Ever since he climbed down from his tree and started tramping about the countryside man has had a nagging concern for knowing his whereabouts. This concern has fertilized an imposing brood of devices, which, like the road map, tell him where he ought to be, or like the sextant, where he is. An eight-year old may still panic and circle in the recesses of a suburban wood, but by and large these devices have licked man’s problem of finding his way around on the earth’s surface.
His travels in the air are another matter. Weather obscures the ancient signposts of ground and sun and stars; in their place the modern plane must use the flimsier guide of electronics. Today’s flight is coached along by a complex catalogue of navigational gear with a Captain Video nomenclature. The latter-day aircraft, making a routine cross-country flight in rainy weather, takes off on a GCI Steer, flies an OmniRange course, then heads for a Homer over which it is tracked by Volscan, controlled by a Rattcenter, and returned to the ground by ILS. It can still get lost.
The pilot of an all-weather jet, flying at 40,000 feet above a cloudbank extending to the ground, plots his location from the activity of a gross of vacuum tubes, failure of any one of which may make it impossible for him to tell where he is flying, or, even more discouraging, whether he is flying at all. If he is lucky or skillful when this happens, he may be able to find a hole in the clouds, identify a railroad line, and thereby manage to get down and write a report about his troubles. Few of the report writers, however, duplicate the luck and skill exercised by Lieutenant (junior grade) Orville Elliott on May 13, 1955, a Friday, in a cloudbank over the Pacific some 150 miles southeast of Okinawa.
Elliott, at the time, was attached to VF- 101 of Air Group One aboard the USS Midway, which had raced around the Cape of Good Hope to the Pacific just in time to help cover the Tachens evacuation in February. Once on the scene, the Midway continued its intermittent patrolling in the Formosa area for the rest of the spring. Air Group One flew eighty planes: one squadron of propeller- driven attack bombers, one of swept-wing jet fighters, and two squadrons of McDonnell F2H Banshees, the last straight-winged, twin-engined jets distinguished in the Navy for their versatility, age, and low speed. Designed in 1946, the Banshee, no threat to the sound barrier, is nevertheless popular with pilots. It is easy to fly, it cruises comfortably on one engine, and as jets go (which is not very far) it is an extraordinary long distance runner. Banshees work indiscriminately as fighters, bombers, and photo planes; one squadron has fitted out its F2Hs to carry high-priority cargo like the shiny green bags naval aviators lug around for logistic support on weekend cross-countries. Elliott, a stocky Texan, had been flying Banshees since July, 1954. After breakfast on that Friday the thirteenth he took off in discouraging weather to bomb a target the Navy had set up in southern Japan.
It was a two-plane strike with Elliott assigned to fly wingman to his squadron’s commanding officer, Commander Richard McNees. By nine o’clock the Midway's plane handlers had trundled the Banshees onto the carrier’s catapults (jets, for all their speed, are slow on pickup; without the shove of a catapult on take-off they will summarily plop into the water). Elliott put on some of his flight gear, a G-suit (a rubber affair which would automatically inflate to constrict his blood supply during violent maneuvers and so prevent his blacking out in a dive), and a life preserver. Then he climbed up to his cockpit and wiggled and snapped his way into a parachute harness, a crash helmet, and an oxygen mask. Next, he switched on some of his instruments and talked to the ship over his various radio transmitters. Everything appeared to work. The Midway and the other ships in her task force turned into the wind, and the carrier ran up a big red and white flag indicating that she was about to start flight operations.
The Midway started badly by launching the wrong plane. Commander McNees’ Banshee was carrying a heavier load and was slower, therefore, than Elliott’s. If Elliott-got off the deck first he would have to circle until the Commander caught up, and a jet circling at low altitude uses fuel three times faster than it would at, say, 40,000 feet. From his perch in the Banshee’s cockpit Elliott had been watching the milling about of the plane handlers and the catapult crews on the Midway's flight deck and he early divined that they had the planes mixed up. He shook his head and waved his arms but the catapult people got him off anyway, and he was jolted airborne with his skipper still squatting on the ship. As soon as he was flying he pulled into a tight left turn which he hoped would bring him back over the carrier just as McNees took off, but the perverse Midway fired the second plane while Elliott was no more than halfway around, and as he came through his turn he saw McNees’ Banshee pop into the bottom of a general sullen overcast brooding less than a thousand feet over the water.
