There were two other aircraft parked on the ramp at Adak early Friday morning when CG 1500 finally taxied up, a P-3 from Moffett Field and John Powers’s C-130 from Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, just in on a one cushion bank shot off Shemya with Al Delgarbino’s spare crew in the cabin. Both crews, Powers’s and Delgarbino’s, would fly later in the day.
Jerry Grigsby had not been found, nor had Butch Miller, but there had been no deliberate daylight search yet for the last two men. Although an early Friday report by radio—Ed Caylor’s message, probably relayed by Maslov himself to CG 1500 soon after the survivors were brought aboard—from Mys Sinyavin in English said that the first was lost at sea and the second died in the aircraft, no one ashore was ready to accept that sad news as definitive so soon after the ditching. Perhaps it was because of uncertainties about the “third raft,” mentioned in some Navy reports and picked up by the Associated Press. Perhaps it was an unwillingness to grant the sea an uncontested victory over Grigsby and Miller, or at least not a victory so soon.
Friday morning, no one was ready to stop looking. SAR flights would continue; CGC Jarvis would keep steaming west, too, planning on a rendezvous with Sinyavin that would never happen. The base for the search would be Adak. Although more than an hour flight time farther away from the scene than Shemya, Adak had crosswind runways and its routine operations were less sensitive; moreover, it was a Navy facility with a TSC to manage crew succession on station and good P-3 maintenance support. Some Coast Guard C-130 aircraft parts were common with the P-3, engines and engine accessories for example, so Adak was a better site than Shemya for Coast Guard operations, too.
With the assets on hand and given the distance to the SAR coordinates from the Central Aleutians, however, Adak would need reinforcement to support anything like a sustained effort. Reflecting its small targets and weather on station, the Coast Guard’s computerized SAR search planning system was prescribing aerial searches with only a mile or two between parallel, “ladder” tracks, some inside investigation areas only five to six hundred miles square. Tight track spacing and small areas meant more aircraft and crews were essential. Adak’s on-top fuel requirement gave a P-3 only forty thousand pounds to burn (literally) before it had to be back overhead the airfield. The restriction meant that P-3s could remain on station in the SAR area not much more than four hours before climbing for home, unless they had certain access to Shemya’s fuel farm. In view of the weather, no plane commander could gamble on getting into Shemya.
The pace of the continuing search and rescue effort, however, was not set by geography or aircraft availability. It was fixed by the weather. The weather already had played a key role in the drama. It imperiled the success of the ditching, threatened the lives of the men in the rafts and extinguished three of them, locked the parajumpers aboard Rescue 804 and 805 (the two Air Force H-3 helicopters) out of the action entirely, complicated Sinyavin’s courageous small boat rescue of the ten, and delayed Jarvis’s arrival on station by forcing it through forty- and fifty-foot seas. Now in a small act of apparent mercy, it would open a window on Friday morning through which additional aircraft and crews could reinforce Adak. That forbearance would be short-lived. Early Friday afternoon, the weather window was to slam shut, effectively closing down the SAR operation entirely just twenty-four hours after it began.
Finding of Fact. Victor Bravo 760, a P-3 launched from Moffett Field, California, arrived in Naval Station Adak at 0259, October 27th, to bolster search and rescue aircraft assets.
Victor Bravo 760 was a Patrol Squadron 46 aircraft. Patrol Squadron 46, the “Gray Knights,” was a sister to Patrol Squadron 9, one of the five (four and two-thirds, really) squadrons present on a rolling basis at the home station all the time.
VB 760 left Moffett Field around 10:00 P.M. Thursday night, California time; slow for a Ready Alert launch but fast for anything else. It is likely that the wing’s operations officer elected to wait until the situation in the north became somewhat clearer before committing the first of what could easily be several more crews to the effort. The delay was not due to Third Fleet–Seventh Fleet politics, which occasionally ensnared the movement of operational forces between the eastern and western Pacific across an imaginary, midocean “chop” line, where operational control was “chopped,” passed, from one commander to the other. Adak belonged to the commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, just as Moffett Field did. As far as the fleet commander, a three star admiral on Pearl Harbor’s sleepy Ford Island, was concerned, moving aircraft and crews between the stations was just like shifting change from one pocket to another.
