A “water landing.” A mandatory part of the senior flight attendant’s safety briefing to airline passengers on every over-water flight is a cheerful explanation of the braced, head-down posture they should assume in the event of what is glibly described as a “water landing.” The phrase is a marketing euphemism for a controlled crash into the water. Only seaplanes make water landings. Land planes ditch.1
Jerry Grigsby would set up AF 586’s ditching as a flat, straight-in descent into the water. His goal was to put his aircraft down, wings level and slightly nose high, flying as slowly as possible without risking a stall and with a minimum rate of descent. As difficult as this would be under the circumstances, it was the easy part—just basic airmanship under extreme conditions. The hard part was a key decision, the wind versus the waves. On which heading should he fly PD-2 into the water? A misjudgment could quickly kill them all. The even more difficult decision was when, when to give up trying to reach land and to put AF 586 down?
During those last forty minutes, while AF 586 ran out of alternatives to ditching, Grigsby would have been trying to pick the primary swell system, the biggest and most powerful rollers running across the sea beneath them, out of the confused chop on the surface. The P-3’s navigation system could give him the wind’s direction and speed down to the degree and knot, but Grigsby would have to analyze the surface the old-fashioned way, by seaman’s eye. The lower the aircraft got, the harder it became to pick out the underlying, high-energy wave system from local disturbances and surface chop.
Ditching procedures are described in Section V, Part 1 (“Emergency Procedures—General”) of the P-3 flight manual. The manual makes the consequences of a bad decision by the patrol plane commander very clear. “Except in extremely high wind conditions,” the text says, “the aircraft should be ditched parallel to the primary swell system. Model tests and actual ditchings of various aircraft indicate that ditching into the wall of seawater created by a major swell is roughly analogous to flying into a mountain. Accordingly, a careful evaluation of sea condition is essential to successful ditching.”
Jerry Grigsby’s experience as a Marlin seaplane pilot, worth little to anyone since before he left Patrol Squadron 50, suddenly seemed priceless.
Finding of Fact. At time of actual ditch, personnel aboard the aircraft were in the following ditching stations:
Station 1—Lieutenant Commander Grigsby (pilot)
Station 2—Lieutenant Caylor (copilot)
Station 3—Petty Officer Flow (flight engineer)
Station 4—Lieutenant (junior grade) Gibbons (Tacco)
Station 5—Lieutenant (junior grade) Forshay (NAV/COMM)
Station 6—Airman Garcia (Radar)
Station 7—Petty Officer Brooner (SS1)
Station 8—Airman Rodriguez (SS2)
Station 9—Airman Reynolds (Ord)
Station 10—Petty Officer Moore (IFT)
Station 13—Master Chief Shepard
Station 15—Ensign Wagner
Station 17—Petty Officer Hemmer
Station 21—Petty Officer Miller
Station 23—Lieutenant (junior grade) Ball
No other ditching stations were utilized. Ditching stations were not assigned according to NATOPS recommended priority.
The flight manual’s explicit “Priority of Ditching Station Assignment” is in a table by that name in Section V of the book. With fifteen aboard, it directs that the first twelve stations be filled first, then puts the remaining three into stations 21, 22, and 23. Stations 21 (where Miller ditched, and almost certainly died without ever leaving his seat) and 22 are side by side at the galley bench, facing the rear of the aircraft. Fortunately, Station 22 was left vacant. It is likely that any occupant of that seat, Ensign Wagner was the logical choice, would have died alongside Miller.
As he set up for the final descent, Grigsby invited Flow to leave Station 3, permitting the flight engineer, whose duties were completed once he toggled the cabin outflow valve controller to the closed position, to ditch somewhere in the presumed heightened safety of the tube, closer to the rafts and other emergency equipment.2 Flow declined, and remained where he was.
The Navy’s P-3 training and standardization program requires pilots to undergo an annual evaluation, examining the pilot’s knowledge of aircraft systems and procedures, and his airmanship. (All other crewmembers undergo an analogous annual evaluation.) The evaluation includes four parts: open and closed book exams, an oral examination, and a flight check in the aircraft.
Ditching is one of the flight check’s “critical” subareas, meaning that the pilot under examination must receive a grade of “qualified” in his demonstration of ditching technique to pass the check ride. To be qualified in ditching, the pilot must call for and complete his items on the eleven-step checklist, and be able to control airspeed within five knots and heading within ten degrees, and sustain a rate of descent less than three hundred feet per minute. Simulated water entry must be made flying straight ahead with wings level.
Grigsby did all that. He did it on 11 July, when he flew his annual check, and he did it to perfection on 26 October, when he put PD-2 down.
Finding of Fact. The configuration of the aircraft at time of ditch was as follows:
Landing Gear—Up
Wing Flaps—Approach
No. 1 Engine—Windmilling
Airspeed—120 Knots Indicated Airspeed
Rate of Descent—50 Feet per Minute
Heading—220° True (approximate—directly into the wind)
Shortly before the third fire warning, PD-2, flying at five hundred feet altitude, with visibility not more than several miles, must have unknowingly crossed Mys Sinyavin’s bow. The ship would have been off to port, too far away to be seen behind the low clouds and rain showers that filled the sky around the aircraft. In a few minutes, Rich Garcia would pick the trawler up behind them on his radar, by which time they had further opened the distance between them, but why he did not pick up the contact while PD-2 was approaching it is not clear. The answer probably lies in some combination of sea return clutter at low altitude, suboptimum performance by the forward radar set, and (perhaps) operator distraction.
