She was from mississippi everybody knew nicks. He had grown himself a very fine handlebar mustache. The would take so and twisted he would take soap and twist it. The chinese instructors, it turned out to not be allowed. We had a filipino guy that was the barber. The chinese have furnished him with some large clippers, not be squeezed tight the squeeze tight. Type. When they made him cut that off he had his l this barber fashion a mustache on his head. Everyone laughed. That was his way of beating them at their own game. I was in my early 20s, i was in the prime of my life, so i could find a lot of things to laugh about. Iwe were missing out on a lo but we were learning a lot. Anything that you want to add more to this interview . Though, i have told my story no, i have told my story. Monday, arjuna patrick font draws 10 president ial artist patrick font draws 10 president ial caricatures. And historian discusses the president s and their memorable qualities. That is on American History tv. , former navy aviator andrew all, former navy and aviator andrew. Plane caught fire and the crew was forced to ditch the aircraft. In the discussion, he talks about the mission and the rescue of the crew members. The smithsonian hosted the event. It runs a little over an hour. The first thing youre going to hear is an h. F. Radio transmission from the aircraft alfa foxtrot 586 to elmendort radio, this is the air force station on the ground in alaska that is responsible for flight following communications with the airplane. Because its h. F. , its a little hard to understand. If you have trouble understanding it at the end of it ill tell you what you heard. But its really quite remarkable that these transmissions still exist because normally 30 days or so after something is recorded its erased. And yet we have coming up on how many years now, this is 1978 were talking about, decades later, weve got the thing that is so striking, the young man youll hear for the most part is a guy named matt gibbons, who was lieutenant junior grade, age 26 at the time, a graduate of a Spanish Language program at marquette university. And he is on the radio, he is so cool and so collected, that you think he is talking about somebody elses flight. And he is that tightly controlled to 150 feet above the water, seconds from water impact, hes one of the few guys who has a window to look out of, hes got a window right at his Left Shoulder and as theyre coming down, those 30foot waves outside the window must look like the end of the earth. And hes got to know hes going to die in seconds, and yet you listen to his voice and hes like hes calling a ball game. And its just striking. That is about, matt is about my size, he hates it when i say this, but he looks a little bit like elmer fudd, and he is a hero. [laughter] any way, lets listen to this and if you have trouble understanding it, ill interpret it. Courts alfa Foxtrot Alpha foxtrot 586, over. Alfa foxtrot 586, go ahead. Alfa foxtrot 586, were a topper three aircraft, we have a propeller malfunction at this time, our present position, 5222 north, 16430 east. Our altitude is 11,000 feet. Crew true air speed 154. Ground speed 194. We are diverting direct at this time. Over. Alfa foxtrot 586, the aircraft, the navy p3 ohry on, ryan orion, just like this one in the painting, has told el elmendorf that they are terminating their mission, they are flying for an air force base because theyve had a propeller malfunction. Hes about 154 knots, a 40 knot tail wind, oh so hes doing about 190 knots over the ground. Hes hundreds of miles away from chima, and thats hundreds amiles away from his base. But what he is telling elmendorf is that we were terminated the flied, weve got a problem were heading home. And the story im going to tell you is the true story of the rescue of alfa foxtrot 586. When i wrote this in 2003 i wanted to call it the ordeal of alfa foxtrot 586 and the publisher said gee, that sounds pretty grim, why dont we dress it up a little bit. And i leave it to you to decide if this is pretty grim or not. Lets start with talking about Antisubmarine Warfare. World war i is the beginning of a point at which the promise of submarines seems to become a reality. As far back as leonardo da vinci, people had the idea that gee, if we could only attack from under water what a good thing that would be. The technology isnt there in the 19th century either, and the u. S. Navy and the Confederate Navy and a couple other navies around drown a number of crews trying to prove that submarines can work. But by world war i, they can work. This is a picture of the sinking of lusitania, and the New York Times article and the other picture, the one right here, of course, is a woman drowning holding her baby in her arms and sinking in the water as the result of this horrific attack on the lusitania. Whats happened here is the stalemate on the western front in world war i, and the very successful british blockade of the continent during that war, has pushed the germans into something called unrestricted submarine warfare. Before that restricted submarine warfare the submarine meant to be submarine surfaced, sent a boat to its target, inspected their cargo, inspected their manifest, and if they determined it was carrying contraband pulled off to sink it but was obliged to make provision for the safety of the passengers and crew. That obviously isnt going to work. [laughter] consequently, as germany got more and more desperate, they twice inaugurated something called unprestricted warfare which meant you either rose to the surface and fired at the with deck guns or you watched the thing submerge, sank it it and kept on going back