US Air Force Mystery: What Happened On Captain Craig D. Button's Final A-10 Flight?

One of the greatest mystery incidents surrounding the A-10 Warthog's career is what happened on the final flight of Craig David Button in 1997. Button was a US Air Force pilot who died when his A-10 crashed, but the circumstances are bizarre. The sequence of what happened is well understood; what isn't understood is the why. While his death is regarded as a suicide, no one may ever know what actually went on. Today, the iconic A-10 Warthog remains in service, but it is expected to be fully retired in a few years.

The wild flight

On April 2, 1997, Button (aged 32) took off in his A-10 on a training mission out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tuscon (where the massive Boneyard is located). He then broke formation with the other A-10s and flew northeast toward the Four Corners area after being refueled.

This training mission would have been the first time Button would have dropped live ordnance. Button's A-10 was armed with 4x Mark 82 bombs, 60 magnesium flares, and 120x metal chaff canisters. Its iconic GAU-8 Avenger gun was loaded with 575 rounds of 30-mm ammo.

People on the ground spotted him many times, with one off-duty pilot saying the aircraft appeared to maneuver around bad weather (this is taken to suggest Button was in control of the aircraft and flying it deliberately).

While the transponder was non-operational (likely switched off), radar tracked the A-10. It was only later that investigators determined the radar signatures to be his aircraft. He disappeared from radar around Vail, Colorado.

The crash

Finally, with 2–5 minutes of fuel left in his tank, he crashed into Gold Dust Peak in the Holy Cross Wilderness near Vail, Colorado. The Air Force determined that Button did not attempt to eject. Instead, it seems he chose to crash his Warthog right into the side of the mountain. It took the Air Force three weeks to find the crash site (during which time a number of suspicions and conspiracy theories started to emerge).

The destruction of the A-10 Thunderbolt was total. Most pieces of the aircraft were around two inches and had to be painstakingly picked off the mountain. Debris from the Warthog was left strewn over a quarter mile, and some debris flew over the peak. It took four months for Buttons' remains to be recovered.

The mystery bombs

In something right out of the 1996 movie Broken Arrow, the four 500-pound Mk 82 bombers were never found. This was despite an exhaustive search effort using metal detectors and even ground-penetrating radar. These bombs were designed to survive such a crash.

The A-10's bomb racks were recovered from the crash site, and analysis suggested the bombs had not been released. That being said, many witnesses reported loud explosions near Aspen and Telluride in Colorado, but no direct evidence was found that the bombs had been released and exploded there.

But at least these are just conventional bombs. According to the BBC, there have been at least 32 so-called 'broken arrow' accidents where atomic bombs have been dropped by mistake or jettisoned in an emergency. While most of these have been later recovered, three US atomic bombs remain missing and are somewhere out there lurking in swamps and oceans. If that isn't disturbing enough, at least the US is relatively transparent. No one knows how many nukes the USSR and Russia have lost over the years.

Suicide or not suicide?

The leading explanation for why Button did what he did is suicide. The Vail Daily reports, "The Air Force concluded that it was probably a case of unrequited love, calling it 'a dramatic example of a man who seems to have everything going for him in his life, yet cannot have the woman he loves passionately.'" Picking up on this narrative, the NY Times ran an article in 1998 sensationally entitled "Airman's Flight to His Death Is Laid to Mental Anguish."

But this explanation is unsatisfactory to many and is just the default explanation in lieu of any other plausible explanation. According to Medium, talk swirled around that he was gay and was afraid of being outed or some other trigger for suicide, but no good motive for suicide has ever been established. Button's parents rejected the idea he committed suicide. Another talking point was that he wanted to steal the bombs on his aircraft, as in the 1996 movie Broken Arrow.

The incident of the A-10 Warthog bears some similarities to the disappearance of Malaysia Flight MH-370 in 2014. Both seemed to switch off their transponders, both aircraft seemed to have made deliberate course corrections, and both seemed to have flown until they were out of fuel and crashed. These incidents seem different from the Germanwings Flight 9525 crash of 2015. In that incident, it is known the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed the Airbus A-320-211 into the French Alps.