Alfa Foxtrot 586’s ditching site
Until the third fire warning, Grigsby had been heading generally east, toward Shemya. The third fire warning went out by itself after a few seconds, just before Garcia reported a surface contact almost directly behind them and now sixteen miles away. Garcia’s news coupled to the blare of the horn must have solidified Grigsby’s resolve. With the prop surging noisily in reaction to every attitude and airspeed change, Grigsby would have rolled gently away from the dead engine, through a right-hand, 180-degree turn, and headed directly at the ship six to eight minutes flying time away. Halfway there—Ed Flow says closer, actually within sight of the ship—the fourth fire warning forced Grigsby to turn away, into the wind and parallel to the tall, rolling waves of the major swell system. They could fly no farther; now was the time.
Later, Grigsby’s seaplane experience in Patrol Squadron 50 would become the accepted explanation for his skillful touch in the final minutes of flight. In truth, there was nothing in that distant experience—his last flight piloting a seaplane was perhaps ten years in the past—that truly prepared him for this. With perfect recall, Grigsby might have remembered the P-5M flight manual’s short discussion of “Rough Sea Landing.” The two techniques for landing on a long, fast swell, illustrated by line drawings captioned with advice about when to hold the yoke back, when to “push the nose down with full force.” You could not do either one in a P-3 and survive. It is possible that he recollected its advice to “survey” the sea and swells, to “drag” the surface repeatedly on different headings, searching for the ideal place to land; the former was essential, the latter impossible. He might have also remembered the manual’s descriptions of the types of surface conditions; the encouraging information that the best landing areas may be found in the tranquil (and perhaps imaginary) place where swell systems are out of phase, and the troughs of one are filled by the swells of the other. “Wind chop waves always travel with the wind and the wave line is perpendicular to the wind line,” the Marlin flight manual explained. It continued:
The interval between [wind chop] waves is very short and their height and velocity is directly proportionate to the force of the wind and the time it has been blowing. . . .
In open sea there is seldom only one swell system. The direction of open sea swell is usually away from heavy storm areas or low atmospheric pressure areas. The interval between swells is very long and depends on the source of the swell and the distance the swell has traveled. Height and speed of the swell are independent of the wind . . .
As he stared out the window in front of him at the tempest churning the surface, he might have remembered, too, the manual’s recommendation that landing the Marlin, a seaplane, in seas more than four feet high—just four feet high—be limited to emergency conditions. The watery peaks in front of him were five, six, or perhaps seven times that big.
But all this counsel had to do with a plane designed to land in the water, to touch down between 75 and 88 knots (86–101 mph). The P-3 was an airliner; it had a cylindrical fuselage, designed for the repeated pressurization and depressurization cycles of scheduled commercial transport service. It lacked the stout ventral keel, the slab sides, the high wings, and the wingtip floats, everything that might have made a “water landing” survivable. Nothing in the Marlin’s flight manual spoke about putting a landplane down into the water in a state 7–8 sea.3
In the cockpit with two men next to him, and twelve others close behind, for the next minute or so Grigsby would be completely alone.
The squadron’s Aircraft Accident Report recorded conditions at the time of ditch as “1,500 foot ceiling. One and one-half to three miles visibility in rain showers, wave height 12–20 feet, winds 223 degrees at 43 knots.” At 120 knots indicated airspeed into a 43-knot head wind, Grigsby’s aircraft would hit the water at a ground speed of 77 knots, about 89 mph. A fifty-foot-per-minute rate of descent would have produced a barely perceptible “squeaker” on a normal landing. Perfect.
In fact, PD-2’s airspeed on final approach might have been much slower. Even before the first fire warning, Grigsby and Caylor had talked about ditching speed. They wanted to go in at the slowest speed possible, and agreed that, wings level, a few knots below stall would be about right. It was a tradeoff: Grigsby would give up his safety margin on final approach in exchange for lower impact forces on splashdown.4 At current weight, it would take 800–1,000 shaft horsepower on each good engine to keep PD-2’s nose high and its rate of descent low, as Grigsby took the aircraft downhill for the last time.
Sinyavin, plodding resolutely down track on the same heading since it had left the Bering, never saw anything.
Finding of Fact. The aircraft impacted three distinct times, coming to rest on the final impact. It immediately started to fill with water. The three crewmembers in the cockpit exited the aircraft through the flight station overhead hatch. The three crewmembers who ditched aft, Lieutenant (junior grade) Ball, Petty Officer Moore and Airman Reynolds, exited through the port overwing hatch. The remaining crewmembers, except for Petty Officer Miller, exited through the starboard overwing hatch. Petty Officer Miller was not observed to exit the aircraft.
Everyone aboard remembered the instant that AF 586 stopped flying. Years later, salty Garland Shepard casually likened it to a “bad P-5 landing,” but it must have been much worse.
The consensus was that there were two bounces, although Ed Caylor, Bruce Forshay, and Ed Flow were among members of the crew who recall three. The first, relatively gentle, must have been a carom off the crest of a swell still at flying speed, the way a flat stone hitting the water at just the right angle will skip off the surface of a pond and continue in flight.