so outraged going to riordan that this going. So outraged the americans, weapons the lusitania, that the u. S. Entered the war. The american response to unprestricted submarine warfare was flawed. They did not understand because of poor dip will mattic reporting from washington on their part, the thraks that would bring. They were willing to bet that they could break the british blockade before the United States responded. That was an erroneous judgment. And what happened was that the entry of the United States into war, you suddenly had millions of men available to revitalize combat on the fronts that had completely stablized because of the horrific destruction of lives during the preceding years of the war. Its possible to see world war i as destroying an entire generation of men. And in many towns and cities especially in britain were recruiting was on a regional basis, where are recruiting was on a regional basis there , were no men. The sons, the uncles, the brothers and the husbands were gone. The entry of the United States in the war raised the possibility of millions of new combatants. The europeans for their part saw this as filler for their regiments, that americans would be dropped into the existing european, french and british regiments. The United States under general pershing rejected that strategy and american units went in under american command as coherent american units, but that changed the balance of the war. Never mind that we arrived very very late in the process. At the point that the United States entered the war, there was no successful possibility, no successful outcome for germany and that was triggered by the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. World war ii begins, nazi germany has i think 55 submarines, theyve learned the lesson from world war i. They understand the power that weapon represents. They start the war with 50 submarines, build 100 new once. New ones. The loss of life is appalling during the conduct of the war. But for a period of time the threat those submarines represented britain, ireland britain, island brinson represent to legend, ireland britain, represent to britain, island britain, is enormous, and in defeat of those submarines through Antisubmarine Warfare campaign is a key moment during world war ii that tends to be neglected. All this is by way of background, because now in the cold war, submarines become an extraordinarily dangerous weapon. These are soviet attack submarines, charlie and victor class submarines, the noise you hear are the machinery noises of the Nuclear Powered propulsion. Beginning in the 50s long before these guys show up, the United States navy concentrates on the problem of Antisubmarine Warfare because theyve seen the dangers that it posed in world war ii. The solution to the problem is very very difficult, because the target at the time is a diesel electric submarine that when operating on a snorkel makes a lot of noise and you can find it with radar. But when operating submerged on its battery is very, very quiet. This results in a determined effort to find a substitute Search Technology for the technology that the allies used at the end of world war ii which was High Frequency direction finding. You waited until that german submarine got a mast and antenna up in the air and communicated with his ways on high freak web sit radio, you intercepted that highfrequency radio, you intercepted that communication and that gave you a position to begin your search to a relatively low speed, relatively limited capacity vehicle. As the war ends, the next generation begins, the u. S. Navy is looking for a replacement for High Frequency direction finding as an asw search tool, Antisubmarine Warfare search tool. And they sort of stumble upon although thats unfair because enormous sums of money are spent, and tremendous engineering talent devoted to it , the discovery that there is a deep sound channel the ocean that is capable of carrying sound through hundreds of miles, this is an illustration and i dont want to get too complicated about this. Picture that there is a duct in the ocean and inside of that duct sound is reflected up and down, and carried long distances. And at low frequency sound especially travels in that duct, oceanic duct, vast distances we are talking hundreds of miles. That sound can be detected, it can be an liced. Analyzed. It and if you have a system that gives you different looks at it , angular looks at the source of the sound, you can come up with a rough estimate of position much the way that High Frequency direction finding works. A rough estimate of position you then send somebody out to that position and look for it. The analysis can be on the basis of broad band noise, which those be familiar to my colleague here who flew these flights with me, or on discreet frequencies and it turns out that any different propulsion plant generates signature noise patterns. And these will travel in this duct possibly hundreds of miles. So those of you who are american taxpayers should be happy to know that in exchange for billions of dollars in the 50s and 60s we wired the Northern Hemisphere for sound. Ok. And it worked. It was possible during the hey day, the glory days of Antisubmarine Warfare, conducted by submarines listening for the same kind of phenomenon or trailing submarines generating those noises, or by great stations on the ground, and ill show you one, to detect the noise of transiting or on station submarines to develop a position roughly, the size of the state of rhode island maybe, and then to prosecute that position down to within the criteria of the torpedoes you carried. That system was called the silent