What he needs aerodynamically is the best angle of climb they can get, maximum vertical movement up for every mile they go forward. They’ve been taught maximum effort obstacle clearance speeds, but they’re all based around takeoff configurations, particularly for short-field takeoffs. But the strategies all involve decelerating to the optimum speed that will allow them to climb quickly. They learn “escape maneuvers” to be used if, for example, they fly on a low-level mission into a box canyon at 250 knots. The protocol has them pulling the nose up, tracking the flaps to 50 percent, in order to catch the obstacle clearance speed that will give them the best angle for forward movement. That speed is 120 knots, and they’re already well below that.
Cline says, “I didn’t have the real estate to lower the nose and accelerate forward before pulling the nose back up to catch the obstacle clearance speed. I figured tracking the flaps to fifty, we were going to lose some lift. And if we lost at any lift at all, we were so critical that, y’know, that power-on stall is the biggest fear I had. So it was basically a gut decision, on the spot, to leave the flaps at seventy.”
With the pilot flying the plane and keeping the wings level, copilot Jason Wright focuses his attention on the instruments, and then watches the horizon. Since the mountains are covered with snow, he has no depth perception and can’t grasp how close they actually are to the terrain that’s rising in front of them. But the fact that the horizon line is moving up tells him that either they’re not climbing, or the mountain is rising faster than the airplane. The navigator who’s watching the radar is seeing the same image, and from behind the pilot, George Akins says, “Climb!”
Cline’s response to that command is fairly automatic: he pulls back on the yoke, putting the nose up. Wright notes that they immediately lost ten knots. And then the plane starts buffeting, an indication that it’s about to stall, which is to say, stop flying and drop like a 130,000-pound rock. At his radio console in the back, Rodney Young hears the copilot say, “We’re stalling. We’re stalling,” and he reacts. “That’s the very moment that I was literally scared. I was cool and calm up to that point because I trusted my pilots and I trusted the navs that we were going to get out of it. That’s when my heart went to the bottom of my shoes.”
But John Cline hasn’t given up yet. Again, he tries to bring the nose up between ten and twenty degrees—after all, it’s not a fighter plane—pulling the aircraft back into heavy buffeting a couple of times—“trying to find that sweet spot,” is the way he describes it. “I kind of pulled back into the heavy buffet, the plane would start to get real mushy, and I’d let off. I did that two or three times and found kind of the happy medium, y’know, right in the kind of light tickle where, hey, this is all this airplane’s going to give us.”
At that instant, just for a second, Maj. John Cline stops being the technician, or perhaps the artist, and gives in to a very human emotion. “As we came closer to the terrain, I just had a flash of just absolute white-hot anger at myself, swept over me for a couple of seconds, and then, y’know, the only airplane I’ve ever flown, I’ve prided myself on being able to do this stuff well. MAJ-COM [major command] evaluator pilot, the chief evaluator pilot of the whole command for this airplane, and how in the hell did I get us in this situation? I never felt a flash of anger like that before, and just as quickly as it came, it went away. I was too busy to dwell on it. I just needed to keep flying this airplane.”
His copilot, who has a lot of hours in the right-hand seat and admires Cline for his adroit handling of the 130, does not share whatever anger Cline is feeling toward himself. He sees the pilot’s response to his warning that they’re stalling is to let up on the stick pressure a little bit, and then milk it right there—they call it a “burble.” It’s where the plane is shaking because the wings are starting to lose lift—the definition of a stall—but the pilot is max performing the aircraft, which is something they learn on the simulator. “He had it max-perform and held it right there. It was perfect,” remembers Wright. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
What he doesn’t know is that they both feel they still have a chance. It is going to be close, but they believe they’ll make it over the ridge.
One of the instruments crews rely on flying at low levels in mountainous terrain is the radar altimeter. It tells them their altitude AGL—above ground level—rather than the standard barometric altimeter that measures altitude above sea level, a rather meaningless bit of data when you’re flying through canyons and valleys in the foothills of the Himalayas. Ditka 03’s radar altimeter had an adjustable bug that the crew would set so that if they dropped below the set height above terrain, a warning light popped on. Their low-light level was set for 450 feet, and Cline’s recollection is that it had already been on for about thirty seconds, and it was continuing to slowly count down.