Alone in one of two side-by-side ditching stations, boxed in between electronics compartments fore and aft, and across the aisle from the blank face of the main electrical load center, Wagner had little idea of what was happening after he left the cockpit for the last time. Sitting in the plane of the props, he could not hear Gibbons or Forshay on the radios and had to crane his neck to see Rich Garcia at the radarscope. No one else was visible. The first bounce told him everything. The moment of that glancing contact is when John Wagner realized that their flight was over.
The next, or perhaps third, impact was much harder as the aircraft hit tail first and then decelerated to a sudden stop, dragged to a halt by further contact with the water. John Ball said it felt like being hit by an uncontrollable force or power. Dave Reynolds’s recollection was more apocalyptic: a severe impact, a bright orange fireball on the starboard side (probably as the wing tore away, carrying both hot engines past Reynolds’s window), and a momentary, furnace blast of heat. At first Reynolds thought he was dead. Matt Gibbons remembered it in less hellish and more earthly terms, as similar to riding an amusement park flume ride.
The flume ride metaphor for a P-3 ditching, a jarring deceleration amid a huge cloud of spray and splashing water, must be especially apt because it was used again seventeen years later. Lt. Jeff Harrison, the Patrol Squadron 47 plane commander who ditched Buno. 158217 just offshore the Royal Air Force base at Masirah, Oman, in March 1995 described his experience as “similar to a log ride at an amusement park, but with more of a kick in the pants.”
AF 586 was now down. Launching the three rafts and getting out of the aircraft quickly had just become the most important thing in every crewmember’s life. Everyone aboard would now have to move amidships, where the life rafts were stowed, and execute survival procedures they had practiced before, but never performed. The three from the cockpit would get there by running down the wet, arched top of the fuselage. The twelve inside the tube would make their way forward or aft along the aisle, toward the escape hatches over the wings.
In one hour Crew 6 had gone from limping to Shemya to going down in a storm at sea. For the men in the cabin, even in extremis PD-2 had been a familiar place, dry, lit, heated, and, thanks largely to Gibbon’s remarkable sangfroid, orderly. Each one would soon take a step, literally a single step, and find himself in a watery, near-frozen bedlam with his life at risk. All the survivors would be surprised by how fast PD-2 took on water and sank.
After he declined Jerry Grigsby’s invitation to occupy another ditching station, as the aircraft descended through one hundred feet Ed Flow dropped his seat down and full aft prior to impact, positioning it away from the center pedestal and nearly under the overhead escape hatch, and locked his shoulder harness while he started to recite the Lord’s Prayer to himself. Trussed up in this protected position, for the first time during the flight he could no longer see the water. Flow does not remember getting out of the seat, opening the hatch (as prescribed by the flight manual), and pulling himself to the top of the fuselage, but he does remember the cold rush of wind that blew past him on its way out the hatch as soon as it dropped open. He still wonders if the aircraft would have floated longer had he left the overhead hatch closed, trapping the air inside the fuselage and forcing the three of them out the midships hatches.
Ed Caylor was dazed by the impact, perhaps even knocked unconscious for seconds. When he came to in the cockpit and reached down to release his lap belt and shoulder harness buckle, he was shocked to find his hands underwater, and more water pouring in around the floorboards under his boots. He went out the hatch right behind Flow, a step or two ahead of Grigsby. Caylor estimated that the three of them were out of the cockpit in less than one minute.
The aircraft must have been sinking nose down, because at about the same time, when Matt Gibbons yelled, “Let’s go,” at the injured Bruce Forshay and pulled him out of his seat, there was a foot or two of water in the aisle.5 John Wagner, buckled in at Station 15 a few feet behind Gibbons, between smoking and sparking electronics cabinets, said two feet of water rushed into the aircraft immediately after impact. When John Ball came to and got out of his seat at Station 23 (the farthest aft in the aircraft), he was in water that was already past his knees and rising.
Just forward of Ball but on the opposite side of the aircraft, Howard Moore unbuckled his harness, rose, and turned (Station 10 faces aft for ditching). He could see nothing ahead of him but the glitter of small electrical fires in the smoky, dark cabin of the aircraft. All the battery-operated emergency lights had unaccountably gone out on impact. Unable to see, Moore ran headlong into the aircraft boarding ladder, still erect in its storage position directly across from the main cabin door, and then disentangled himself. He arrived just behind Rodriguez at the port escape hatch, with others forming a line across the aisle at the starboard hatch.
Rodriguez, who had ditched in his seat at the Sensor Station Two operator’s position, was responsible for jettisoning the port side emergency hatch and launching the no. 1 raft. Moore remembers that Rodriguez opened the port hatch and immediately went out after it.6 After fumbling ineffectually himself with the clips to release the no. 1 raft while the water rose, Moore recalls that he then gave up and followed Rodriguez’s lead out the hatch, onto the wing and into the water, ahead of Reynolds and Ball.
The actual sequence of events at the port overwing escape hatch in the minute after forward motion stopped was somewhat different, as substantiated by Dave Reynolds’s statement on 8 November and Matt Gibbons’s recollections since. Reynolds remembered Moore jettisoning the hatch while Rodriguez attempted unsuccessfully to launch the no. 1 raft, even as the water rose rapidly above it while the fuselage filled. With the cabin half-flooded and the raft still stowed firmly in place, Rodriguez would have been compelled to duck down, fully submerging his helmeted head in the dark water to continue fumbling with the reluctant release catch. Before Rodriguez gave up trying, Gibbons grabbed him by the back of his life vest, pulled him across the aisle and shoved him out the starboard side hatch ahead of Bruce Forshay. This switch explains Rodriguez’s presence in the Mark-7 with the other two sensor operators.