under water surveillance system. Heres a picture of that rig around the island of icelandic iceland, which was a key point because the soviet Northern Fleet was right around the corner here and they would have to pass through the gap between greenland iceland, and the United Kingdom to get into the broad open waters of the north atlantic. So you wire the ocean for sound, there are stations all along here on the east coast, iceland, norway and other places, and listen. And sure enough, from hundreds of miles away, rounding the north cape, here come those engine noises which you just heard a moment ago. And our story begins there because the aircraft were talking about is the lockheed p3 airplane and it was the ground based half of the system that prosecuted these contacts. The sea based half of that system, as one of the marines in the audience knows, attacked submarines who also conducted trail operations and other operations to keep track of all these bad guys. That system, those acoustic rays acoustical rays acoustic arrays out in the ocean, terminated at stations on shore, deliberately inconspicuous. And in rooms such as this, the acoustic data that were collected on those microphones were displayed on the they went the thermographic paper graphs and provide but the identification information that ive just described to you. From the land based aircraft side, you then would send me an airplane out to chase the guy down, to detect and localize the position and then to keep up with him for a while, or simply to confirm that there was somebody there. It was a brilliantly executed technical solution to an enormously complex problem, in salt water physics and under water acoustics. Really neat. The airplane were talking about is flying from adak in the center of the Aleutian Islands not on such a mission. It is being used in a mission to fly along the soviet coast, the contract that coast kamchatka coast, peninsula and hes going to fly along that peninsula just to see how soviet communications and air Defense Systems respond to the presence of an american aircraft off shore. This was part of the peace time aerial reconnaisance program. And it is a little bit teasing the animals, little built of an little bit of an efforts to find out how are they going to reply in the presence of the u. S. Aircraft there, what are we going to learn from electronics eavesdropping, in response to that. So alfa foxtrot 586 is going to take off out of here, this is the bering sea, this is the north pacific, theres the great chain of islands called the aleutians and here is the soviet far east, the kamchatka peninsula. Here it is easier to see, the aleutians like a chain of beads separating the shallow waters of the bering from the keep waters of the open pacific. The navy has an air station, naval station, sweus me, on the island of adak roughly in the middle of this. Adak is otherwise uninhabited except by the navy. There are no natives much they were relocated early in world war ii when the japanese pressed very hard against these islands and in fact landed on some of them and captured them. After the end of the war the navy moves back in, establishes one of those High Frequency direction stations we were talking about, some other intelligence collection facilities and bases some aircraft some Navy Surveillance aircraft at adak to conduct any warfare patrol in those waters. Not in the the bering because its too shallow. It is worth stopping to talk about the bering sea for a minute. It is a famous ship killer terrible weather, and the reason is you very cold weather systems coming off the dry continent of siberia, hitting the relatively warmer moist air of the bering sea, that impact stirs upper up enormous storms. Things that are effectively pole polar hurricanes, and these things form up here in the bering, tear down along a regular track into the gulf of plask and then dissipate as they get over warmer waters. And its a very regular pattern and youll see that developing in the course of this story. The aleutians, the islands we just looked at, are the tops of volcanos, the bases of which were drowned during the melting of the ice at the end of the last ice age. So here are those volcanic tops, they are the tops of those islands i just showed you on the map. Heres another view of them its quite beautiful, i can tell you i have never seen the aleutians looking like that. [laughter] it is never without clouds without winds, without wretch ed weather. Im not sure how they got this picture. It may be a fake. [laughter] i suggest to you it may be a fake. Heres another shot at it, but gives you a sense that you are at the end of the world up here. At chimia it is literally the end of the world, the wind blows so strong there that it is supposed to blow the native foxes off their feet as they for forage for food. And adak was called its closed now, the birthdays of the winds. Birthplace of the winds. This is the patrol squadron hangar at adak and in the period were talking about, late 70s, four crews and three aircraft would be sent to adak on a sixweek cycle, they would stay those six weeks up there, fly out of there, as part of the third fleets effort to understand soviet submarine operations in the northern pacific. And here are the various squadron patches that guys painted on the hanger. The field has long since been abandoned, it was turned over to an Indian Business venture and supposedly put up for sale. Its inconceivable to me what anyone would do buying it. [laughter] but this is the patrol squadron hanger from which this these two guys fly out of. Were going to be speaking about patrol squadron 9. One old at that time 24 navy patrol squadrons, operating the Antisubmarine Warfare mission and land bases because these are big airplanes, and because they dont have a tailhook. You cant put Something Like this aboard an aircraft carrier, thank god. It would otherwise be very thrilling. It this is crew six of that squadron, they are flying a navy p3. 