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Other Memories
I HAD TO BAIL OUT AT SUPERSONIC SPEED
by Lt. Cmdr. Ray Hawkins, USN
as originally written in 1954 for Post Magazine
(used by permission)
Lt. Cmdr. Arthur Ray Hawkins tells what it's like to be fired out of a disabled plane at 40,000 feet while going faster than sound. A hair-raising experience, described by the only man ever to live through it.
MORE ABOUT LCDR. HAWKINS:
Lcdr. Arthur Ray Hawkins, USN, left college to become a naval aviator, graduating from the cadet training program in January, 1943. From then on, he fought in virtually all the Navy's major battles against the Japanese. He had show down fourteen enemy planes before he was old enough to vote, and he is officially credited with a direct bomb hit contributing to the sinking of the Japanese battleship Ise.
At the surrender, he had logged 142 combat missions. In 1950, he returned to the wars with Fighter Squadron 191, operating over Korea from USS Princeton. Here he logged forty-seven combat missions. It is hardly surprising that he is one of the Navy's most decorated pilots, holder of three Navy Crosses, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, four Air Medals and a great many campaign ribbons and battle stars.
I am a Navy fighter pilot, and that's not just for now, a sometime thing. This is my settled profession, and so it will be, until the flight surgeon prescribes bifocals and a swivel chair. So far, I've logged almost 3000 hours of flying time, including combat off the carriers in World War II and in the Korean war. One thing about combat: you go looking for trouble, so you're not surprised to find it. It's the unexpected that really curls your hair. I've never been more scared or nearer to death than I was last summer on a routine flight from New York to Texas. I had this jet fighter at 40,000 feet, cruising level. It was so safe, so easy; and then, over Mississippi, the plane went crazily supersonic and tried to kill me.
I should explain that in peacetime I do a lot of acrobatic flying with the Navy's air-show team, the Blue Angels. I'm the leader. There are six of us, and we were all together, flying in line abreast, when my plane went out of control. It dived into an enormous outside loop -- I was vertical -- then I was upside down, hanging by my safety belt, and beginning to red out as centrifugal force whirled blood into my brain at tremendous pressure.
That would put the fear of God into any man, especially when you know that you're traveling faster than the speed of sound. If I was going to bail out, I'd have to go now, before I lost consciousness -- now or never. But the slipstream outside my canopy was supersonic; plunging into those granite-hard shock waves might conceivably smash the life out of me. In all the history of aviation, no one had pierced the sonic wall with his unarmored body -- barehanded, so to speak. At least, no one had survived to tell about it.
I remember thinking of all that; at the same time, I felt sorry that my airplane was going to auger in and be destroyed. It was an F9F-6 Cougar, the last word in Grumman-built Navy fighters -- wings swept back, lots of fizz out the rear end, and a red-line speed above Mach 1.0 ["Mach" numbers indicate the ratio of a plane's speed to the speed of sound at the temperature at which a plane is flying; the speed of sound varies according to temperature.]
The F9F-6 Cougar was a new type, superseding the F9F-5 Panther. As soon as dash-six production started, the Blue Angels wanted to trade in their dash-fives -- all of a sudden the Panther was last year's airplane. We had to wait, thought, until a few active-duty squadrons got theirs. Finally, after months of itching, we had the word: six Cougars were waiting for our team at the Grumman factory in Bethpage, Long Island.
Out home base is the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas; we're all instructors there in the Advanced Training Command. We left our old jets and Corpus and flew north in a Navy transport, arriving in the day. The next morning we swarmed out to the factory, six eager guys. Texas, here we come!
But first we had to study the F9F-6 cockpit, noting how it differed from the F9F-5 layout. There were important changes in the elevator system. In the older Grumman, you had to take your hand off the throttle to adjust elevator trim tabs. In this one there was a button on the control stick; you could trim up or nose down by flicking it with your trumb. Electric motors did the rest. There was an emergency trim-tab system, too, also electric.
Then, the Cougar had been given what we call a "flying" tail. The idea behind it is fairly simple. You take a conventional tail, with its horizontal surfaces -- a movable elevator hinged to a rigid stabilizer, design it to tilt up and down like the elevator, and provide a power drive. There's your flying tail. In effect, it gives a pilot a double-size elevator whenever he cuts it in.