Reynolds’s Station 9 faced aft, too, directly at the forward bulkhead (wall) of the P-3’s head and across the aisle from Howard Moore’s seat. When he came to after impact, the bulkhead of the head compartment was lying on top of him, pinned in place by the heavy backpack parachute stowed at its top and by the loose galley equipment that had been secured in the head. He wrestled himself free, following Moore up the aisle through the water flooding into the aircraft, and then dropped past his knees into the open well of the hydraulic service center. Its hatch had failed on impact, opening a mantrap into the small below-deck compartment that housed the hydraulic systems’ pumps and reservoirs. Hauling himself out of the hole, Reynolds, minus the emergency water bottle and first aid kit that were Station 9’s responsibility, waded another few steps forward and then escaped the aircraft out the port side behind Moore, urging Moore out the hatch ahead of him.
By the time Ball freed himself, first from the galley table that had collapsed around him and then from a large crack in the floorboards that had opened up aft of the main cabin door and momentarily trapped one of his feet, the tops of the escape hatches were already underwater. Ball, who had yelled to Miller before he started moving and got no answer, was now breasting chest-high water that was rising fast, head and shoulders in the big bubble of air momentarily trapped in the top half of the cabin but flowing swiftly out of the open overhead hatch in the cockpit. He thought that he was the last one still inside the aircraft, and he probably was the last one alive. A lucky roll exposed the top of the port hatch, and he swam to it and out, following Moore and Reynolds into the cold water. When Ball popped up alongside the sinking aircraft, its cabin was probably completely full of water.
AF 586 was now down to a maximum of two rafts, capacity nineteen men according to Navy specifications. If both were launched, they would be adequate for the fifteen men on the aircraft. Things had gone better on the starboard side, where everyone else from the tube had congregated, although the problem was the same. The raft tie-downs proved very difficult to release.
Finding of Fact. The Mark-7 and Mark-12 life rafts, located on the starboard side of the aircraft, were launched by Airman Garcia and Lieutenant (junior grade) Gibbons. The Mark-7 life raft located on the port side of the aircraft was not launched because of difficulty encountered releasing its retaining straps and rapidly rising water.
Gibbons and Forshay were seated across one of the two fault lines in the aircraft after impact. (The other was at the galley.) The impact at water entry cocked the nose of the aircraft over to port, popping out both officers’ observation windows and opening up a large hole in the fuselage at the navigator’s station, through which pieces of the shattered nav table and all the gear stowed inside it now washed out into the ocean. Bruce Forshay’s flight jacket went with it, flushed off the back of his chair by a wave. Surrounded by small bits of floating debris, he submarined under his lap belt, back and right side wrenched or possibly battered by a collision with something unknown.
Across the aisle, Matt Gibbons was uninjured, despite the fact that his tactical display had imploded noisily, sucking glass shards from the shattered screen into what had been the vacuum in the interior of the big tube. Gibbons stepped across the aisle, yelling, “Let’s go.” He slapped Forshay’s lap belt open and pulled the other man up from his seat to join the distressed procession midships—Brooner, Garcia, Shepard, and Wagner, not in that order—heading through the smoke and the dark, past the “shambles” (Gibbons’s description) at the aircraft’s main electrical load center, to the overwing escape hatches. They would all cluster at the starboard side, even Gibbons, whose station assignment put him in the no. 1 raft with the plane commander.
Hemmer fell into line ahead of order. On impact he had been thrown out of Station 17, which he later described as “completely destroyed,” and directly across the aisle into the sonobuoy storage area next to the starboard side hatch. He got up, remarkably uninjured, and went through the hatch, now completely covered with water, in the middle of the line.
The faint light of an overcast, gray afternoon filtering through a few small windows (or through where windows had been) and caught in dense smoke was all the illumination the crew had. As PD-2 settled into the water, the cabin became progressively darker.
Finding of Fact. The emergency lighting in the aircraft, which had been turned on prior to ditch, failed and the aircraft was completely dark.
Ed Caylor glanced quickly down the length of the cabin as he stepped out of the water and onto a circuit breaker panel pedestal, heading out the overhead hatch. The tube was dark and full of smoke, and the groans of metal flexing and breaking carried forward to him from out of the shadows beyond the cockpit. He would flash back to these sounds and images of drowning machinery years later, when he saw the artfully staged scenes of RMS Titanic’s last hours on the movie screen.
Battery-operated exit lights beside the emergency exits had been turned on as part of the crew’s preparations for ditching, a precaution in case the g-switches that should automatically illuminate the lights on impact did not work. The reverse happened. All of the lights went out, perhaps knocked free from their retaining clips next to the hatches by the impact.
This failure provoked Recommendation No. 6 in the JAG investigation, that “Naval Air Systems Command evaluate the emergency exit lights aboard the P-3 aircraft for reliability and examine the retention capability of the emergency exit light holder.” The wing commander passed this recommendation up the chain of command with the unassailable and somewhat vacuous observation that there was a “critical need for emergency equipment to function as designed when needed.” His superior, rather more forthrightly, called for “a more reliable internal aircraft emergency lighting system.”
