Every set of weary eyes in the Langley Ops Center followed the odd aerial procession through two border crossings and an aerial refueling. It was nearly an hour later, following an uneventful traverse of Yemeni airspace, that Ruger 22’s flight lead made her last transmission of the night.
“Feet wet, we’re handing off and heading home.”
“Feet wet” conveyed that they had crossed the coastline and were headed out to sea. From there a pair of FA-18 Hornets, launched from the carrier Stennis in the Arabian Sea, took over the job of babysitting the pilotless MD-10. Within the hour, the Hornets also refueled as the gaggle headed south, passing the Horn of Africa and skimming uncomfortably close to the tip of Somalia. Six hundred and twenty nautical miles later, halfway to the Seychelles Islands, the end played out.
The Hornet pilots gave a running commentary as the MD-10’s port and starboard engines flamed out almost simultaneously. The aircraft slowed as the autopilot tried to maintain altitude despite the loss of thrust. The number-two engine, mounted high on the tail, and thus having longer fuel lines drawing from the starved main tanks, ceased combustion one minute later. The autopilot did its best, but on reaching minimum speed gave up trying to hold altitude, reverting to a controlled descent.
No sooner had the new aerodynamic trim been set when, with the engine generators no longer supplying electrical power, the autopilot succumbed to a bus transfer and disconnected. At that point, CB68H was little more than a three-hundred-thousand-pound falling leaf. Her final downward glide took less than a minute. She hit the Indian Ocean at 02:58 UTC, bounced once in the gathering dawn, and cartwheeled in a massive splash that was recorded by the gun cameras of both Hornets. The old workhorse airframe—which had been rusting away in the Amazon only days earlier, and with two neat new holes in its forward windscreen—sank quickly in what would eventually be charted as 13,810 feet of water.
The Night Over Ghawar, as it would come to be known in Langley’s internal after-action report, had reached its inglorious end.