U.S. stations and bases in the North Pacific
VB 760 was in the air and on the way to Adak just a few hours after it was clear that there were survivors. Marked by the letters “RC” and a red-plumed armored knight’s helmet on the tail, this aircraft would have flown northwest on the same airway jet routes, generally along the great continental arc embracing the Gulf of Alaska, that had guided Jerry Grigsby to Adak days before.
As the just-arrived Patrol Squadron 46 aircrew left the flight line, the Adak detachment’s last crew was finishing its preflight inspection. They would launch within the half-hour. The officers from Moffett headed for the club, for a drink and to complain to each other about the winds and turbulence during the approach and landing. That is where John Powers from CG 1600 bumped into them an hour later, rekindling complaints about the weather on final approach. All of them wondered if Bill Porter was going to get in.
Held on the ground by crew rest requirements, the new crew from Moffett Field would not be ready to join the search until early that same evening.
Finding of Fact. Coast Guard 1600 landed at Adak for refueling after having to divert from Shemya because of weather.
Coast Guard 1600, with John Powers in the left seat, was planned to be the relief for 1500 on station, after which the U.S. Navy would presumably fill in until 1500 could be turned around or a third Coast Guard aircraft, CG 1602, was spliced into the rotation. But 1600’s failure to get into Shemya because of crosswinds meant that when Coast Guard 1500 left the SAR scene—heading all the way back to Adak, not to nearby Shemya—there would be no U.S. aircraft overhead the ditch site for an hour. Sinyavin would be alone until the arrival of Patrol Squadron 9’s next flight, manned by the Adak detachment’s fourth and last crew. Last, that is, until the Gray Knights finished crew rest and became eligible to fly.
In the meanwhile, Al Delgarbino’s crew, the “passengers” aboard CG 1600, was available to relieve the detachment’s last available SAR flight crew, which would soon take off as Delta Foxtrot 704. Delgarbino’s crew had not logged any time on the long flight from Kodiak, and that fact preserved the fiction that they were fully rested and ready to go to work.
Finding of Fact. At 0324, the second Patrol Squadron 9 Ready Alert aircraft, DF 704, took-off for the S.A.R. scene.
After XF 675, Pat Conway’s crew, took off, Mike Harris had emptied the offices and maintenance shops of the detachment to put together an alert crew to take the place of the one just launched. Harris, the squadron’s aircraft maintenance officer as well as the detachment’s current officer in charge, was scrambling to deal with the crisis. Lt. Anthony Guido and eight others were all he could find. Guido was right at hand. He was standing the detachment duty officer watch, with a new pilot in the squadron, Lt. John Branchflower, with him in the duty office under indoctrination.
Tony Guido had brought PD-2 to Adak from Moffett Field on Tuesday, 24 October, to replace PD-6. Five of the men in the water now had ridden up with him then. The twenty-fourth had been a long day for Guido and the crew. PD-2 was only minutes into its departure climb from Moffett Field Tuesday morning, barely beyond the San Francisco Bay and into airspace over Marin County, when it had to return to correct a now-forgotten problem. The second attempt was more successful, and the plane arrived at Adak just before midnight, after 10.5 hours of flight time. In the face of strong westerlies and forecast poor weather, Guido had stopped on the way at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, for more fuel and that had added some time to the trip.
Early Friday morning, less than 48 hours after delivering PD-2 to Adak, Guido was sent to look for it. PD-9, on this flight called DF 704, got away from Adak and sped west during another small, passing hole in the fog and rain, with Tony Guido in the left seat, Lt. John Branchflower in the right, and a made-up crew in the tube. Both of the pilots were 1974 classmates of Ed Caylor’s at Annapolis, and “Branch”—an oceanography major, like Caylor—was his new roommate in the Adak bachelor officers quarters. Guido was an experienced, first tour plane commander with his own flight crew, but Branchflower had just checked into Patrol Squadron 9 in late September from an assignment as a training command flight instructor. Branch had never been in the Aleutians before. In common with many on AF 586, his first flight out of Adak would be today. DF 704’s flight engineer was Don Tullar, who except for the last minute assignment of Butch Miller to AF 586’s crew in his place two days ago, would have been aboard PD-2 on Thursday and in the water now. Their tactical coordinator was Lt. (jg) John Skarzenski, John Ball’s bingo partner of Wednesday night.