The right nav, Don Tyler, doesn’t need to look at the altimeter to know they are close to crashing. He can sense the cushion of air under the plane when the condition known as being in ground effect kicked in. He knew it happens at a height roughly equivalent to the aircraft’s wingspan, in this case, 132 feet.
What the pilot sees out the window through his NVGs is a featureless white terrain covered with snow. On both sides there are big, craggy rocks, and he taps the rudders a bit just to keep the plane headed into the snow bowl. What he can’t tell at all is whether they have a quarter mile, a half mile, or even a mile left. So he begins watching the radar altimeter needle count them down, lower and lower, the needle sweeping down slowly. It was obvious that they aren’t headed for a vertical wall where they are just going to crash and all die. That isn’t going to happen if he can stick with the game plan: “Don’t let the airplane stall; do not let the wing drop down, ’cause once the wing drops, you cartwheel and you’re done.”
Behind him, a feeling of profound sadness accompanied by fear has overcome the left nav, George Akins. With no real tasks to occupy his mind, he’s thinking about his wife and children as the recognition hits that this is what it’s like to die.
And to Cline’s right, copilot Jason Wright is thinking about his friend who was killed when a Marine C-130 crashed a month earlier after taking off from the same airfield they’d left earlier that night. What troubles him is that all of his friends had just gone through a really horrible time, and now they are going to go through it all over again. He especially focuses on his wife, Amanda, and how difficult it had been for her. And then he begins to dwell on what it is going to be like to die.
“About a million things flashed through my mind. I guess some people say that a million things can go through your head in a second, and it really did at that point. I think that’s it, and the next thing I expected was the whole mountain just to come through me. I thought about what happened when my friend crashed, and I figured, Well, he probably never knew what hit him, ’cause the mountain hit him so hard. It just collapsed the whole airplane. So that’s kind of what I expected to happen.”
John Cline considers himself fortunate that he was occupied with flying Ditka 03. He didn’t have time to think about his wife. He couldn’t dwell on how he was the youngest of seven kids, and how he’d be leaving behind a really big, tight family. Cline pulled the airplane back in and out of heavy buffeting a couple of times. “I took a last scan of the instruments and I think the last thing I saw was eighty-five feet on the radar altimeter, and eighty knots of airspeed, which was incredible, considering how heavy we were. I had never, never flown an airplane down to that airspeed before. And the airplane was flying wings level.”
Jason Wright’s last recollection is glancing at the radar altimeter and seeing twenty-five feet. That was when he knew they weren’t going to clear the ridgeline. “My heart kind of sank just enough to realize that, hey, we’re not going to make it. And . . . and that’s never been an option to me. I was thinking, ‘We’re always going to make it. We always make it.’ ”
On the right side of the plane, loadmaster Jeff Pohl is
looking out the window and sees that the refueling hose, which Doss is in the process of reeling in, is hanging almost straight down. It dawns on him that the reason is that they don’t have enough airspeed to keep the paradrogue inflated. Seconds later he sees the basket and the hose coupling strike the ground, sending out a shower of sparks as it rips away from the wing.
Forward of Pohl’s position, Rodney Young hears the pilot say, “Oh, fuck!” Cline doesn’t remember saying it, and no one else recalls hearing it. But Radio is used to monitoring four or more channels at a time and has good ears. As soon as he hears it, he grabs the window armrest with one hand and clutches an arm on his chair with the other.
And then they hit the mountain.
Ditka 03 in the snow as photographed by a Predator drone (USAF photo)
CHAPTER 5
“HOLY SHIT, DITKA JUST CRASHED”
FEBRUARY 13, 2002
And then it was quiet.
One second Ditka 03 had four 4,900-horsepower turboprop engines screaming at full power, and the next second, nothing. Not a sound.