So it must have been a surprise to many when the commander of the Naval Air Systems Command the following July informed everyone that a contractor investigation (presumably by the lights’ manufacturer) “has shown that the emergency exit light holders are adequate to withstand ditching loads. The lights are designed to come on during ditching loads, and have an expected life of 30–40 minutes.” He did not comment on the fact that none of this had worked that way on 26 October, the year before.
Finding of Fact. The aircraft sustained the following exterior damage as a result of the ditch:
The starboard wing was torn from the aircraft at the fuselage.
The aircraft had a large crack in the fuselage aft of the main cabin door.
The magnetic anomaly detector boom had broken off at impact and was floating near the aircraft.
Despite Grigsby’s extraordinary airmanship, the laws of physics still governed what was happening west of Shemya. Force still equaled mass times acceleration, and PD-2 hit the water at around sixty to seventy knots or more and weighing approximately fifty-two to fifty-three tons. The resulting impact was enormous and battered the aircraft powerfully, immediately wreaking major structural damage and speeding its sinking.
Adrenaline seems to have distorted everyone aboard’s sense of the passage of time, creating in each man’s mind the illusion that he was moving with unnatural, almost superhuman, speed through a very slowly unfolding disaster. Crew estimates of the length of time PD-2 remained afloat, however, do not show this same attenuating effect. By all accounts, PD-2 went down very quickly. Ed Caylor thought it might have been only one minute after impact before the tube completely filled with water and just ninety seconds altogether before the tip of the vertical stabilizer disappeared under the surface. Bruce Forshay agreed, ninety seconds until PD-2 was gone. The consensus in the Mark-7, however, reached after a quick muster to find out who was aboard, was two minutes. The longest estimate was three to four minutes. PD-2 hit the water and sank, and very quickly there was nothing on the surface to mark where it had gone down other than the rafts. Almost nothing.
Hours later, while orbiting overhead the rafts, crewmembers in XF 675 thought that they observed AF 586’s crash position locator floating in the water. (The device is a small, floating airfoil containing a radio beacon set to 243.0 megahertz, the UHF distress frequency. It is designed to fall away from the aircraft automatically on high-impact shock and to immediately transmit an emergency signal.) Possibly they did see it. At 4:15, still half an hour away and miles from the ditching site, they had heard an emergency beeper on 243.0, but the source could have been one of the PRT-5 beacons, too.
Days later, delayed by the weather, the Coast Guard cutter Jarvis finally got to the scene, too late to do anyone any good. It did, however, steam past what some believed was the pen-shaped magnetic anomaly detector boom housing floating in the water. That is what it looked like in the grainy photos the crew took. The weather was too bad to attempt a pick-up of the flotsam, however, so whatever it was, it was allowed to float away. Gibbons’s empty Mark-12 raft was still afloat, too. Nothing else was visible. PD-2 had vanished into the sea.
Finding of Fact. The aircraft sustained the following significant interior damage as a result of the ditch:
Copilot’s flight instrument panel came loose and hit copilot’s legs.
Floor panels beneath copilot’s chair started to come loose.
Tacco station window imploded.
Nav/Comm station navigation worktable disintegrated and struck Lieutenant (junior grade) Forshay on the right side.
A section of the aircraft, including the Nav/Comm window, approximately two foot by four foot, exploded on impact, leaving a large hole in the starboard side of the fuselage.
Ditching Station 17 broke loose from its mounts.
The forward bulkhead of the lavatory broke loose at impact and hit Airman Reynolds.
The Hydraulic Service Center door broke loose or popped open, allowing water to enter the aircraft at a rapid rate.
The aircraft cracked aft of the main cabin door and forward of Ditching Stations 9 and 10. The crack resulted in a 4–5 inch gap in the deck of the aircraft.
The bench seat opposite (aft) of Ditching Station 23 broke loose and canted forward toward Ditching Station 23.
Remarkably, all eight cockpit windows remained in place. Had they, the three front windows especially, failed, it is likely that Grigsby, Caylor, and Flow would have quickly drowned in their seats under a tidal wave of cold water.
In view of the destruction that occurred in the cabin, it is surprising that only Miller was killed and Forshay injured. Hemmer, Reynolds, and Ball could have quickly been victims of structural failure, killed on impact or trapped inside as the aircraft went down.
Finding of Fact. The channel 15 emergency sonobuoy was not removed from the aircraft because of difficulty releasing its retaining straps and rapidly rising water.
Crouching amid the cluster of bodies at the starboard escape hatch, the injured Bruce Forshay could not release the restraining straps that held the emergency sonobuoy securely in place next to the no. 3 raft, on the forward end of the storage rack that held buoy reloads. Even during crew emergency drills under ideal conditions, the clips and nylon webbing could stick and tangle, defeating attempts to release survival equipment. Forshay was defeated by them now, as Rodriguez, Moore, and Wagner had been. By the time Bruce gave up the struggle, water was already covering the hatch. He stepped through it and popped up to the surface, lifted there by the air trapped in his anti-exposure suit.
The AN/SSQ-83 emergency buoy that Forshay had just reluctantly abandoned was little more than a microphone attached to a battery-operated VHF radio transmitter sealed into a watertight canister. When the sonobuoy sank with PD-2, the survivors’ only ability to talk to an aircraft overhead went down with it.7
The choice of this particular type of buoy for this purpose was deliberate. Q-83s had the longest life in the water of any buoys in the Navy’s inventory at the time, up to sixty hours of continuous transmission. Once in the water, when its saltwater battery was activated and energized the buoy’s radio transmitter, the emergency buoy could serve two purposes.