892. Its a 2yearold airplane, its almost brand new. If you got onto it today it would still smell like a new car, the vinyl in the airplane and on these seats and all would have that new car smell to it. It has about 2,000 fight hours on it. They are first run engines, have never been overhauled. And this crew, crew six, is going to take that airplane and fly for nine hours off the soviet coast in the middle of the cold war, 1978, october 1978 , to see what happens. The event on the flight schedule is called alpha kilo 262, all that means is adak alaska on the 26th day of the second flight, and its october 26, 1978. This is the interior of that aircraft. I will show you the other side in a minute. This is basically the lockheed electro. It is not amelia ehrhardts el ectro, its the same manufacturer, same name, very different airplane from amelia earhardt. This comes into service in the 1950s just at the wrong time. You know how they finished the erie canal just before the railroad took over . Same deal here. The turbo props are introduced into Passenger Service just as the dc8 and 707 arrive, and they will blow these airplanes out of the air, because the economics of it just doesnt work. This particular airplane didnt work particularly well any way as an electric because youve got a coupling between the propeller and the wing such that the propeller would tear the wing off. And there were a couple nasty accidents, one one i think over the grand canyon when one went down because of that. The navy solves that problem im happy to tell you, they stiffen the wing box, cut 7 feet out of the fuselage to shorten it. Obviously change the interior completely. Install a bomb bay, most airlines don carry those. Dont carry those. And 10 stationings on the wing to hang weapons, search light, television cameras, whatever you want, 10 wing stations. So that forward hemisphere radar, afh radar detector, and a sensor that detects the disturbance a submarine makes in the earths Magnetic Field and thats pretty much the complete package. If you think about searching for submarines or doing anything to them what youre doing is youre detecting the disruption the submarine makes in the environment. One of those disruptions obviously, is acoustic, it makes noise. One of them is magnetic, the hull of the submarine changes the local Magnetic Field. But theres all kind of other things it does. Heats the water as it passes very very little. But if youve got a really good sensor you can detect that. It creates a ridge on the surface of the ocean, above where it is. Very, very little, that takes a really slick sensor to pick that up. But what youre looking for is where the submarine disturbs the environment and the best way is acoustic, but one of the ways also is magnetic. Ok, so this is the interior of the aircraft. The typical crew is somewhere between 10 and 12 guys, can you carry is a many as 21, but in that case youre not doing any work, youre just transporting people. Here is that interior layout. Pilot, Flight Engineer, forward radar we talked about, the guy sitting here is the tactical coordinator, hes responsible for pulling the sensor information together and creating a picture of where the submarine is in the vast ocean underneath them. Hes the key guy in that. Thats where matt gibbons is sitting when the radio transmissions that youre going to hear. These are the sensor operators this is the main cabin door and a ladder to get to the ground and a galley and a rest area back there. The other side of the airplane looks very much like it, the copilot, the navigator communicator, this guy runs the radar and other sensors, here is the load center where electric power is distributed. The aircrafts acoustic connection to the water is stored here, and theres the rest of that rest area in the airplane. The airplane is number one propeller, runaway propeller on restart. Cold engine. Old engine. It resulting fire in number one engine. Matt gibbons is telling el elmendorf that they had a problem on the restart of the number one engine, they had a fire and had to shut the engine down. What has happened lets talk about what has happened. On station, the aircraft takes off at quarter to nine in the morning, flies out to station, and will spend nine hours in flight. Theyre supposed to take off at 9 00 they take off early because , that keeps people from criticizing you for being late. They will spend nine hours on station and return. Once hes on station he shuts down under 110,000 pounds of gross weight, shuts down the number one engine, on purpose, to save fuel. This aircraft thats a routine activity. You dont normally shut down functioning engines on airplanes, but you do on this one. As a matter of fact if it went a lot lighter, youd should down the number four engine too and just fly on those two in the middle. Conserving fuel, extending your endurance, and your time on the station. Jerry grigsby, the pilot, will decide to restart that engine because of ice, developing ice on the air frame and thats the problem, on the restart theyll have a loss of control of that propeller and thats what you just heard matt gibbons reporting. The engine propeller combination that drives this thing is a jet engine, like a jet engine in any other airplane except it has some extra stages in the turbine and its driving through a great big drive shaft of huge