They’d gone from eighty knots on the airspeed indicator—ninety-two miles an hour—to zero in a distance of perhaps 150 feet, certainly no more than 200. To the cockpit crew it seemed as though they’d skidded into the hillside, nose up, all forward movement stopping in about twice the length of the airplane.
There’s no raging fire, no roar of fuel tanks exploding, no chunks of hot metal flying through the air. The condition of the flight deck is pristine. There’s not even a broken window.
Jason Wright remembers thinking, “We just stopped, and I was totally dumbfounded that we were still there.” As in alive. Instinctively, he reaches out and throws the switches shutting down all four engines, then looks at John Cline and realizes the pilot is laughing at him. There are no engines that need shutting down; two of them have torn loose from the wings and hurled forward, burying themselves in the snow. The other two have just stopped, as if they know there is no need to continue a heroic effort to get over the ridgeline. Their mission has ended.
In the flight engineer’s seat behind the pilots, Jeff Doss is dazed. He’d been wearing a lap belt but not the shoulder harness when the plane hit, causing him to jackknife forward, his helmet slamming into the back of the pilot’s seat, then ricocheting into the center console. Like the others, he begins touching body parts to make certain they are still there. In his case they are, though somewhat the worse for wear. He wouldn’t learn till weeks later that he had broken his sternum, had a cracked vertebra, and suffered a concussion that would affect his recall of the crash and what was to follow.
While the left navigator, Maj. George Akins, has come through unscathed, the right nav, Maj. Don Tyler, isn’t so fortunate. He’s the only one on the flight deck who wasn’t strapped into his seat during the crash—in order to do his job he needed to be able to move back and forth to the window—and he’s paying the price. He finds himself on the floor of the cockpit, down on one knee, cradling his left arm. To no one in particular, he screams, “Oh, fuck, I think I broke my arm!” After that announcement, he falls silent. What he’d done was dislocated his shoulder, popping the bone of his upper arm out of the socket by several inches, tearing an assortment of tendons and muscles from his shoulder blade and destroying the rotator cuff in the process.
In contrast to the flight deck, the rear of the plane does, indeed, look like it has been slammed into a mountainside, not surprising when the nose-up attitude of the crash is taken into consideration. From the inside, it’s clear that the aircraft is in three distinct pieces: the section forward of the wing, the wing box (the structure that attaches the wings to the fuselage), and the fuselage and tail aft of the wing box.
The radio operator, S.Sgt. Rodney Young, who had been hanging on to handholds for dear life, finds himself hanging upside down, suspended from his lap belt. He’d put it on midway through the refueling process, and now is having difficulty getting out of it. Rodney is shocked at what he describes as the nonviolence of the impact: “I’m hearing a noise like a car crash. I thought we might have just scraped it and kept on flying.” The absence of any engine noise doesn’t sink in. What he does realize is that his radio console broke free of its mounts and hit him in the shoulder. Now his mind is up and running. He thinks, “Okay, I just got hit in the shoulder with something. I’m still alive. Wait for the airplane to stop.”
All the way in the rear of the plane, the left loadmaster, Chris Langston, had been scanning out the window of the left paratroop door, leaning against a seat belt strap rigged as an improvised backrest, when he heard the copilot say that they were stalling. Two seconds later, they impacted.
“I remember hitting and everything just going black, and then going straight up in the air and then having that same strap clip me by the back of the legs and just kind of flip me around; I remember getting thrown backwards. At that point, it was over.”
He’d actually done a complete back flip, landing in a crouch, the back of his ankles against his butt. What disorients him momentarily is that the top of the plane, where the interior lights are, is adjacent to his right temple. His feet are on the hinge of the cargo plane’s huge rear ramp, which normally rises at an angle when closed. Now it is almost perfectly horizontal. It is a good five or ten seconds before he realizes that they’ve crashed. Oxygen is hissing and fuel is dripping everywhere.