It could act as a locator beacon. An “on top position indicator” in the cockpit would then point the way to the buoy. As Gibbons reminded Elmendorf several times (“U.H.F. D.F. three four five decimal five”), aircraft with no OTPI and only a UHF direction finding capability could find a channel 15 buoy on 345.5 megahertz.
For raft-to-aircraft communications. A floating microphone on a twenty-foot cord was attached to one end of the buoy. A downed aviator could speak into the mike and be heard on the receiver overhead. All P-3 SAR crews knew to tune their sonobuoy receivers to channel 15, 172.75 megahertz in the VHF band, in a rescue area.
In 1978, the same type of clips and nylon webbing lashed the buoy in place that held the rafts upright and in position, and Forshay could not get it free.
Finding of Fact. Airman Garcia inflated the starboard Mark-7 life raft. Lieutenant (junior grade) Gibbons swam after and inflated the Mark-12 life raft, which had rapidly begun to drift away from the aircraft when its tether either was cut or broke.
The Mark-12 got pushed out the hatch successfully, but its painter, sixty feet of 50–150 pound test line meant to keep the raft tied close to the aircraft during boarding, immediately parted and the raft started to float away. Gibbons swam after it, punching through a wave “as big as a house” to catch up with the raft and hanging on to slow its drifting until other crew members could join him.
If the crew were evenly distributed among them, two Mark-7 rafts would have been sufficient for fourteen men, and the loss of the Mark-12 would not necessarily have been a disaster. But the no. 1 Mark-7 wasn’t available; it had already been abandoned and was going down with PD-2, still lashed firmly in its place. And so Gibbons’s quick reaction to capture the Mark-12 saved several lives—likely those of Moore, Reynolds, and Ball—who would soon appear swimming one after the other around the tail of the aircraft in open water with nothing but their LPA life vests to support them and QD-1s to protect them.
Grigsby’s tragic experience to come was a forecast of what almost certainly faced these three men, if they did not quickly make it into the relatively benign environment of a raft. Immobility, unconsciousness, and a mercifully quick death. Instead, all three of them would join Gibbons in the Mark-12, and live.
But Gibbon’s recovery of the Mark-12 saved others, too. Had he been forced to join the nine in the remaining Mark-7, adding his five-foot-ten-inch, 177-pound bulk to its load, that leaking, terribly overloaded raft would have gone from providing marginal support to the men aboard to practically none at all. In this case it is doubtful that even one man would have survived the twelve hours between ditching and rescue.
Finding of Fact. Lieutenant (junior grade) Ball, Petty Officer Third Class Moore and Airman Reynolds, all of whom exited the port side of the aircraft and swam around the tail area, boarded the Mark-12 life raft with Lieutenant (junior grade) Gibbons.
Just before impact, Dave Reynolds leaned across the open center aisle toward Howard Moore and confidently promised, “We’ll party when this is over.” He was right. They would both survive to be guests at a three day reunion and party five months later in Fairbanks, joined there by the Air Force crew that would soon be circling overhead. Reynolds’s and Moore’s private celebration of life, however, got displaced and forgotten in the press of other events.8
When PD-2 jerked to a stop on its third bounce, more than fifty tons coming from nearly eighty knots to zero in the space of a football field, Moore released his safety harness, stood, spun around to face the nose, and quickly headed for the port side overwing escape hatch. He would go through that hatch, and step off the wing into the sea, despite the fact that there was no raft to receive him, and nothing in sight but the partly submerged wing, with its nacelles torn off, and huge rolling breakers out to the horizon. Reynolds was behind him pushing, Ball was still farther back. Their rush out the hatch was less a leap of faith than it seemed. To hesitate aboard PD-2 meant certain drowning, whereas the QD-1s and inflated lobes and collars of the LPAs provided some reassurance that they would have a chance to find a raft and enter it.
Petty Officer Miller never made it out of the aircraft and almost certainly not even out of his seat. He might have been killed where he sat by the breakup of the aft fuselage on impact, or he might have been injured and unable to extract himself from Station 21 as the plane went down. In either case, the end was very quick.
Finding of Fact. Lieutenant Caylor, Lieutenant (junior grade) Forshay, Ensign Wagner, Petty Officer Flow, Petty Officer Brooner, Airman Garcia, Airman Rodriguez, Master Chief Shepard and Petty Officer Hemmer boarded the Mark-7 life raft.
Rich Garcia arrived first at the starboard overwing hatch. He had already removed it by the time his crewmates began joining him in the tight, open space between the electrical load center and the sonobuoy storage rack that gave access to the emergency hatch.
Garcia quickly pushed the raft out and launched it. Meanwhile, John Wagner groped unsuccessfully for the fresh water bottle he knew was stowed on the deck, but he could not see or feel it in the flood of seawater pouring through the hatch and up through the floor. When Wagner gave up, the water in the cabin was already above the top of the hatch, and he had to dive down to get out, surfacing through a puddle of jet fuel. Once on the surface, he immediately threw up the apple he had bolted down during the last minutes of flight and then swam for the Mark-7, perhaps twenty feet away.
