Back in 1969 I was  saving leave in preparation for getting out of the USAF the following year, and my own crew was on leave, and I was called in to substitute for the navigator of another crew one  afternoon; this story reports the bare basics of the event.  Some day I will write more in depth about the events, but for now this should suffice. Our 46 Air Refueling Squadron Reunion is coming up next September in Marquette and this will undoubtedly be one of the stories that gets chewed over. It always does. It is hilarious now. It was not so funny during or immediately after the events herein described.

I just read something this morning  on the squadron site about the great KC-135 glider flight of August 1969, it was written after the fact  by someone who was not involved,  and I decided I’d better put the story right. As previously stated, I was the substitute navigator on the crew that day; we started off with several hours of transition,  which means touch-and-goes, various approaches, etc, up-down, up-down; the crew’s copilot needed a recheck on an Instrument Landing System [ILS] approach. After several hours of up and down, the IP came out and climbed aboard and wanted to get the ILS done, but was informed the KI Sawyer ILS was broken and not in service, so we had to go to Kincheloe. Why he didn’t already know this has always puzzled me. We knew before we flew by checking Notams, etc. He asked for clearance going east at 10 or 12  K feet. When asked if he was sure about the requested altitude, he said, “You’re right, get 6 K or 5 K.’ whichever was the appropriate level for east bound. As a crew we expected to quickly pop up above 20,000 ft. to save fuel on the  run east, then drop back down. We were all dumbfounded by the altitude request which would keep us down at a level where consumption rates would be high.

All the way to Kincheloe, the pilot and copilot debated the need to stop and refuel. The IP would hear none of it. The copilot on final at Kincheloe said he was going to land to top off our fuel. The IP said, “You will make a missed approach and that is an order. Our fuel is all right.” We thus dutifully made the missed approach and headed back to KI Sawyer, this time only a thousand difference in altitude than on the trip over. You could almost hear the engines slurping JP-4. The copilot looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. We began to experience fuel starvation around Munising. At that point the IP told the AC to get out of the left seat, and in sliding down into position, he pulled back two throttles, not to idle, but to off. Once in his seat, he restarted the engines, another waste of fuel.

Thus we lumbered west and somewhere between Munising and Skandia the AC and copilot made it clear we had serious fuel problems. Thus, the IP now shut down two engines (the same two he had shut down and restarted once before). Then things began to become frantic as the copilot and IP played with fuel tanks, trying, I assume, to get a handle on what we actually had and to move fuel from tank to tank to get the best possible balance, etc. At one point between Skandia and the runway, the copilot suggested we declare a Mayday and the IP vehemently rebuked him . “We do not have an emergency.” But now engines were beginning to starve out and go silent and reluctantly the IP said on the interphone: “Prepare to bailout.” By then we were all strapped into our chutes and the boomer stepped up and pulled the bar and blew the escape hatch. I stood by my nav seat, looking down, watching trees pass below. The IP was silent through all of this, and the boomer, seeing that we had no engines and were in flying brick mode, said, “I’m out of here, sir,” grabbed the bar, pulled up his knees, let go and away he went. I stepped forward and looked at the fuel panel. The IP was fiddling with everything. The AC, sitting in the jump-seat, was silent.  The panel read all zeros. I said, “Okay, we’re gliding and I’m out of here.” I then did what the boomer did and my chute popped, I had time to check that it was deployed and full, and then I was sliding down the side of a white pine. Beyond my chute I could see two other chutes, the boom operator and I was not sure who else. When I stepped out, I could look down at the trees and all I could hear was the soft whistle of wind coming up through the hatch. All four engines were dead and windmilling.

On the ground, I popped my riser releases and reeled in my beeper and turned it off. Then I heard a voice yelling for help. I spread my chute on a tree so I could mark my place and went and found the AC hanging in a small tree, and helped him to get down. We then build a fire in a small clearing and waited for the cavalry, which finally arrived about 0130 and was lost The copilot did not get out until 0430. He  had landed on an island in creek, after one swing in his chute; there he  built a fire only to have had a bobcat or lynx scream at him and the fire from 20-30 yards away until almost dawn.

The night before the flight evaluation board [F.E.B] I got inappropriate phone calls from someone with Stanboard  “suggesting”  If I knew what was good for my career, I would testify a certain way, which made it obvious someone wanted to blame the boom operator for all that had happened. I told him I was going to testify the way it happened. Period.

At the F.E.B, Colonel Bert Brunner (our former 46 ARS CO) said, “You guys didn’t have the order to bailout.”

I said, “Yes sir, that’s true because the pilot was out of his seat and silent and the tanks were empty, the four engines were out, and as far as we were concerned the IP was dead. We had been given the order to prepare to bailout, which we had. And altitude was falling fast and we knew it was time to get out.” I told the board if they were going to try to pin everything on the boomer, I knew ways to make the whole thing quickly nationally public and very, very messy. After the boomer, myself and the AC had bailed out, the copilot asked the IP if he could go to and only then somewhere between Skandia and the runway did the IP agree that a Mayday should be declared. Which it then was, and then the copilot jumped from his seat to the bar, took one second to stabilized and dropped out the escape hatch. The first thing I did when I landed in my chute was disconnect my O2 mask and listen for the thump of an explosion, which I never heard. As the crow flies it is about 6 miles from Skandia to the north end of the runway at the base. The terrain between is some of the nastiest in the U.P.

There were lots of funny events during the course of this goat rodeo, but the funniest concerned my wife, Sandy. The CO and a chaplain showed up at our house and she talked them through the screen door and the CO sort of mumbled and hemmed and hawed and finally said, without looking her in the eye, “We think your husband’s crew has had a little problem.”

“What kind of little problem?” she shot back.

“They bailed out – but we think they’re okay.” By now the two are trying to push their way inside to take care of the little lady of the house.

She stared at them and said, “Did they bail out over land or over water?”

“Land.”

Sandy said, “Okay, my husband will be fine, you guys can go, and closed the door in their faces.

I had parachuted before and I had always told her that if I got out over land not to worry, that the only worry should be an over-water bailout. She had taken what I had said as gospel.

When we applied to the Caterpillar Club for membership we were turned down because our aircraft had “never been disabled” and thus there had been no need for a bailout. Despite the board finding that the deployment of the weighted hatch plus the loss of  600-800 pounds of human meat was adjudged the critical factor that allowed the IP to dead-stick the pig to the ground short of the runway. In other words, our getting out prevented a crash. Talk about ironic.

The story of that night’s emergency  got released to the media before we were found and we were all listed publicly as “missing.”  The headlines the next day read, “Engines on Fire, Pilot Orders Crew to Bail Out.” Where to you supposed that fantasy came from?

Ah, them were the days. We were the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th people to ever parachute safely from a KC-135.

Over.