Less than twenty-five minutes after DF 704 took off from Adak, Air Force Rescue 95825 reported extreme turbulence on the approach into the field, abandoned his attempt to land, and diverted to Cold Bay, more than five hundred miles away.
The most recent information anyone in Alaska had about the men in the water came from CG 1500’s last situation report, transmitted while Porter took his crew off station. Sinyavin had picked up four survivors from one raft, his report said. The rescue of three or four others was in progress. Two bodies had been recovered. Porter observed that “the Soviets were very cooperative in the rescue effort.”
Just over two hours later, with DF 704’s navigation lights and blinking red anticollision beacons probably now visible under the overcast to Sinyavin’s bridge watch, the ship sent Ed Caylor’s report, not identified as such, direct to Adak by radio, in Morse code. A later transmission from the ship provided more details: “F.V. Mys Sinyavin [to] Coast Guard Juneau Alaska. 1322 GMT 27 Oct picked up 13 men at sea. [Three] of them are dead. Brooner. Garcia. Rodriguez. As the American citizen Edwin Flow said Butch Miller died with the airplane and Grigsby was lost at sea because they couldn’t pull him on the raft due to bad weather. Continue searching him at sea.”
Under the circumstances, DF 704’s mission was not completely clear.1 The replacement crew would arrive on station in the dark—and in fog, rain, and icing—three hours before sunrise. Search for the two missing men would be difficult, if not impossible, until there was enough light on station to see the surface. When the sun came up, they would have an hour to search for a raft, or possibly for two men, afloat in life vests and apart, alone in a vast and turbulent sea. Anyone they flew over would have been adrift in the killing waters for eighteen hours, unlikely to be alive and certainly incapable of signaling to them.
Finding of Fact. At 0525, DF 704 reported on station in the S.A.R. area. They tracked the Mys Sinyavin until daylight, while attempting to communicate on every available frequency. When sufficient daylight was available, they returned to the site of the ditching and searched to the east-southeast for the missing crewmembers until low fuel forced them to return to Shemya.
DF 704 would spend four hours on station trying to be helpful and, sadly, accomplishing nothing. Only Coast Guard aircraft were equipped with the frequency modulated VHF radios that Sinyavin’s receivers could hear. For three hours, DF 704’s crew flew circles around Sinyavin, trying without success to communicate. Working their radios across the high-, very-high-, and ultra-high-frequency bands, they could not raise a response from the ship to any of their calls. The only replies came from curious airliners, transiting six miles above them between the two continents, otherwise oblivious to the drama below.
Once the survivors of AF 586 from both rafts were aboard, Mys Sinyavin stayed in the SAR area through the night, searching for more Americans. Finally, seven hours after the rescue, Sinyavin gave up the search. Just after 9:00 A.M., DF 704 marked the trawler only a few miles away from the SAR site, but now heading west purposefully at a speed (over)estimated to be fourteen knots.
During the next two days, Sinyavin sailed for Petropavlovsk, trailed by a Soviet Navy Krivak-class frigate that diligently followed the fisherman all the way to port, for reasons known only to commanders in Moscow and Petropavlovsk.2 Alfa Foxtrot 586’s ditching also provoked serious congestion in what was usually near-vacant airspace. Headquarters, Fifth Air Force at Yokota watched attentively, from over the horizon, as Soviet aircraft collected in the area.
A Tupulov TU-16 Badger was the first Soviet aircraft to respond to the ditching. A few hours after the American Embassy in Moscow asked for the USSR’s assistance (and just about the time CG 1500 got on station), one of the subsonic 1950s-era medium bombers was already known at Fifth Air Force headquarters to be heading for the site. The twin turbojet Badger was no more suitable for this low-altitude surveillance mission than was Cliff Carter’s much bigger RC-135.
One or more TU-95 Bear bombers soon replaced the shorter-legged Badger, occasionally circling overhead the small, waterborne procession heading for Petropavlovsk, and at least once on Friday taking a long, close look at the mysterious dorsal radome on an Air Force C-130 participating in the search. It, or they, made Juneau nervous. Even with the best of intentions onboard the Bear, the big, four-engine turboprop—with its distinctive glassed-in, bomber’s greenhouse nose and sharply swept wings—posed a midair collision risk in the cloudy skies around datum. No Russian aircraft type had communications with any American aircraft on station and no agreed procedures or altitude assignments existed to ensure safe separation.