So we had skull practice. After that we took the jets up for routine flight-testing. The flying tail, we learned, was hardly needed at low altitude, where the air is thick enough to give standard elevators a good bite. But at high altitude, in thin air, it was invaluable. The tightest turn I could pull at 40,000 feet, with elevator alone, was a wide sweep, too wide for turning inside a MIG. When I cut in the flying tail, however, the Cougar really wrapped herself around.
We finished the hop well satisfied, bought the airplanes from Grumman, and took off for home. On the way, we stopped at Sewart Air Force Base in Smyrna, Tennessee, for rule and lunch. So far, so good. Leaving Smyrna, it took us about twenty minutes to get climbed out and formed in line abreast. We weren't pushing our engines, but another hour would see us in Corpus Christi.
Or so I thought. I had no premonition of danger. The controls felt a little sloppy, but that's natural at 40,000 feet. A normal stick movement isn't enough in skinny air. And then you move the stick big, and it's too much, and you get into a lope. But nothing to worry about.
I turned my head left, and right, to see the other jets. When I looked forward again, my nose had dropped a little below the horizon. That's no worry either. You ease back on the stick slightly, the nose rises, and there you are. But this time there was no response to stick movement. The nose stayed down. It went further down.
I thought I could recover by adjusting the elevator trim tab. It was already set a litle nose-up, just enough for level cruise at altitude. I thumbed the button on my stick, feeding in more nose-up trim. Not too much.
The dive steepened. My air speed was getting very high. I fed in more trim tab. No response. More trim tab, and more, until I had all of it -- fifteen degrees. Still no response; the airplane was getting away from me, diving steeper and steeper, building up speed every moment. I heard one of the boys call on the radio -- it was Lt. Bud Rich's voice '' "There goes Hawk; he's in trouble!"
Centrifugal force was pulling me out of my seat, and I realized that I was in the first arc of an outside loop. What had gone wrong? I had only seconds left to figure this out.
Not the trim tab, Might be the flying tail, switched on accidently. No, the switch is still at Off position. The engine, then, a sudden flame out ... but the gauge shows I'm pulling 90 per cent power ... of course it might be stuck there ----
To test instrument response, I shoved the throttle forward. The gauge went to 95 per cent; so power wasn't my trouble. The dive angle was not about thirty-five degrees, and my speed was approaching a dangerous level. Machmeter and air speed needles were wheeling around together. I cut my power, dropping the dive brakes and went to my emergency trim-tab system, flicking the switch with my left hand. It had no effect.
Another glance at the instrument panel showed that I was already past the speed of sound -- and the needles were still winding up. Dive angle fifty degrees ----
Vertical! The loop's centrifugal force had me pinned up against the canopy, and a crimson haze began to cloud my vision. It was the first stage of a red-out. There was one last hope -- keep pressure on the stick, full nose-up trim, and switch on the flying tail.
I flipped the switch. And with that, the airplane tucked under, and I was upside down, hanging in my harness. Vision was going; consciousness would go next. There was just enough time to jettison the plastic canopy and fire the explosive charge that would cannon me into space, seat and all. I knew the bail-out drill by heart:
Depress this lever; it blows off the canopy and arms the explosive shell behind your seat. Draw your feet back into the stirrups. Reach overhead, grasp two handles and pull the protective curtain over your face. The last inch of pull will trigger a firing pin. Boom! Out you go.
But I couldn't get the sequence started. Hung up in the canopy as I was, my reach wasn't long enough to shove down the first lever. Stretching to the utmost, I could just graze it with a finger tip. One last chance. Alongside my head was an emergency handle to be used only in desperate cases. It would arm the ejection seat. But it wouldn't blow off the canopy. To get out of this supersonic mantrap, I'd have to fire myself through the thick plastic glass.
I pulled the handle.
How tough is my helmet? Duck down. Maybe the seat rails will punch a hole for you.
I pulled down the face curtain.
When the ejection charge fired, I was four or five inches off the seat. It came up and hit me like a pile driver. Too stunned to feel anything, I went through the canopy, a limp bundle traveling faster than sound. When the momentary blackout passed, I found myself clawing for my rip cord in a groggy attempt to open my parachute. Then I saw that I had missed the handle, and torn a pocket off my flight suit.
Then I thought, How stupid! Wait until you slow down. A chute opening at this speed would be torn to shreds.