Both Elliott and his skipper knew that prolonged groping for each other at low altitude could use up enough fuel to wash out the strike. If the groping were too successful, moreover, it could wash out the planes as well. Accordingly, McNees radioed Elliott that he was climbing through the overcast on course to the target and told Elliott to join him when they got on top. Elliott started his climb and was directly in the clouds himself. Every few minutes McNees radioed his altitude. At 25,000 feet, with the Commander reporting, “still in the soup,” Elliott broke out of the weather and found himself in a shallow cloud valley with the morning sun silhouetting a puffy and undulating ridge to the east and no sign of Commander McNees. McNees reported, “27,000; still in the soup.” Elliott looked around and decided the other Banshee was somewhere inside the puffy cloud. He watched for a minute, then McNees said, “28,000; in the clear.” Elliott squinted into the sun and a tiny blue plane edged clear of the luminous wad. He banked into a long turn to starboard and as he closed Commander McNees he saw, by the haphazard swinging of its needle, that his Bird- dog—his most important navigation instrument—was clearly out of order.
There were 158 dials, switches, indicators, and instruments in Elliott’s cockpit. Fourteen of these were what pilots call “bread and butter gear,” that is, instruments recording such information as which way his Banshee was going, how much fuel it had, and whether it was about to blow up. On his climb through the cloud layer Elliott had relied on five of these fourteen, an even more essential subdivision called the flight group; they included an altimeter, a rate-of- climb indicator, a gyrocompass, an artificial horizon (another gyro device which pictures the plane’s attitude in relation to the ground) and an airspeed indicator. Using these, Elliott was able to keep on course and in a steady climb, although he could not see seven feet to the tip of his Banshee’s nose. When he broke out of the cloudbank, he allowed himself to look around at the other 153 instruments a bit, and it was then that he got around to considering the gyrations of his Birddog needle. Birddog is the aviator’s name for an intelligent radio receiver which sorts through radio signals and points to the direction of their origin with comforting accuracy. Using his flight instruments to keep upright and his Birddog to keep on course, a pilot can fly blind for hours, or as long as his gas holds out and he can find a strong signal to listen to. Elliott’s Birddog was set for what should have been a very strong signal from the nearby Midway; the hunting back and forth of its customarily tenacious needle showed him that the carrier’s transmissions were not getting through. Elliott tried to adjust the diffident receiver, but the needle continued its gyrations. It subsequently turned out that the shock of the catapult launching had broken several of the receiver’s parts, a defect which showed up aboard the Midway the next day in an inspection which Elliott was immeasurably pleased to be able to carry out in person. Still closing the other plane, Elliott tried his second piece of radio navigation gear, a device called YE which is not so long-ranged as Birddog but which sniffs out the origin of a radio signal in somewhat the same way. His YE did not work either. Elliott reported the double failure to Commander McNees as he moved into wing- man position, to the right, below, and slightly behind the other Banshee.
This, Elliott knew, must have been disturbing news for his skipper. They would now have to fly the hop over bad weather with all of Elliott’s radio navigation equipment out of order. There was no question of turning back, however; although this was a training mission there had been an intense seriousness about the Air Group’s training since it had flown with loaded guns at the Tachens and both pilots knew that in a war there would be no canceling the flight for failure of one plane’s navigation equipment. Furthermore, McNees’ Birddog and YE appeared to be operating properly, and as long as Elliott could see his skipper he could follow him to the target and home.
The Banshees continued north at well over 25,000 feet. As they neared Japan the cloud quilt underneath McNees began to fray and by the time they crossed the coast it was clear below—“as pretty a day as you could ask for,” says Elliott. Neither he nor his skipper had any trouble locating the target. Elliott followed the Commander down in a long, shallow bombing run, took some pictures of McNees’ bomb kicking up dirt satisfactorily near the bullseye, then climbed back up for what had at least some prospects of being an uneventful trip home.
A jet plane gets its best gas mileage at those altitudes where there is enough air to feed its engines but not enough to impede its flight. For a Banshee that altitude is close to 40,000 feet, and it was at this height that Elliott and McNees started back to the Midway. By now both pilots were becoming engrossed in gas mileage calculations. The mission as originally mapped out allowed them a half hour to locate the carrier and land on it. This was cutting it fine enough, even if everything went as planned, and it now seemed fine indeed considering that Elliott had used several minutes of fuel in his unscheduled trip around the carrier. Also, Elliott had to rely on McNees to lead him to the Midway, and that last weather message from the task force had reported the overcast lowering to a few hundred feet with frequent rain squalls drooping through it to the water. The pilots could see cloud buildups on top of the overcast, too. Soon they were back over the cloudbank, flying through grey knots of cumulus some of which bulked as high as 40,000 feet, and Elliott began having a little trouble keeping McNees in sight.
