier; f106deltadart.com; Amusing Planet). According to the fullest account, drawn from the recollections of Major Lowe and the squadron’s maintenance chief, the sheriff radioed Malmstrom for instructions and was told simply to let the engine run until it exhausted its fuel, which it did after roughly an hour and forty-five minutes (f106deltadart.com; Grier). One retelling adds that the sheriff briefly climbed onto the wing before the aircraft, its hot exhaust melting the snow beneath the fuselage, began to creep slowly forward on the slight downhill grade, at which point he climbed back down and kept his distance (f106deltadart.com). This vivid detail appears in only one of the sources reviewed here and cannot be independently confirmed.

The aircraft, still carrying the stenciled name of its assigned maintenance officer rather than Foust’s own name on the canopy rail, sustained a long gash to its underside where equipment had punched through the fuselage skin, but its wings and structure were otherwise largely undamaged (f106deltadart.com; Grier).

RECOVERY, REPAIR, AND A SECOND LIFE

Within days, a depot field team from the Sacramento Air Logistics Center at McClellan Air Force Base in California arrived at the site, partially disassembled the aircraft, and trucked it to a nearby rail line for shipment to California (Grier; f106deltadart.com; White Eagle Aerospace). There, workers repaired the damage and eventually returned the Delta Dart to active service, a process that by differing accounts took it first through storage in Arizona before it rejoined operational squadrons later in the decade (f106deltadart.com; White Eagle Aerospace). It flew afterward with the 49th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, based first at Griffiss Air Force Base in New York and later at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, where, in a coincidence that several sources treat as a fitting close to the story, Gary Foust, by then a major, was reunited with the very airframe he had once abandoned over Montana and flew it again (Grier; White Eagle Aerospace).

By the late 1980s, as the Air Force retired its remaining F-106 fleet in favor of newer interceptors, aircraft 58-0787 was set aside for preservation rather than conversion into an unmanned target drone, a fate that claimed roughly two hundred and thirty of its sister aircraft (Grier). It entered the collection of the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1986, where it remains on display, still painted in the markings of the 49th Fighter Interceptor Squadron rather than the 71st, a point of some good-natured dispute among F-106 veterans who feel the Malmstrom squadron deserves the credit, or perhaps the blame (f106deltadart.com).

AN INCIDENT REMEMBERED, A RECORD CROSS-CHECKED

The story acquired its enduring name, the Cornfield Bomber, almost immediately, despite the fact that the F-106 was an interceptor rather than a bomber and the field in question grew wheat, not corn. Pilot Foust himself is reported to have preferred the more accurate, if less memorable, label “Wheatfield Fighter” (f106deltadart.com). The episode has since been recounted in Air Force Magazine, in the Air Force’s own historical outreach publications, in aviation history outlets, and, on its more recent anniversaries, in the regional press serving the Big Sandy area itself, a rare instance of a national Cold War aviation story remaining tied to local memory in the community where it occurred (Blaine County Journal). The broad outline of events, the flat spin, the ejection, the unmanned recovery and landing, the idling engine and sweeping radar that greeted the responding sheriff, and the aircraft’s eventual repair and museum preservation, is corroborated across independent sources, including a first-person account from one of the other pilots on the flight and a letter from the mission’s ground radar controller published in response to the Air Force Magazine article (f106deltadart.com). Certain colorful particulars, among them the wrapped drag chute, the rock pile in the aircraft’s path, and the sheriff’s moment atop the wing, rest on a single retelling apiece and are presented here with that caveat, in keeping with the standards of careful historical reconstruction.

WORKS CITED

Amusing Planet. “Cornfield Bomber: The Fighter Plane That Landed Without Its Pilot.” Amusing Planet, https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/03/cornfield-bomber-fighter-plane-that.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

Blaine County Journal News-Opinion. “Cornfield Bomber Landed Itself After Pilot Ejected 55 Years Ago this Month.” Blaine County Journal News-Opinion, 19 Feb. 2025, https://www.blainecountyjournal.com/story/2025/02/19/news/cornfield-bomber-landed-itself-after-pilot-ejected-55-years-ago-this-month/10120.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

F-106 Delta Dart Association. “The Cornfield Bomber F-106A 58-0787.” F-106DeltaDart.com, 3 Mar. 2025, https://www.f-106deltadart.com/580787cornfieldbomber.htm. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

Grier, Peter. “Gary, You Better Get Back in It!” Air Force Magazine, Apr. 2009. Reprinted as “Plane Lands Itself After Pilot Ejects: Four Decades Ago in Montana, a Pilotless F-106 Guided Itself to a Miraculous Landing.” Torch, Air Education and Training Command, https://www.torch.aetc.af.mil/News/Features/Display/Article/365396/plane-lands-itself-after-pilot-ejects-four-decades-ago-in-montana-a-pilotless-f/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

“9 Astounding Facts about the ‘Cornfield Bomber,’ the Plane That Flew Itself.” Interesting Engineering, 13 May 2020, https://interestingengineering.com/lists/9-astounding-facts-about-the-cornfield-bomber-the-plane-that-flew-itself. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

White Eagle Aerospace. “An Improbable Landing.” White Eagle Aerospace, 16 Feb. 2020, https://www.whiteeagleaerospace.com/an-improbable-landing/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.