The seat and I were tumbling over and over, but that soon stopped, and I was sitting upright in space, falling with a lot of forward motion, like an artillery shell. It was then I realized that I was bareheaded. The wind had torn away my face curtain, helmet and oxygen mask.
No oxygen, altitude still above 30,000 feet -- I'd gasp my life out if I opened the parachute and dangled up here. I decided to fall free two or three miles, to get into breathable air as soon as possible. So I fell, keeping one hand on the trip that would jettison my seat, and the other on the ripcord handle. Two or three miles? Why, in about four seconds the lack of oxygen was graying me out. If I blacked out entirely, I knew that I might never wake up in time to pop the chute.
At an altitude later estimated as 29,000 feet, I opened my safety belt and pulled the ripcord. When the chute blossomed, it jerked the living fool out of me. The stock was so great that I thought the canopy had torn, but looking up, I saw it was intact.
Next, I thought of my feet and legs. As far as I knew, I was the first Navy pilot to be fired through a canopy. But a lot of dummies had been shot through, in experiments, and I'd read the reports: most of them had feet torn off, legs shattered, heads bashed in. My head felt all right, and I saw that my feet wire still attached to my legs.
The ground below was so far away that it didn't seem to be coming up at all. It was very quiet. The only sound was a soft whistling of air in my parachute. And then I couldn't see the ground, or the parachute, or anything. My vision faded away. I seemed to be suspended in gray fog. I needed oxygen.
After a while, I heard a jet go by. I was too grayed out to see it, but I knew it was one of the Blue Angels, following me down. I could think after a fashion, and hear, and feel -- I remember feeling the intense cold. But I couldn't see. Then, finally, the blackout. I came back to gray, sank into blackness once more; again regain gray consciousness. The blackouts scared me. If I could only hang on until I got down where there was oxygen pressure!
The chute drifted down through a layer of rough air that swing me from side to side. I was violently sick at my stomach. Afterward, I felt better. My vision cleared, and in a space of mental clarity I remembered a lesson from Navy flight training, about "grunt breathing."
"If you lose your oxygen mask in a high altitude bailout," we were told, "take deep breaths, close your mouth and grunt hard. That will put pressure on the air in your lungs, and force oxygen into your blood stream."
I tried it, inhaling, holding it and straining to put on pressure. Pressure is the thing; there's oxygen at high altitude, but it's at low pressure. A few seconds after each grunt, my vision would improve for a while. Now I could see the jet. He was flying figure eights to stay with me, but keeping a safe distance, so his jet blast wouldn't collapse my chute. Where the four others were, I couldn't guess. It was explained to me later:
To begin, three jets were on my right, and two on my left, when my planed nosed over. Lt. Bud Rich, the first to see me go, dived on my tail and had my plane in sight all the way to the ground. He didn't see me bail out. Nobody did -- I was a mere speck in an enormous sky.
Lt. Pat Murphy and Lt. (j.g.) Frank Jones went screaming down right behind Rich. That left Lt. (j.g.) Roland Aslund and Lt. (j.g.) Dayl Crow to circle around, putting out "Mayday" distress calls, holding 40,000 feet to get maximum range on their transmitters. They hoped ground stations could take radio bearings on them and thus pinpoint the crash location. It worked too.
The boys told me later that my plane completed only the first half of its outside loop. After it got on its back, it ent down at a steep angle, augered in and exploded. Rich followed down -- when he leveled out he was barely 500 feet off the ground -- and saw the plane strike in a wooded area, doing no harm.
Murphy and Jones leveled off at 1000 feet, radioed news of the crash to the boys topside and started climbing back. Topside flashed the word to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, and Corpus Christi had it on a hot line before Murphy and Jones got high enough to see something glinting in the sun -- me and my parachute. For a minute, they mistook me for a high altitude weather balloon. They still didn't know that I had bailed out.
We met at 22,000 feet. Murphy stayed up there, feeding radio reports to the nearest military air base, while Jones flew descending figure eights alongside me. It was a long, slow drop, and everybody was getting lowon fuel. Aslund and Crow went into Barksdale, and reported to NAS Corpus Christi by phone. Murphy and Rich landed at NAS Memphis, and eventually Frank Jones went there too.