Garcia and Wagner were among the first, possibly the first two, to get into the Mark-7 raft and then turn to help others board. Like PO Gary Hemmer, Master Chief Garland Shepard went into the water, chose the closest raft and swam to it.9 The two would sit next to each other near one end of the raft, with Shepard working diligently through the night to keep Hemmer alert and alive. Ed Flow probably arrived at about the same time, and he was helped aboard by the others already there.
Ed Caylor, behind Flow out the hatch, immediately slid the few feet into the water from the top of the fuselage and started a quick, scooping backstroke away from the sinking plane fearful that its suction might pull him under. (He thought the water would be very cold and was surprised at first by how warm it felt, until the adrenaline wore off.) Caylor stopped swimming only long enough to raise his middle finger at PD-2, a wordless gesture of frustration and anger at the airplane that had let them down.
Ed then noticed the Mark-7 behind his left shoulder, and began to swim toward it, still sculling on his back. He clambered aboard between Jim Brooner and John Wagner, but would soon slide over to make room for the navigator. Bruce Forshay was last to arrive at the Mark-7; he was the ninth to get in, crawling aboard between Ed Caylor and John Wagner. Wagner had watched him swim up, and noted that he seemed injured and was not swimming well.
Rodriguez must have arrived at the Mark-7 sometime before Forshay, but no one remembers when.
Finding of Fact. With the exception of Lieutenant (junior grade) Forshay, all personnel who boarded the life rafts were free of serious, physical injury. Lieutenant (junior grade) Forshay suffered a severe bruise of the right side of his back and upper right leg.
Afloat in the water behind the short stub of the starboard wing root, Bruce Forshay had a near perfect view of the length of the aircraft. He could see from the hole torn out of the skin at what had been his nav station forward, aft to a crack in the vertical stabilizer that presumably was responsible for the canted tail.
Once in the water, Forshay first swam for the Mark-7, saw that it was overloaded, and then made for the Mark-12. In his words, he “made absolutely no headway” toward it, so thinking quickly he turned again toward the Mark-7, where Caylor and Wagner helped pull him aboard between them. That quick decision saved his life. At the time, he knew there was something wrong with his back, but it did not bother him much.
Finding of Fact. Lieutenant Commander Grigsby, who was the last person to enter the water, did not board either life raft.
There is something vaguely Lincolnesque about the thin, full-bearded figure with a prominent nose staring out of the photograph in the First Baptist Church of San José’s memorial program. The pose, before an unidentified waterfront, is slightly awkward. Both feet are pointed to the right, into the wind that pushes his trouser legs back against his shins. Grigsby’s torso is turned 45 degrees, half toward the viewer, shoulders hunched. He is clasping a camera, waist-high, in what appear to be very large hands.
In the photo, Grigsby is in tropical white uniform, with that uniform’s open collar, short sleeved-shirt, and black shoulder boards. It is possible that the picture was taken in Adak during the summer of 1978—there are no trees in sight and the estuary behind him could be one of many places on the island—possible but very improbable. Wearing tropical whites, the familiar, all-white “Good Humor man’s uniform,” would be unusual in Adak even in midsummer. More likely, the photo was taken sometime during the squadron’s 1977 deployment to Okinawa, perhaps on Diego Garcia or the Cocos Islands during detachment operations in the Indian Ocean. The beard is unusual, too.10 The vast majority of navy officers was clean-shaven then (and now). Facial hair was uncommon, restricted almost exclusively to an occasional carefully trimmed moustache, like Gibbons’s or Wagner’s.
Grigsby was last out of the cockpit. He went out through the overhead hatch behind Flow and Caylor, but apparently hesitated before going into the water. The two others did not. Grigsby responded to Caylor’s shouted “Great job, Mr. Grigsby” from the water with a blank look. He probably did not hear it, but the accolade was well deserved. Grigsby had put them down perfectly.
Lieutenant (jg) Ball, who had followed Moore and Reynolds out of the port overwing hatch and along the fuselage, saw Grigsby on his hands and knees atop the fuselage, “looking as if he were counting heads,” while Ball floated past the tail of the aircraft. Well clear of the tail, Ball just managed to intercept the drifting Mark-12, and was helped aboard by Airman Reynolds.
Ensign Wagner saw Grigsby atop the aircraft, too. He thought that Grigsby was in good shape and surveying the situation. If Grigsby were, in fact, surveying the situation, the sight in front of him would have appeared nightmarish. The aircraft he had been flying seconds before was now nose-down in the water, with its starboard wing gone. The nacelles on the port side were gone, too. Their departure point was marked by tall “mushroom-shaped” steam clouds rising abruptly into the sky about three-quarters of a mile beyond the tail, formed as the hot engines plowed into cold water and instantly vaporized it. The vertical stabilizer was cocked to one side, marking where the fuselage had broken aft during the last impact. Brown smoke leaked into the sky from the break.
What was left of PD-2 was now floating in a heavy chop, rolled side to side by a huge swell system that rocked the aircraft every fifteen seconds or so, while smaller waves broke regularly against the nose. A shine on the water marked the temporary slicks of tons of floating jet fuel, ejected from shattered tanks in the wings. The jet fuel would temporarily blind and gag several of the crewmembers.
Two yellow rafts bobbed uncertainly near where the starboard wing should have been, with waves breaking over them every few seconds. Everything else he could see would have been in shades of gray. Visibility from where he stood, at not more than ten feet height-of-eye, would have been practically nothing in the trough of the swell and probably not much more than a mile or two at its crest.