reduction gear box. The reason is this engine is turning at some 30,000rpm. You want the propeller to turn at about 1,000r. P. M. So you have this enormous mechanical gear train stepping down the speed of this shaft to about 1,000r. P. M. It will be fires in this box right here that will bring the aircraft down. Well talk about why this fire is there in a minute. The plane commander is from oklahoma, age 34. This is him flying in a p3 from the previous squadron, hes just landed from japan. The numbers there on the tackity tactical plot show the amount of fuel that he burned on the way, 51,000 pounds. Take a look at these handles in the cockpit. These are emergency handles, if you pull one of those out youll shut the engine down and feather the propeller. When he restarts number one engine and it overspeeds, the first thing the Flight Engineer will do is pull that handle out, shut that engine down, and he expects to see the propeller go to feather and stop. And the reason is if it doesnt stop, it is going to extract energy from the air stream blowing over the wing. Sufficient energy entirely possibly to force the loss of control of the airplane. So you really need that thing to stop. Anyway, theres jerry, he is the plane commander, as i say he comes from northeastern oklahoma, married, married a young girl not a young girl, married a woman from seattle. They have two children. Two young girls. There will be some question about jerrys readiness for flight and about his ability to manage the flight, because he has just been passed over for promotion to the grade of commander. He was up for commander in the last promotion cycle, he failed the selection and the feeling is well, maybe that disappointment weighed on him, pressed on him and thats an explanation for in part of how this flight developed and how the emergency developed. For what its worth, i dont believe it. But theres talk about that and as the accident report proceeds up the chain of command youll hear that some more. Early in the morning at about 4 00 in the morning, jerry wakes up. These are waves, ok. Early in the morning jerry wakes up, goes to the Naval Weather Service and without, wait a minute, and gets a weather briefing. This is actually the briefing he gets and let me help you with it because it is a little confusing. Here are the Aleutian Islands. Im sorry. [laughter] here are the Aleutian Islands. This is the island of adak. Here is the soviet kamchatka coast, this is the north atlantic, here is the bering sea. There is off kamchatka and the bering a storm. From that low extend from waves from frontal waves, a cold front, and that deep low will track cross the bering sea into the gulf of alaska and down, bringing with it rain, sleet snow, freezing rain, and it will progressively close the air stations in the aleutians, such that the search and rescue operation to come will be impeded and finally shut down by the poor weather thats preceding out of this system. Jerry is supposed to fly up and down the coast here in the back side of that weather system, and hes not concerned about it. This aircraft is a superb foul weather airplane and he can handle this. The aircraft can handle it without difficulty. It might complicate his landing back home at adak, if theres very bad weather there, in which case hell proceed to elmendorf and lend their at the air force base and land there at the air force base on the alaskan main land. So this is the briefing he gets on the 27th of october, 1978. And he walks into the airplane with that briefing in hand. Courts requesting patrols requesting the patrols on board. inaudible . One five over. During the course of the emergency, elmendorf will ask him repeatedly for survival information. The first question is always how many souls on board, how many people are on board the aircraft and where are they. The reason is because they will pass that information to the crash crew. If you put the aircraft down on the runway, the rescue people need to know where the bodies or people are they are looking for. So you will repeatedly hear this. Five souls on board three in the cockpit and 2 in the after station. That is what he is telling him and elmendorf in that transmission. This is the distribution of the crew. There are 15 men on board. Those represent the stations at which some of those 15 are sitting. The pilot, the engineer, the copilot, tactical coordinator, the navigator, spare pilot a third pilot, a young guy named john wagner there he is, 15 two acoustic operators, nonacoustic operator, technician, and the offduty Flight Engineer. These 15 men in those stations , in those stations will ride this aircraft into the water halfway between kamchatka about 2 00 in the afternoon on october 26. Here are the stations they are sitting in. Ed lives in portsmouth, new hampshire, today. I will spend next week with him. Im looking forward to it. He flew for delta for many years after he got out of the navy. Here is where they will be sitting when the aircraft hits the water after a couple of hours of flight. Position fivetofive north 5225 north 58 east. We are proceeding west of chimsia. At this time, we are 337 miles west of chimia with a propeller malfunction. Over. Roger, copy all. Are you going to declare an emergency at this time . Elmendorf, this is alfa foxtrot 586. That is affirmative. We are not in extremis, we are proceeding direct. Matt gibbons tells them they are declaring an emergency but are not in extremis. Jerry calls up and says yes we are. What you heard is another one of these transmissions. Over the course of an hour and a half matt will be explaining the situation. He will constantly repeat his position. He will