The entire accident, including the slow float down, took about half an hour. It seemed even longer, hanging in the chute. I wanted to give Jones a wave, to let him know I was alive, but being starved for oxygen, I lacked the strength to lift an arm. I thought, Well, I'll save the energy and let him know later.
Grunt breathing kept me alive all the way down to 10,000 feet, and there I could breath normally. At 5000 feet, I was able to raise my arms in a semaphore R. R for "Roger" -- O.K. The ground was coming up fast -- woods, cotton patches, highways. I was drifting toward a country road, and I could see a pickup truck moving to intercept me; I counted tow men, a woman and three children.
I missed a barbwire fence and landed in a cotton patch. The chute quietly collapsed on the ground. People from the truck came running. I felt too weak to get up right away.
One of the men said, "Shall I help you up? I might fall down helping you. I'm scareder than you are."
I told him to let me sit awhile. Jones buzzed us in the Cougar. Since I didn't feel like getting up just yet, I asked one of the men -- Mr. Arthur Edwards, a farmer and ex-deputy sheriff -- to signal for me. "Wave to him on the next pass so he'll know I'm all right."
Back came the jet, shrieking, and Mr. Edward waved his hat. That didn't satisfy the pilot; he could see me sitting up, but I didn't look very lively. He came by again at 100 feet. I got on my feet, semaphoring "Roger" and a wave-off. He waggled his wings, and with drying tanks, went off on a bee-line for NAS Memphis.
Mr. Edwards told me I was in Mississippi, near the small town of Pickens. About half an hour earlier, he said, he had heard three claps of thunder. Since the sky was clear, he was puzzled. He looked up; and he soon saw four jets diving towardhim, one of them obviously out of control.
(Later, when accident investigators questioned local people, they found several who had heard three thunderclaps. These were "supersonic bangs," of course, and they originated as shock waves on my plane, about the time I bailed out. Three shock waves, three bangs; the effec is well known in high speed test flying.)
Mr. Edwards drove me to the scene of the crash, about three miles away. I wanted to make sure the plane hadn't hurt anyone or destroyed property; and after that, I wanted the wreckage inspected for clues to the cause of my trouble. A rising column of smoke led us to a wooded area, where a crowd of farm people were standing around a deep crater. Fire smoldered in the pit my plane had dug, and chunks of metal were scattered everywhere. I asked if anyone had seen the tail or parts of it.
"If there's enough left of it," I said, "the experts can tell what went wrong."
A man said, "I think it's back over there," and he showed me a good piece of the tail.
I asked him to see that no one icked up anything for a souvenir, and to phone the marshal for a guard. He said he would attend to it. Mr. Edwards then drove me into Pickens, to a drugstore, where I put in a long-distance call to my wife. Whenever I'm due in Corpus Christi, she always comes down to the flight line to meet me. She'd be waiting now, knowing I was overdue.
My wife is up on all the trouble we have with airplanes, and before I went north to get the F9F-6 she asked me if they had got all the bugs out of it. I told her entire squadrons had been flying F9F-6's, and anyway, I said, somebody has to make a start with every new plane. That satisfied her well enough. But now I had some explaining to do.
When she came on the phone, she was crying, and I told her if she didn't hush up, I couldn't tell her anything. It was awful, hearing her cry; she never cries. I assured her I was all right. She wasn't satisfied with that. She knew that I had bailed out; Aslund and Crow had phoned that much to the duty officer at Corpus, when they landed at Barksdale. Was I alive? They didn't know. About half an hour later, Bud Rich phoned my wife from Memphis: I'd been seen on the ground waving. Whether Ihad broken bones or anything, he couldn't say.
No wonder she was crying. She kept asking, "Are you all right? Are you sure? Are you sure?"
I told her that one of my ribs was slightly out of kilter, but other than that, I was fine.
"Where are you calling form -- a hospital?"
"A drugstore," I said; and I kidded her a little tolet her be really sure everything was all right. She stopped crying.
I made my official call to the duty officer at Corpus. It was arranged that a Mississippi highway-patrol car would take me to a nearby airfield, where a Navy transport would be waiting to fly me to NAS Memphis. There was just time to see a local doctor. He taped up my rib and gave me a tetanus booster shot for scratches he found on my legs. My neck felt sore, my thighs ached from the two-and-a-half-ton spanking the ejection seat had given me, and altogether I felt as if I'd played an hour of football against a rough team. And I had butterflies in my stomach.