When they got 125 miles away from where they thought the force should be, McNees and Elliott planned to shut down one engine, another fuel-saving measure. If all went well they would then gradually drop, trading altitude for airspeed and fuel economy, and come over the force at 20,000 feet—high enough to give them time to make sure they knew exactly where to find the Midway before making their final descent through the clouds. McNees, navigating for both planes, radioed Elliott when he calculated they were 125 miles out. A Banshee’s throttles are paired, one for each engine—stubby handles which move back and forth in a pair of slots alongside the pilot’s left knee —Elliott pulled back on the right-hand throttle when he got the word from the skipper and watched the needles on a pair of gauges, one giving his starboard engine’s revolutions per minute, the other the temperature of the gases from its exhaust, fall off to zero.
Elliott now moved his left hand to the port throttle. “By now we were down in the soup and I was keeping as close to the skipper as I could, flying him while he flew his instruments. I was watching him, holding the stick with one hand while I jockeyed the port throttle back and forth with the other. There isn’t much noise in a jet, at least not in the cockpit, but all of a sudden it got quieter and I saw my tailpipe temperature start dropping in the port engine. It had flamed out, and when I looked back out of the cockpit the skipper was pulling away.”
Although it has one moving part and consists, in essence, of a large pipe with air coming in one end and an oil fire burning at the other, a jet engine is a sensitive machine, depending on a nice balance between its intake of fuel and air to keep itself running. A small change in the balance can choke or snuff the fire and since a jet pulls itself up by its own bootstraps—uses its combustion to turn a turbine to spin a compressor which inhales the air necessary to keep the combustion going—a flameout (the trade name for this loss of power) will stop the engine once and for all unless the pilot can relight the fire and get the combustion cycle working again.
Elliott’s first move, therefore, was to press a switch which set off a hot spark in the volatile mixture of air and jet fuel now streaming through his dead port engine. “If you catch a flameout while the engine’s still hot you sometimes get a fast light-off, but I was pretty high, and it’s harder starting in thin air. My tailpipe temperature still kept dropping after a couple of seconds and I knew the engine hadn’t caught. My airspeed was going down fast, too, and when I looked up the skipper was far enough away so that I could just make him out. I got on the radio and said, ‘This is 1022 Coldspot. I have flamed out my second engine.’ The skipper sounded like he was having trouble hearing; he came back with, ‘Did you say you had flamed out completely?’ By this time I couldn’t see him at all. I told him that was affirmative, that he was leaving me, and to pop his speed brakes. Those are panels which little electric motors push out of your wing. They slow you down without messing up your control. A few seconds later on the skipper slid back to where I could see him again. He had his brakes out, and I began to gain a little. I was really working to stay with him now; I figured I might be able to get an air start at a lower altitude and I wanted him around to follow back. As soon as I had the skipper pretty well in sight, I started switching over to emergency power.”
The electrical power for running a Banshee’s radio, most of its instruments, and some of its controls normally comes from a pair of generators driven by the jets. A power loss would leave the plane blind and speechless; accordingly, it carries a stand-by source of power, and as Elliott’s second engine cut out his electrical circuits automatically switched to a battery installed for just such an emergency. The load on this battery can be heavy—82 circuits operate in a Banshee in normal flight—and Elliott wanted to save as much of its charge as he could for another try at starting his engine. “I reached down by my feet and began pulling circuit breakers, cutting off all the gear I could. This meant I was looking inside the cockpit for a minute; when I got around to raising my head again I was right behind the skipper and catching up fast. I grabbed for my mike button to tell him to get his brakes back in, but somehow in going over to battery and pulling the circuit breakers I had killed the radio too. All I had time for as I went by was to point to my ears and give a thumbs down, the no radio signal. I shot right on past him and looked back and he was gone.”
Elliott was now about as alone as gregarious modern man, with his penchant for self-location, can get. He could hear nothing of consequence and see nothing at all. His natural senses were useless and his artificial senses—the radio and the instrument panel —were inoperative. He had no way of telling where he was flying, and lacking the reference points of ground, sky, or horizon, whether he was airborne at all. Caught in a similar situation during an Arctic flight several years ago, a pilot once struggled with the controls of his transport for several minutes until he discovered he had mushed into a mountain and was perched immobile on top of a snowbank.