An Ilyushin IL-14 Crate (the NATO code name for the USSR’s Douglas DC-3 clone was especially apt for what was, even then, a flying antique) passed through the area at least once, too, while one of the Bears was in the air. CG 1600 reported seeing it (“twin engine, low wing, DC-3 like appearance”) when he was orbiting overhead Mys Sinyavin on Friday.
Even while Sinyavin steamed west, the Soviets showed continuing interest in the area left behind. Several other Soviet navy vessels congregated briefly around the ditching coordinates, and Soviet air force aircraft continued to spend time in the airspace above (renewing fears of collision with the Americans on station). Their intent was unclear—there were never any communications between U.S. and Soviet military units on station—but no one had any reason to believe this was anything other than assistance in the search for survivors, which Washington had urged them to join. Some Russians would still be at the scene when Jarvis finally arrived.
Finding of Fact. At 0532, Adak received word of survivor status: 10 people alive, 3 died in rafts. Grigsby lost at sea, and Miller went down with aircraft.
Caylor’s brief muster report, passed to Adak SAR Radio by Sinyavin’s radioman in Morse code, was, “Have thirteen members aboard. Three of these are dead. Two others lost prior to pickup. Brooner, Garcia, Rodriguez—dead. Miller died with aircraft. Grigsby lost at sea while trying to board raft.” The message was received at the naval station just about the time DF 704 reported on station.
Essentially the same message, minus names, reached the American embassy in Moscow through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 8:30 Friday night, local time. The names would come to the embassy the following Tuesday in a short telex from Petropavlovsk signed by Ed Caylor and Matt Gibbons: “Caylor, Gibbons, Ball, Forshay, Wagner, Sheppard [sic], Hemmer, Flow, Moore, Reynolds all in good condition. Brooner, Garcia, Rodriguez bodies recovered. Grigsby lost at sea. Miller lost with aircraft.” By then, who had lived and who had died was generally known everywhere it mattered.
Finding of Fact. At 0738, Coast Guard 1600 departed Adak en route to the S.A.R. area as a relief for DF 704.
Juneau’s original plan was that John Powers and his copilot, Lt. Joe Egan, would fly CG 1600 to Shemya from Kodiak late Thursday night, fuel and drop off their extra crew at the air force base, and continue west to relieve Bill Porter in 1500 on station early Friday morning. Later in the day, Delgarbino’s crew was to take Porter’s aircraft out of Shemya to replace John Powers and company overhead the SAR site. None of that happened. Both Coast Guard aircraft and all three crews ended up in Adak early Friday morning because of the powerful crosswinds overnight at Shemya.
So it was that eleven hours after he left Kodiak the night before, Al Delgarbino in CG 1600 finally took off on his first SAR flight. His mission was to search a small rectangle of ocean 1 degree wide by 30 minutes high, centered slightly southeast of the ditching coordinates, at low altitude. What sounds like a small area spanned 1,050 square miles, and in that space half the size of Delaware the announced object was to find two men. Hours later, John Powers and Joe Egan would take Porter’s aircraft and fly a 5.9-hour search mission of their own, flying parallel tracks through another small box. Same mission, same results.
Finding of Fact. At 0928, DF 704 departed the S.A.R. area en route to Shemya. Coast Guard 1600 estimated arrival in the S.A.R. area at 1030, October 27.
Tony Guido landed at Shemya after 7.2 hours in flight with a thoroughly frustrated crew aboard. Their last hour on station had been spent in a futile visual search for Grigsby and Miller. The crew had done everything they could, but accomplished nothing. Their plan was to fuel and return the aircraft quickly to Adak, so that it could be sent out again. Their frustration would increase soon.
The Sinyavin was already twenty-five miles west of the ditching site when CG 1600 first spotted it, after marking overhead one of AF 586’s PRT-5 beacons on the way to the ship. (The PRT-5s would continue to send their distress signal—SOS three times in Morse code followed by a steady tone, over and over again—by rote, until their batteries died sometime late Saturday or Sunday.) Like DF 704, CG 1600 spent some time in a visual search, and hours orbiting Sinyavin while the fishing vessel continued tracking steadily west at eight to ten knots.