repeat often the fact they are in orange or green survival suits. The life vests are orange and theyre going into orange rafts. The reason for repetition of position is obvious. It is exactly what air malaysia 370, the great mystery is where did it go. Matt knows that, he knows the Pacific Ocean and because the Navigation Systems are functioning normally, he is able to within a nautical mile tell elmendorf exactly where the airplane is. He will constantly repeat they are in orange because he wants to make it certain people know what they are looking for. The fact that summer in green some are in green survival suits is bad news for them. If they are adrift in the water in green, they will never be seen. As a practical matter, even if they are in orange suits alone in 40 degree water, it will be difficult to do anything useful for them. What happens as the aircraft flies along is it will get repeated fire warnings. They have shut that engine down normally. They have restarted it normally as they approach icing. Because if you get icing in the intake, you cannot restart it. They have overspeed in the propeller. They have lost control of the propeller. They have shut the engine down. They have shut down the flow of oil to that great big reduction gear box that is about 13. 5 feet of prop. And the reduction gear box is eight feet. It is continuing to spin. It will eventually catch fire because it is spinning and getting hot. In fact, it will catch fire four times. The first two times, they can extinguish the fire using this system here. These are the emergency handles. It puts a bottle of fire extinguishing fluid into the nacelle. That fluid will blow the fire out. You can do that twice. You cannot do it three times. Because you have the system on one side of the airplane. You have a similar system on the other. And they are not crossconnected. They could not be because you could not have a big enough model to pressurize the system on the opposite side of the airplane. They will get four fires. The first they will put out with the direct engines bottle. The second fire they will put out with a bottle labeled adjacent engines. The third fire will blow itself out. The fourth fire, Jerry Grigsby will decide he has to put the airplane in the water. That is an aluminum plank wing, if the fire burns through the firewall and hits the wing, it will dissolve the wing at which point everybody will die. The decision of when to put it in the water and under what circumstances, where and how, is the thing he is preoccupied with. It is the key question in determining who will survive. And who is not. I dont want to walk you through the emergency shutdown list. But i told you a minute ago the your is rotating, continuing to rotate because of the loss of control of the propeller. There is no oil in it because there is a valve in the oil tank , the bottom of the oil tank that they have shut off to prevent the flow of oil into the nacelle to stop the fire. You dont want flammable fluids going into that. The problem is under this situation where the propeller continues to spin, theres a further step in emergency procedure that provides you will disable this valve such that oil will continue to flow in the gearbox. It has to. Otherwise, when you hit 400 degrees in the gearbox, all kinds of things start to happen. The crew fails to execute that key step in the emergency checklist that will provide lubricating oil to a reduction gearbox that continues to spin even though you have shut the engine down. At the end of the day, Jerry Grigsby will receive tragically posthumously the distinguished flying cross for his brilliant performance in putting the airplane down safely under these conditions. He will have, however made a fundamental mistake by not completing this step of the checklist and not restoring lubricating oil to the gearbox and thus setting up the situation that permitted the fires. There are several ways to get out of the airplane in an emergency situation in the water. Over the port wing through this hatch, under the starboard wing through this hatch, out of the cockpit through the overhead hatch. You cannot use the main cabin door because if you ditch the airplane, it will be below water level. You will go down by the tail. In a real hurry. The crew will abandon the aircraft through the hatches. The flight crew will abandon it through the flight station hatch. These are the emergency stations as they are laid out. Essentially, what is going to happen is everybody in the aft end of the aircraft will come out the port side. Everybody in the forward side of the aircraft will come out the starboard side. The flight crew will come out of that hatch. And they will end up congregate at the life raft on the starboard side of the airplane. Alfa foxtrot 586, mayday, mayday proceeding north. 143 [indiscernible] 52271660 mayday, mayday, mayday we are dipping, dipping, dipping. Position 5227. One to 60 east. Mayday, mayday. 