“What I remember next was that something began whistling in the cockpit. Banshee cockpits are pressurized and heated, false little worlds of their own, and when I lost my power I lost the pressure in the rubber seals which keep the canopy tight. The wind started coming in the cracks and the cockpit temperature went down fast. It was something like twenty below zero, and I just had a set of skivvies on under my G-suit, but I was still managing to work up quite a sweat.
“Without the skipper I didn’t have anything to watch, and I began feeling damn alone, wondering whether this was the way I was going to go. I managed to keep busy, though, trying to hold a respectable airspeed and get the cockpit cleaned up, and finally I got all the non-essential gear off and switched on the radio and sent out a ‘Mayday,’ the international distress signal. I also tried calling the skipper and telling him I hadn’t been able to get a light-off. He answered me, which was encouraging because it meant at least my radio was back in business. I asked him if he had a steer to the task force and he said he hadn’t but that he would try to follow me down and relay my position. I was doing some fast calculation about now. I figured I was about a hundred miles from the task force, keeping a rate of descent—if I could believe any of my instruments—of around two thousand feet a minute. That gave me about ten more minutes in the air and would put me in the water about seventy miles from the ships. About then I thought about ejecting but didn’t like the idea of bailing out in the soup, and I supposed that as long as I was going in the general direction of the ship I might as well stick with the plane. There was always the chance that they had me on radar and if I went into the drink I wanted to be as close to the ship as I could get.
“For a time I hadn’t been able to see anything at all outside the canopy, and I kept shaking my head to fight off the vertigo. Flying in the soup is always tough, even when you can trust your instruments. A couple of times before I had been caught in bad weather and had the ungodly feeling of the plane seeming to slip off one way when my instruments said I was going the other. The head shaking helped, and I concentrated on the needle-ball, a little gauge which works like a pendulum and doesn’t need power, to keep my wings level as I glided down.
“By now I was resigned to going into the ocean, and I began running over the ditching procedure in my mind—open canopy, wheels up, harness locked, and all that business. What was worrying me was that report of the overcast dropping right down to the water. I had seen how rough the water was when we took off, and I didn’t a bit like the idea of going in without expecting it.
“When I got down to around twelve thousand feet, I tried the igniter again, as much as anything to keep up my morale and give me something to do in the five minutes I had left. After a second the tailpipe temperature went up pretty as you please, and I knew I had gotten a light. Right then I felt like doing cartwheels in the cockpit. I got back on the radio and told the skipper the good news, and asked him if he had a bearing on the force. He said that he hadn’t been able to raise the force at all, and that as far as he could make out his Birddog was now out, too.
“With my engine going I felt I was back in the ball game, but actually I realized that all I had gained was about thirty minutes flying time. Now neither of us had any idea where the ships were. We hadn’t been able to contact the force on the radio for more than an hour, and I heard the skipper calling over and over for any ship or plane receiving him and asking them to tell the force we were lost. Unless we managed to pick up some kind of signal, we could fly right over the ships and not see them, but radio and radar are funny, and there was a possibility that all this time the force was hearing us or had us on its radar and for some reason we couldn’t hear them. I figured I’d stay on course until I thought I was over the force and then let down and go into the water there and hope that somebody had been tracking me on the way down. Even if he had been, he’d have to look around a thousand square miles of ocean to find me, but somehow with an engine I felt I had a fighting chance.”
Aboard the task force, at this point, Elliott’s speculations on the odd behavior of radio and radar were being peculiarly well borne out. Several ships in the force had indeed picked up the Mayday he had sent after his flameout—it had come in faint and disjointed (the same weather which had created the overcast was enthusiastically emitting static onto most of the force’s radio channels), the radiomen had misunderstood it, and the Admiral commanding had detached a pair of destroyers and ordered out search planes in the belief that Elliott was already in the water. After that, despite the fact that Elliott and McNees were approaching all the time, the ships’ radio reception got worse instead of better, and the task force could neither hear the planes nor find them on radar, although they were well within the transmission range of both. On the Midway the rest of Elliott’s squadron mates calculated that if either plane was still airborne it had no better than twenty minutes of fuel left; the fliers began crowding into the ship’s Combat Information Center, a dim and awesome room, which displays what the ship is seeing on her radar, and watched the circling yellow lines sweep around the carrier’s radar scopes.