Almost three hours after CG 1600 got on station, communications were reestablished with Sinyavin, probably when the ship’s radio shack was again manned. The first report was a roster of the Americans aboard the trawler, “passed with great language difficulty.” At 1:48 P.M., CG 1600 was informed by Sinyavin that the ship planned to transfer the Americans to another vessel, apparently to a small combatant ship close aboard. In the transmission, the survivors’ condition was described as “poor.”
The news quickly triggered a reaction from the State Department. If the crewmembers’ condition was too poor to permit them to speak on the ship’s radio as the department had been led to believe, State wanted to know early Saturday (Moscow time), how was it possible that they could endure “the rigors involved in transfer of survivors at sea”? The embassy was asked to get more information from the Soviets on the “gravity of survivors’ condition.”
U.S. aircraft overhead watched carefully to observe the transfer, presumably to the trailing Krivak. It never happened. The U.S. then repeatedly requested that the transfer be made to Jarvis, still proceeding to the site at best speed. Captain Arbuzov considered that alternative, but that transfer did not happen either. The trawler’s master later explained, “When the danger to their lives come off [sic], I was going to meet with the American frigate of the Coast Guard ‘Jarvis,’ but then it was decided to go to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky because the saved men were in need of urgent medical treatment and the time to port was shorter.” Ed Caylor and the other survivors of AF 586 remained aboard Sinyavin.
In fact, by sunrise (about the time Sinyavin broke off the search and turned toward port) Dr. Safronenko apparently had concluded that the Americans, with the possible exception of Hemmer, were out of danger. A rendezvous with CGC Jarvis near Attu Island would have been no farther away than was Petropavlovsk. The limited medical facilities aboard the cutter, no doctor, but a chief hospital corpsman running the ship’s small sickbay, with a junior assistant, would have been fully adequate to care for the men until they were put ashore at Adak. The bodies would have been moved from an iced hold in Sinyavin to bags in Jarvis’s walk-in freezer.
The problem was not distance, but weather. If Sinyavin had turned east toward Jarvis, it would have been steaming with the low, imbedded in a weather system heading in the same direction as was the ship. The three hundred miles to the rendezvous could easily have taken much longer to sail than the same distance to port. Then there would have been the risky transfer in high seas from one ship to the other. Either way, by small boat or Jarvis’s HH-52 helicopter, the transfer would have been dangerous, risking the very lives Mys Sinyavin had struggled to save.
John Power’s Coast Guard aircrew would not fly on Saturday. They would return to Kodiak on Sunday, having flown only one rescue mission since departure from their home station Thursday night.
Finding of Fact. At 1043, SW 608, a Patrol Squadron 9 P-3 returning from Hawaii, landed at Adak.
Once he got the bad news, Lt. Cdr. Jim Dvorak departed Oahu for Adak early Friday morning in such a hurry that he left two men behind. These two, ground pounders who had flown down early in the week with his Crew 12 to Naval Air Station Barbers Point for a three-day visit, would have to find their own way back. Their extra time in Hawaii would be the only benefit anyone would wrench from the loss of AF 586.
Jim Dvorak’s crew had left Adak on Wednesday for Oahu, 9.3 hours en route with an operational mission along the midocean track between the two wildly dissimilar islands. Thursday had been devoted to a practice torpedo load and drop on the Navy’s Barking Sands weapons range near Kauai, a short 3.8 hour flight. Friday morning was going to be spent on the beach. They would leave for Adak in the afternoon, seven-plus hours at normal cruise speed north-northwest over empty water. A few hours in the sun, rarely seen and never felt on bare skin at Adak in October, were one of the benefits, the “bennies,” of a trip to the weapons range.
