Thursday, April 19, 2018

Military Pilots Really Have "The Right Stuff"




Tammie Jo Shults, F-18 Fighter Pilot


Today I listened to the audio of pilot Tammie Jo Shults calmly speaking with Air Traffic Control in Philadelphia after the Number 1 engine exploded on her Southwest Boeing 737 aircraft.  Her voice had the kind of calm I have heard on headsets when I have been on military aircraft in serious trouble.  You would never know the danger from the voices of the pilots.

The Exploded Engine on Southwest Flight 1380

Shortly after I enlisted in 1972, I discovered that active duty soldiers could fly anywhere for $10. After I settled in to my first permanent duty station at Hill Air Force Base in Utah late that year, I decided to take a week’s leave and fly military from Utah to Boston and try out Space Available Flying.

I showed up flight operations at Hill the morning my leave began.  The first flight out was to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver.  It was an executive jet flying empty to pickup a general. I was a 19-year-old Airman First Class at the time.  They signed me up for the flight. I was the only passenger for the 500-mile trip over the Rocky Mountains.  It was glorious.  I had a drink and snacks served by the sergeant who was the steward on the plane.  I arrived in Denver thinking that flying “Space A” was about the coolest thing that ever happened to me. 

C-130 Hercules Transport Aircraft

I strolled to flight operations in Denver.  The next thing going anywhere east was a C-130 Hercules on its way to Atlanta, Georgia.  I think the plan was actually to go to Warner Robbins Air Force Base, but in the end, Atlanta was where we landed. Atlanta sounded good to me. I had never been to Georgia and I would be on the Atlantic Coast. 

The C-130E Hercules of that era cruised at 300 mph, less when fully loaded as we were today. After the one-hour trip across the Rockies, it would be more five hours inside the engine roar and wind noise of the four-engine Hercules.  The plane was fully loaded with palletized cargo under straps including what looked like Army mobile radar.  I walked up the tail ramp and past the cargo to the front of the plane.

Behind me, more than 50 high school ROTC cadets filed in for a trip to Georgia for a convention of some kind.  For some of these kids, it was their first flight.  In a C-130, everyone sits in fold-out seats made from nylon strapping material facing the middle of the plane.  The few windows were behind the heads of the cadets. Most of the cadets had their official USAF bag lunch as did I: two bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread, chips, a cookie, and a carton of milk.  Those lunches would keep me busy for much of our ill-fated flight. 

Before we took off, the loadmaster handed me a set of headphones and asked me to help with the cadets.  I said sure and started checking seat belts.  The loadmaster told the cadets not to look at the cargo while we were in flight and to keep their seatbelts on unless they had to get up.  If you have never been in a C-130 or other cargo plane with seats down the sides of the fuselage, it is great advice not to look at the cargo, but it’s pretty much impossible.  The shaking cargo in flight will shift even a good digestive system into reverse. 

The flight was smooth for the first hour.  Many of the cadets laughed and joked and ate their bologna and cheese sandwiches.  An hour later we hit turbulence.  I watched some those happy teenage faces go pale, then green.  I grabbed a stack of airsickness bags and passed them out, open and ready for use.  Then I collected them. 

The kids kept me busy for the next few hours. While I was helping one of the kids out of the toilet, I left my headphones hanging on the bulkhead.  As we sidestepped toward his seat, the plane shuddered. When the kid was safely buckled in, I went back and grabbed my headset.  I heard the pilot say, “No fuel to the right wing. Engines three and four inop. Feathering props.”

The plane was crabbing in the sky. With power only on the left wing, the plane would try to spin clockwise, then flip back when the counterforces built up.  So we oscillated as if there were an axle sticking up and down between the wings and we rotated on it.

The pilot had been talking to air traffic control. He came back on the intercom. “We’re 70 miles out. Runway at Hartsfield will be clear for us. Ten years ago in the ‘Nam I landed a model B with one engine and some big chunks of wing missing. We’ll be fine. Big bump, when we first touch down, then we’ll be fine.”

We slowly descended. Our slower airspeed made crabbing less violent. The loadmaster and I double-checked seatbelts and told all the kids everything was fine and we would land soon. We were lying with a smile.

Ten miles out I went up to the flight deck and looked ahead though the cockpit.  Red lights were everywhere on the airstrip. The pilots and the rest of the crew were perfectly calm, but it seemed like the rest of the world thought a plane with two dead engines was a problem. 

We descended. As we neared the ground the pilot pulled the nose up hard.  When we touched, the plane took one big bounce, skidded right for a couple of seconds, then settled down and stopped quickly. 

I waited until all the kids had filed out before I grabbed my duffel bag and walked down the ramp.  Fire trucks and ambulances ringed the area. I couldn’t count all of the emergency vehicles that were waiting for that big bounce to turn into something worse.  I sat on my duffel bag and waited for the crew to come out of the plane.  When the pilots and the flight engineer came down the ramp, they were talking like nothing had happened.  The loadmaster came over and shook my hand. He thanked me for helping out with the kids. 

A couple of decades later I would read Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and know that the “Cool” those astronauts brought to the Mercury space program came from learning to fly in the military.  Alan Shepard, John Glenn and the other astronauts, the heroes of my Cold War youth, are now pilots like Tammie Jo Shults and Chesley Sullenberger, military pilots, masters of the complex skill of flying and who remain calm and competent when engines fail.

   

Exhibit of Contemporary Art from Ukraine and Talk by Vladislav Davidzon at Abington Arts

I went to "Affirmation of Life: Art in Today's Ukraine" at Abington Arts in Jenkintown, PA. The exhibit is on display through...