The right loadmaster, T.Sgt. Jeff Pohl, isn’t as lucky. He is pinned in the middle of the wreckage, against the Benson tank, facedown in jet fuel soaking into a cushion of packed snow that had been scooped up by the fuselage behind the wing box as it slid up the mountain. His right foot is at an ugly angle through the side of the aircraft, locked in place by sheet metal that has crunched around his ankle like a shirt collar a couple of sizes too small.
Pohl’s injuries include a compound fracture of his right tibia, multiple fractures of his pelvis, a broken rib, fractured cervical and thoracic vertebrae, and head injuries that result in the permanent loss of his left peripheral vision. He has bruised the membranes that attach the intestines to the abdomen, ruptured his spleen, and has a scrotal hematoma. Of most concern is that he is bleeding internally, into his pelvic area.
How the right loadmaster ended up wedged against the aft edge of the Benson tank, which is mounted near the left wheel well, is a momentary mystery. What the crew soon discover is that the right side of the plane had crushed inward, violently shoving him left, mashing him to the cargo deck, and driving his right leg through the airplane’s skin like an oversize rivet.
In the lead Army helicopter that had been in the left observation position behind Ditka 03, watching as Chalk 3 attempted to refuel, the pilot hit the intercom to Lt. Col. John Buss, the airborne mission commander for the entire operation. “Did you see that?”
Buss, of course, couldn’t have missed the flash of light that marked the impact of the airplane with the mountain. It looked almost like a fire, but it didn’t last. What they all registered on their NVGs were the sparks generated by the crash. Buss didn’t believe anyone could have possibly survived what he thought had to have been a catastrophic impact. The immediate reaction was to have all three helicopters turn away from the terrain by doing a starburst maneuver and climb out of there. Then he instructed his pilots to circle back around and see if it would be possible to land near the crash site.
In Chalk 3, PJ team leader Chris Young, still wearing his NVGs, was on the floor relaxing when there was a sudden flash of light. He heard one of the crewmembers shouting, “Holy shit, Ditka just crashed!” In an instant he was on his feet, guys were handing him comm cords, and he was plugging in, trying to find out what’s going on.
Back in the Ditka 03 cargo bay, Rodney Young is taking stock of his situation. The console knocked off his headset and wool watch cap when it slammed into his shoulder. No problem. He’ll just get down on the floor and find them. What he can’t figure out is why it’s raining inside the aircraft.
/> “My face is cold and wet, so I’m asking, am I bleeding from my face? So I put my hand to my face and rub it off. Can’t see anything; I’ve got black gloves on. Then I realized, whoa, that’s gas spewing inside the airplane.” The sound reminds him of a sprinkler system run amok, a loud, persistent, obnoxious sound that he can’t place. Then it dawned: In addition to jet fuel raining down, there’s liquid oxygen blowing on his face. The valve has broken on the tank that supplies the crew’s emergency oxygen masks. Puddles of gas are already forming on the floor; the cargo area is being saturated with pure oxygen. A tiny spark is all it will take to turn a survival miracle into a front page disaster report about eight American deaths in the war on terrorism.
Rodney knows he’s got to get out of the plane before that happens, but there’s one small problem: he can’t see a thing. The radio operator wears contact lenses, and, fearful that they’ll get saturated with gas and he’ll be temporarily blinded, he’s got his eyes screwed shut. Even though the plane’s emergency lights came on as soon as the triggering system detected an impact greater than 2.5 Gs, keeping his eyes closed is understandably making it difficult for him to crawl around on the floor looking for his wool cap, his survival vest, his GAU-5 rifle, and the bag with his crypto—the secret punch tapes he uses to program special scrambling codes into the radios. He doesn’t want to evacuate the plane without the GAU—this is bad-guy land—and the 9mm pistol that was strapped to his leg doesn’t represent adequate firepower. He’s willing to exit without his cap and without his survival vest. He’s well trained enough to realize that he can’t leave without the crypto. This forces him to un-scrunch his eyelids and peek just a little, thinking he might get lucky. Ultimately, he thinks, “Screw it,” and opens his eyes wide to begin the search in earnest. Then he hears voices coming from up above, and realizes that people on the flight deck are alive.
None Braver Page 17