Very late Thursday, while Crew 6’s survivors were still afloat in their rafts below the aircraft circling overhead, the Patrol Wing 2 duty officer at Barbers Point tracked Dvorak down. After the duty officer’s call, Dvorak and Lt. Larry Myers, his tactical coordinator, rushed over to the Wing’s command center for a briefing. There the two got the news that PD-2 was in the water. They corralled the rest of their crew at the Outrigger Hotel for a few hours rest, and then took off in PD-8 back to Adak just after 4:00 A.M., call sign Sierra Whiskey 608. SW 608 landed at Adak almost seven hours later, after a landing approach that was so turbulent Dvorak had to keep both hands on the control yoke, instructing his flight engineer to adjust engine power almost to touchdown. When Dvorak taxied in, there were only Powers’s C-130 and a single Orion parked on the detachment’s flight line. It was the P-3 from Patrol Squadron 46 that had arrived hours before.
Finding of Fact. At 1108, DF 704 landed at Shemya. It was unable to continue further S.A.R. operations because of a bad oil leak on the No. 3 engine. No corrective maintenance action could be taken because of the high winds at Shemya.
Delta Foxtrot 704 left the SAR station with enough fuel to get to King Salmon, at the top of the Alaskan Peninsula, if bad weather in the islands forced them that far east, but not enough to reach Anchorage, on the mainland another three hundred miles northeast.
On the way, they managed to put down on the Rock instead. (Branch’s daily diary rated Guido’s landing on Shemya into fifty knots of wind as “good.” He would rate his own performance on that flight as disappointing, without explanation.) Guido, or one of the other officers, immediately phoned the Adak Tactical Support Center with bad news. The TSC watch officer’s logbook entry said it all: “11:11 . . . DF 704 on deck—sighted nothing. Aircraft possibly down—bad oil leak No. 3 engine.” The confirmation came in another call not long thereafter. “11:50 . . . DF 704 hard down at Shemya, unable to work on aircraft due to high winds.” PD-9 was now unflyable and stranded with its crew in the weather system that soon was to ground aviation from one end of the Aleutians to the other.
PD-9 would remain at Shemya for two days, waiting for improved weather, and for a mechanic from Adak with a replacement engine-driven compressor. Meanwhile, Branch, wandering around the barren island to kill time, stumbled across two old Russian graves not far from the water’s edge. The discovery could have been an omen: the same day, the crew got the muster of AF 586’s dead and missing from a Coast Guardsman on the island.
Finding of Fact. At 1143, Alfa Delta 275, a P-3 from Moffett Field, landed at Adak.
AD 275 was a Patrol Squadron 9 aircraft, one of six still at Moffett Field and the first to Adak after the loss of AF 586 midafternoon the day before. Cdr. Peter Cressy, the squadron executive officer and Bud Powers’s planned successor in command, was the senior man aboard.
Of all the supporting cast, Pete Cressy—wolfishly handsome, tirelessly ambitious, and famously lusty—will come out the best from this incident, not simply unscathed but enlarged. He owns the most sensitive political antennae at Moffett Field, perhaps in all of maritime patrol aviation on both coasts, and he will move quickly to contain the damage from loss of an aircraft and some of its crew.
Cressy’s is a polarizing personality, stimulating near-fanatical admiration and loyalty from some, and repelling others with his ambition. His critics say that Cressy’s tour in command of Patrol Squadron 9 exhausted the under-manned squadron; his admirers say it revitalized it after several failures culminating in the loss of PD-2. Whichever, it will certainly propel him to promotion and his next command, an air wing in Maine. In quick time, Captain Cressy will become Rear Admiral Cressy, Dr. Cressy (a Ph.D. in education), president of two colleges, and finally the sleek, affluent CEO of a big-budget industry association in Washington. There his staff will call him “doctor.”
The twenty-seventh of October was long before any of that. Cressy, who will chair the squadron’s “aircraft mishap board” and write its report to the Naval Safety Center, had come to talk to the men of the detachment and find out what was going on. That kind of quick, instinctive solidarity after catastrophe often comes at some professional cost in the Navy, where it is difficult for senior line officers, those eligible for command at sea, to escape the taint of failure when a ship or plane is lost for any reason. Two things made his generous gesture risk free.
