B-52 MITO

Ten Buffs from Minot AFB practicing a (MITO) minimum interval take off. This was bread and butter exercise during the cold war SAC days. This was to give the alert crews practice getting off as fast as they could after the horn blew. We had a resident SAC bombardment wing and associated tankers at my first duty station Mather AFB CA. This type of flying happened regularly, once the alert force launched during a Global Shield exercise about 2 AM one morning. Needless to say for the first few minutes no one knew it was an exercise and the alert force was gone climbing north over downtown Sacramento. They must have vibrated folks out of the beds in the neighborhoods that night.