On the other hand, Lieutenant Commander Grigsby might not have seen a nightmare at all. He was raised a Baptist. In college, he was president of the Baptist Youth Fellowship. After college, he met his future wife during services while on a church-sponsored mission to Seattle. As an adult, as he had been as a child, Jerry Grigsby was a committed and devout Christian.
Standing atop PD-2, precariously legs astride in between the snapped high-frequency radio antenna cables draped into the water, the aircraft now more than half-awash and sinking fast, Grigsby might not have seen a catastrophe. Two of the three rafts floated below and before him in the water. The men of his crew were either inside them or successfully scrambling aboard, their white hard hats clearly visible against dark life vests and the gray sea. In the confusion of the escape from the aircraft, it would have been impossible for Grigsby to count each man individually and easy for him to assume that with so many heads visible, they all had made it. Easy for him to believe, as he must have hoped, that, with God’s help, he had put AF 586 in the water so skillfully that they had all survived.
To Grigsby, the scene before him might not have looked like a disaster; it might have looked instead like a small miracle. And in a way, it was.
Gibbons, the first man to get in the Mark-12 raft with Ball, Reynolds, and Moore, watched Grigsby slide off the fuselage into the water, and begin to swim toward them. The inflated lobes of Grigsby’s LPA life vest would have impeded the action of his arms, forcing his stroke into a vertical, climbing action rather than pulling him horizontally toward the raft, now drifting away rapidly with the wind. During one moment in his swim for life, Jerry Grigsby actually floated over the Mark-12’s sea anchor, but, held on the surface by his life vest, he could not reach the anchor’s tether to haul himself in. An attempt to throw the anchor (a cloth bag on a line) to him failed also, the wind merely carried it away like a kite.
Grigsby got close enough to the Mark-12 that Reynolds, watching from inside the raft, saw “a look of pain on his face” before Grigsby belatedly turned for the Mark-7. When the Mark-12’s sea anchor drifted by out of reach, Grigsby turned in desperation toward the crowded Mark-7 raft, and began swimming toward it. Gibbons said he appeared to be uninjured and “swimming for his life.”
The interference of the LPA probably accounted for the “frantic stroke” that Lieutenant (jg) Forshay observed from the Mark-7, where he was wedged in between Lieutenant Caylor and Ensign Wagner. Petty Officer Flow, on the same raft, saw it differently. Ed Flow spotted Grigsby about thirty feet from their raft, but thought that Grigsby was not making any real attempt to reach the raft.
Finding of Fact. Due to high winds and strong currents, the rafts could not be maneuvered into a position to pick up Lieutenant Commander Grigsby, nor was anything available of sufficient length to throw to him. He was alive, conscious and able to swim upon entering the water.
Several survivors on the Mark-7—Hemmer said two; Caylor was one of them, Rodriguez was almost certainly the other—bravely entered the water, trying to kick the Mark-7 raft toward their plane commander. Others aboard paddled in his direction with their cupped hands, trying to propel the raft upwind, while the injured Forshay yelled steering instructions to the men in the water.
Ed Caylor and Randy Rodriguez spent five to ten minutes, by Ed’s estimate, back in the water after they had once boarded the Mark-7 raft, trying to move the raft toward Jerry Grigsby, who was bobbing helplessly. An effort to tow a small raft into the wind with seven men aboard would be a challenge in warm, calm waters. Under the conditions they faced, it was completely futile. The Mark-7 made no progress against the waves or wind. The two swimmers, exhausted and chilled to the marrow by the cold water, eventually had to be helped back into the raft by Bruce Forshay. The others soon, reluctantly, gave up their ineffectual paddling.
The distance between the raft and Grigsby steadily increased. Caylor lost sight of Grigsby at an estimated ninety feet away, both hands held above his head but otherwise not moving. Flow says he watched Grigsby out to several hundred feet from the raft, where he last saw him floating motionless in the water.
Petty Officer Hemmer later thought that the exhausting effort to save Grigsby had consumed as much as an hour, but it was almost certainly shorter than that; Ed Caylor guessed the total effort may have lasted six minutes. It is possible that as little as an hour or two after shooting the best landing approach of his life, Jerry Grigsby was dead.
The four survivors in the Mark-12, out of sight of the smaller raft behind the waves and showers of the late afternoon, assumed once Grigsby disappeared from view that their plane commander had made it safely into the Mark-7. Not until the two groups got together for the first time since the ditching in Sinyavin’s whaleboat early the next morning did the roster of survivors, missing and dead, become clear.
Finding of Fact. The aircraft sank within a maximum time of four minutes after impact. Some of the crew estimates were as short as 90 seconds.
Settled in the Mark-12, under water from his ribs down, Matt Gibbons decided that it would be four or five hours before Garcia’s radar surface contact would arrive at the rafts.
Pushed by the wind, the two rafts began to drift apart quickly even while PD-2 was still on the surface. At a few feet height-of-eye, the visual horizon would have been very close in the best of circumstances. Now, obscured by high seas, concealed by cold, horizontal rain and occasionally by fog, too, once the rafts spread several hundreds yards apart they were invisible to each other, even before night fell.
After PD-2 sank, the Mark-7 and -12 floated out of sight of each other, leaving behind what must have looked to the dazed men in each raft like an empty, boiling sea. Twelve hours later, the rafts would be two miles apart.