The highway-patrol officer who came for me, Jerry Wald, said he had the cure for my unsettled stomach. "We'll stop by my house, and my wife will give you a cold glass of buttermilk. It's an old Southern remedy."
Mr. And Mrs. Wald were wonderful to me, and I shall never forget their kindness, or Mr. Edwards' either. As for the butermilk, it worked like magic.
It was after dark when I landed at the Naval Air Station in Memphis. Rich, Murphy and Jones were waiting for me, and there was an ambulance I didn't need. But I had to go to the Navy hospital, willy-nilly, where they looked me over -- Ihad nothing worse than this one rib -- and told me to return inthe morning for X rays. For a man who had been through a supersonic bailout, an unheard-of thing, I was in good shape. For instance, I might have frozen to death, floating so long in subzero temperatures at high altitude. Luckily, the slipstream hadn't torn off my shoes or gloves, and I was wearing my uniform under the flight suit. Only my ears were slightly frost-bitten.
After X rays the next day, I was flown back to Corpus Christi. I came stumbling off the transport plane, and there were all these people waiting -- my wife with our small boys, Raymond and Michael, and a dozen of my best friends, Aslund and Crow, and my boss, Capt. H.J. Dyson, Chief of Staff of Naval Advanced Air Training -- a very happy reunion. But my wife had tears in her eyes, and later on she said to me, "I'm never going to worry again. The Lord is saving you for something; you better start listening to find out what it is."
The doctors at Corpus re-examined me. This time there was much emphasis on eyes and lungs, and I remember a psychologist dropping in, sitting around and popping little questions at me to get my mental attitude. They couldn't find any reason to ground me. Yet it was six days before I could resume flying; I was swamped with paperwork.
Regulations said I had to write a formal accident report at once. I owed the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington a report on my physical condition, with long words in it like "metatarsal," which our flight surgeon stuck in for me. Then, the safety experts wanted a special report, written in great length. And I had a phone call from the Naval Air Material Center in Philadelphia. In tests of escape procedures, they'd been firing dummies through plastic-glass canopies, and most of them couldn't take it. Would I come east and talk over any ideas I might have?
I did visit NAMC, and, on seeing the dummies, suggested that they be made more flexible, so they'd squash down a little, as I had when the ejection seat walloped me, and go out with legs streamlining naturally after the torso. Perhaps I had the answer. But the big question was: Why had my F9F-6 gone out of control in the first place? Was this an isolated case? Or was there a basic defect in the Cougar design, some hidden fault that would cause many more accidents?
We had the verdict very quickly. Cougars in general were safe, but I'd been unlucky enough to get one with a malfunction in the flying tail. Power for the up or down tilting is supplied by hydraulic pressure. In my plane, a very slow leak in a valve permitted a gradual build-up of pressure on the nose-down side of the system. The mechanism, plucked from the wreckage, was found locked in full nose-down position.
The facts being known, a Navy order grounding all F9F-6's was lifted, on condition that they be flown with the stabilizer rigid, until Grumman could make a permanent fix. For a while, we had to pull a little harder on the stick and we couldn't turn as tightly at high altitude. Grumman promptly began installing a manual control in all F9F-6's, so you can shut off all hydraulic pressure on the stabilizer in an emergency.
I ordered another F9F-6, before the fix was made, and the Blue Angels continued practice using the five others. We were doubtful of the swept wing, at first, because sweeping is apt to hurt the precise control you get with a straight wing. And you'd better be precise, doing barrel rolls in tight formation at low altitude. However, the wing gave us no trouble at all. It's a fine airplane; in a way, you might say it saved my life.
That emergency handle -- the one that let me escape -- existed at the time on only a few other aircraft. It was there because some of us wrote back from Korea and asked for it, suspecting that at least one of our friends died because he couldn't eject himself. Grumman pioneered the device in the F9F-6; and my experience has prompted the Bureau of Aeronautics to order it put in all previous F9F's in the field.
That's the story.
The way I've told it caused my wife to say, "You talk about an airplane as if it were a human being."
I said, "Well, I love to fly; that's the way I feel."
She said, "You might feel that way, but other people don't."
It sounded a little jealous, and if she believed I thought as much of my airplane as I do of her. Well, I don't, and I told her so, before it came to me that she mght be kidding to hear what I'd say. And then we were laughing.
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