15 souls on board. Three orange liferafts. Over. Hearts you know you know what when you get in an airplane and the Flight Attendant stands in front and recites the emergency procedures, they will say Something Like in the unlikely event of a water landing, heres what youre supposed to do. Ok, there is no such thing as a water landing in a land claim. Land claim. It land pklane. You are going to ditch. It is a controlled crash at sea. What these guys are talking about is a controlled crash at sea that everybody hopes will survive. He is telling elmendorf mayday, this is it. We are going in and ditching and tells them where they are. They dont ditch at this point. There will be several times during the flight that matt thinks this is all over. He announces they are ditching. He later says we are still in the air. Progressively, they get lower and lower and it becomes more clear they are not going to make it to the air force base. This is the emergency equipment inside the aircraft on the starboard and port side. When they go to abandon the air craft, the kids, and they are kids, the oldest of them is Jerry Grigsby at 34. The officers are in their 20s. Several are on their first fleet tour. Reenlisted the enlisted crew in the back of the airplane are in their teens, some of them. When they congregate, on the port side their responsibility is to take out the life raft. They will not succeed in detaching the liferaft. From the storage straps. They will not succeed in launching it over the side. On the starboard side, both the seven and 12man rafts will be successfully launched out the hatch. Nothing else. Not the water bottles, not the communication equipment not the firstaid kits, nothing. So when the aircraft settles and they start to evacuate, they will take with them a sevenman raft and a 12man raft out the starboard side of the aircraft. Courts elmendorf, this is alfa foxtrot. Our position has stabilized. We are now 500 feet [indiscernible] north 16645. East. We are going to try to make it into chimia at this time. I will keep you posted if our situation changes. Request verification you have our alert. Over three of court over. It matt is telling them they will try to stretch it out and get to the base. Hes asking for confirmation the search and rescue aircraft has been launched. He is looking for someone to fly alongside him so the location of the impact is precisely known by an outsider who can report it. The aircraft will end up go down halfway between the soviet city and the u. S. Air force base. These two islands are part of that chain. But they are soviet owned and out of the equation. These are the resources, the aircraft and assets that will be used to assist in the rescue operation. And let me walk you through them quickly. Scone 92 is a reconnaissance aircraft. It is a great big boeing 707. I will show you a picture of it. He is in the air off of kamchatka because the soviets are getting ready to fire a missile test. And what he wants to do is to get photographs of the warheads and reentry vehicles on that missile as they break apart and hit the targets in the impact area. He is on a sensitive intelligence collection mission. He is up in the air purely by accident. Xray foxtrot 75, these are other navy p3s in alaska who will be sent out of adak to fly over the area to find the site and to lend search support as the process develops. Coast guard 1500 is the coast guard rescue aircraft that has been flying in the aleutians on a fisheries patrol. What he is doing is looking at the International Fishing boats in water claimed american waters and see what they are doing. He has gone through adak. He has landed there, spent the night, refueled, and took off a half an hour after 586 but heading for kodiak. And home rather than here. He will be turned around and sent out to the ditch site to orbit the ditch site and provide search and rescue services on top. The crew of coast guard 1500 in the next 24 hours will spend about 17. 5 hours in the air, night and day, participating in this rescue mission. The air force launches a c130 of its own out of elmendorf accompanied by helicopters. Rescue 804 and rescue 805. The idea is they will fly from the mainland across the aleutian change to shemya. Everyone will stop, refuel, and relax. And then the air force rescue airplane will lead the helicopters out of the ditch site. They will drop jumpers into the water. These guys will prepare the survivors of the crew, put them in baskets, haul them up in the helicopters, and drag them home. The problem will not be in locating the wreck. In locating the dude site, in locating the site, in locating the raft. The problem will be under those water conditions with temperature, wave height, and weather conditions, you have got to get the guys out of the water or they will die of exposure. The exposure suits they are wearing or by regulation or by are by regulation or by definition supposed to keep them alive in this water for 18 hours. As you will see, that did not work for everybody. The purpose of this trio is to get people out of the water. Way out at the ditch site. The problem is as they arrive approaching shemya, the weather is so bad at shemya they determine they cannot land. They turn around and fly all the way back. They will have flown twice the length of the aleutian chain for no purpose whatsoever. The coast guard cutter jarvis is in court port adak refueling. When she gets the word of the emergency, they cast off lines get underway in a hurry, and start moving atop up across the aleutians to the ditch site. She will hit 70 knots of wind on the nose and waves reported as 50 feet high. The result is this cutter capable of 24 knots by design will be making less than four knots across the ground. She will not arrive at the ditch site until saturday morning, two days later, just in time to see a couple pieces of wreckage floating in the water and in no time to rescue anybody. The key to the rescue will be a soviet stern trawler that has been fishing in the bering sea four days, has completed its mission, and is now trucking through the aleutians heading back to the southern tip of the homebase island to unload the fish. It will turn out theis is the that this is the only vessel of any flag close enough to be able to effect a rescue and pull these people out of the water and save their lives. Let me show you some of these as we talk about them. Elmendorf, 