Flying a race-track course over the ship and plainly visible on those scopes at this time was the Midway's Combat Air Patrol, four jet fighters orbiting the task force as a species of airborne and highly mobile sentry post. The CAP was also listening for Elliott and McNees, but the weather was playing hob with its communications as well, and there were times when the CAP’s radios themselves could not hear or be heard in the electronic surf. All the CAP’s pilots had served with Elliott and McNees for more than a year and were depressed at their apparent loss. They were getting low on fuel and it was just as one was trying to make a routine report to the ship on his position and the state of his fuel that he heard, clear amid the crackling interference, Commander McNees’ frantic call for any plane or ship.
Elliott first knew that McNees had contacted the force when he overheard the Commander telling somebody that he was low on fuel and needed a steer. Whoever it was answered by asking McNees to give him a short count, to count up to five and down again, keeping the radio circuit open long enough for a Birddog receiver to point out the signal. “After a bit I recognized the other voice. It was John Nevins, a friend of mine in one of the other squadrons, and I knew the skipper must be talking to the CAP. The skipper told Nevins that I was up there too, and I started giving short counts myself. Nevins acknowledged one of them, and it was the first word I had had from the force for more than two hours. He gave me a couple of steers to himself; then I told him I was very low on fuel and asked if he would lead me in to the ship instead.
“The fuel problem was really critical by now. I had about enough for maybe twenty minutes in the air, and I had not burned any at all during the time I was gliding after my flame-out. The skipper had had one engine going all the time, so he was that much worse off. This put a hell of a burden on Nevins, since if he were a couple of miles out in his figuring and we missed the ship we wouldn’t have enough gas to try again. He had to figure out where he was from the ship and where we were from him, and then use that to work out a course from us to the ship. He would change off, first getting a short count from the skipper and giving him a heading, then switching over and doing the same for me. Pretty soon his wingman got up on the line. Nevins would work out the courses and his wingman would check them. They were agreeing, which was encouraging, and I could tell from the steers I was getting that Nevins was trying to get straight between us and the ship so he could lead us in without all the figuring. Time was pretty well running out, and I guess he knew it.
“I had gone around five minutes more and was just about convinced that we were both out of luck when the skipper shouted that he had the force in sight with 250 pounds of fuel left. That was enough to get him aboard. The skipper switched his radio to the land- launch frequency he would use in landing, and that was the last I heard from him. That left me up there alone, following Nevins, with maybe fifteen minutes of fuel.
“During all this I still hadn’t been able to hear anything from the ship, and as it turned out, except for my Mayday, the ship hadn’t been able to hear me. I knew I must have been very near the force, and it seemed too bad to get so close and then give up, but I didn’t see any way out, and I began thinking about ditching procedures again. Then Nevins said the Midway had me on its radar. Right after that I heard the ship calling to tell me the same thing. I may have felt good when I started that engine, but it was nothing compared to the way I felt when I heard the carrier. The ship gave me a heading and told me to start letting down. I nosed over on instruments—I still couldn’t see anything—and from there on in it was the old rocking chair. I got below the overcast at about a thousand feet and there was the force, already turned into the wind.
“I switched over to land-launch and started around the carrier with the Landing Signal Officer reading through my landing check-off list with me, nice and slow. I guess he figured that after two hours in the soup I might be a little slipshod, and he made me check everything twice as I came around. I got aboard on the first pass which was just as well, since I didn’t think I had enough gas for another go-around if I missed. It wasn’t the best landing I’ve made, but it wasn’t the worst, either. It was far and away the most enjoyable.
“When I taxied forward and shut down my engine the Midway’s skipper and the Air Group Commander were on the flight deck to meet me. I got out of the cockpit—it was the first time I realized how cold it actually was—and asked]about Commander McNees. They said he had landed on the Oriskany, the other carrier with us. He had been so low on fuel he picked the first ship he saw, a pretty good pick considering both his engines had flamed out from fuel starvation as he was going up the flight deck. Somebody took some pictures and I unzipped my G-Suit, and the flight surgeon walked me down to his cabin and broke out a couple of those little bottles of medicinal brandy. Commander McNees came aboard the next day and I met him in the ready room. I smiled and said, ‘Hello, lucky’; he smiled back without saying much, and then we went down to take a look at the pictures.”