20 seconds to ditch. Position 5250 north. Position 5240 north, passing through 200 feet. Listen to this. We have 15 souls on board, three orange rafts, and all personnel in either orange or force forest green with exposure suits. We are passing through 150 feet this is 586 out. Matt gibbons, speaking for the crew, tells elmendorf they are descending. That is their last radio transmission. He is giving them the position and the information they will need to effect a rescue, assuming anyone survives water impact in 30 foot seas in a land plane. After this, people will save say, the reason why the aircraft did not break up is that jerry was a seaplane pilot, he had flown seaplanes before and consequently, he knew how to land this aircraft in the water so it did not break up. Hey, that is nonsense. This is a land plane. Besides that, the seaplane he flew, in the Operations Manual it said if you are going to put this thing down in over fourfoot waves, you are in trouble. And that is a seaplane. This is an electra. They flew for psa. He did a really good job. What you hear matt saying is that 150 feet above the water, 40 foot waves rising around them. Hey, this is where we are, this is who we are how many of us , there are. This is our last transmission. He says it with such control that it just astonishes me. This is a 26yearold predicting he is going to die. And he is doing that the way i am speaking with you. I find that astonishing. The impact with the water is horrific. The airplane might have skipped twice, might have skipped three times before it finally came to a stop. It tore off the starboard wing entirely. The impact tore off the nace lles the prop one and two nacelles. It broke the aircraft behind the flight station and at the galley in front of the vertical tail. In that condition, the 15 men began to abandon the aircraft after it stopped in the dark. And very quickly, there was two feet of water inside it. It was in the dark because the emergency lights went out on impact. So these guys are coming out of that airplane as it sinks 15 of , them. 14 will make it out. The offduty Flight Engineer will not. He is the one sitting in the galley. Incidentally. The speculation is he was either crushed by the collapse of some of the galley equipment or he had a heart attack and died. The reason for that is as he moves from the cockpit back to the after station to participate in shredding the crypto tablets so the russians cannot get to them, he looked completely shaken ashen faced trembling. One of the officers said to himself, i think he is having a heart attack. In any case, jerry not jerry the offduty engineer, butch , miller, is sitting in the galley and he never comes out of the airplane. He is lost as the airplane goes down. All the others, the other 14 come out of the airplane successfully. 13 of them will succeed in getting into the rafts. This is an illustration of the men abandoning the aircraft. Four of them three of them, excuse me will go out the port , side. They are unable to launch the raft. They step into the north Pacific Ocean wearing survival suits and life preservers and nothing else. For the next 600 miles, there is nothing but deep water. They step out and float back like ducklings behind the aircraft driven by the wind and the waves. Astonishingly, as they do that here comes the mark 12 raft, the 12man raft with one guy in it matt gibbons. When they hit the water, they put the rafts out the starboard side. The 12man raft is tied to the airplane like the other one is. That tie breaks and it starts floating away. Matt swims to it, climbs aboard, and it drifts past the tail of the aircraft. And the three guys who went out the port side find themselves saved by this 12 man raft. The four of them will bob in that raft until 2 00 the next morning when they are rescued. The other nine will go into the sevenman raft. At least on one side. Out of star board side. They are crowded aboard that over the course of the night until 2 00 in the morning when they are rescued. Progressively, they will begin to die. Three of the nine die between water impact and 2 00 in the morning. And they are dying of exposure. The water was ferociously cold. Under these conditions, without protection, you would be conscious but not functioning for about 30 minutes and then dead after that. In the suits that they are wearing, they are supposed to have 18 hours of protection. But some of them are torn on exit from the aircraft. And some of them are filled with water when they try to pull the raft closer to Jerry Grigsby. Jerry is the last to come out of the airplane. The comes out the top above the cockpit. He watches the copilot and engineer slide over the star board side and get in the raft. He seems to be counting heads. The next thing that happens is he slides in the water, starts swimming to the sevenman raft. Apparently sees it is overfilled swims toward the 12man raft , and is unable to reach it. The yells, he says throw me the rope. There is supposed to be a long wrote on the raft with a big not on it for these purposes. There is no such rope on the raft. The last thing they see of jerry is floating with his hands in the air over this life preserver and he is disappearing, being pushed away from the raft by the wind and waves. Jerry will die after 20 minutes or half an hour after shooting what is the best landing approach of his life. These are photographs taken from one of the rescue aircraft of the rafts in the water. There is the sevenman raft with nine guys in it. Here is the 12man raft. And nobody knows how many are in it because unlike the seven it has a cover. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org]