A consensus would swiftly emerge out of the accident investigations that would lay the failure at the feet of the two men who had paid for it with their lives, Grigsby and Miller. Both were beyond criticism now. Moreover, the aircraft was lost not on Pete Cressy’s watch, but on Bud Powers’s.3 Even before the loss of PD-2, things had been tough recently for the Golden Eagles of Patrol Squadron 9. The squadron had failed an annual special weapons readiness inspection and the annual aircrew standardization exam, too. After the loss of an aircraft and some of its crew, Patrol Squadron 9 had nowhere to go but up. Whether you believed Commander Cressy pulled the squadron up by force of personality or lashed it to a foaming lather and rode it up in 1979 depended on what you thought about the man himself.
Crew 11, weary and still shaken by the sight of squadron mates in the water was surprised, the day after their exhausting mission, to hear their executive officer announce in person that everyone involved would be decorated for his performance. No one had expected that medals would be a topic of discussion.
Six months later, Pete Cressy delivered on his promise. The medals were presented on 30 April 1979, not long after he took command of the squadron. Jerry Grigsby’s brilliant airmanship at the very end gave him special status, recognized, possibly ambivalently, by the posthumous award of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Ed Caylor was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal. Matt Gibbons got the Navy Commendation Medal. Eighteen Patrol Squadron 9 men received the Air Medal in connection with the loss of AF 586, the eight who rode AF 586 into the water and the nine aboard XF 675 who helped to save them.4
It is difficult to tell just how much these medals meant to the men who got them. Surely not much to the survivors, who had been granted life itself. Today, their medals and those of Crew 11 almost certainly lie nearly forgotten in dresser drawers across America.
In contrast, the Coast Guardsmen aboard CG 1500 alone got no tangible recognition for their effort. Perhaps, in a service dedicated to lifesaving at sea, it was believed that Bill Porter and his crew had done nothing out of the ordinary on 27 and 28 October, but the omission or oversight rankled Bill Porter for years. More than two decades later, Porter, who thought that medals for the acts of his crew would have improved their chances for promotion, was still bitter about the neglect. He was unhappy, too, that his unit’s commanding officer had not even bothered to greet the crew when they shut down on the Kodiak flight line after their successful rescue mission.
The Coast Guard’s four C-130s based at Kodiak—1500, 1600, 1601, and 1602—flew a total of eleven sorties and 54.5 flight hours atop AF 586, before flight operations were finally suspended on 29 October. Despite their crews’ best efforts, none of the missions after Bill Porter’s made any difference to the outcome.
Finding of Fact. Between 27 October and 30 October, the weather at Adak, Shemya and in the S.A.R. area became progressively worse. No S.A.R. aircraft were able to launch after 1450, 27 October. Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis did not arrive in the S.A.R. area until late October 28th due to rough seas.
Adak’s flight control tower’s watch teams kept a flight clearance logbook, an informal record of events during their hours on duty. Section Two was on duty in the tower on Thursday, and the watch supervisor’s handwritten notes recorded reports coming in about the emergency and also wary consideration of the deteriorating weather blowing down on them from the northwest.
Adak’s main instrument runway, 05-23, is oriented northeast-southwest, aligned along the axis of the prevailing winds from the south-southwest. Even so, as the low closed in on the Central Aleutians, winds, not low ceilings and reduced visibility, were the problem. The flight clearance logbook recorded the progression. From a steady fifteen to twenty knots Thursday morning, the winds strengthened to forty knots with gusts to seventy on Friday midafternoon.
The weather on SAR station on 28 October was daunting: the Associated Press reported sixty knots of wind and seas fifty feet high, presumably the information came from Coast Guard sources. In fact, the seas were likely only half as high. The worst of the weather was now well to the east. Saturday morning along the islands, dawn came accompanied by grounding conditions.
By sunrise on Saturday, Adak’s surface winds were forty to fifty knots, with gusts to ninety—just over one hundred miles per hour, well beyond hurricane force—and forecast to remain that way through the day. On Adak, once the winds exceeded fifty knots, ground personnel were no longer permitted to operate the aircraft hangar doors, because the big, steel doors were vulnerable to being blown off their tracks by such strong winds. The danger was not so much that the doors would be jammed ajar, but that they would fall flat, crushing anything—men, aircraft, ground support equipment—caught beneath them.
As the weekend started on Shemya, visibility dropped as low as one-quarter mile in passing snow showers. Occasionally, thunder boomed hollowly out of the clouds even while the snow fell, with a low bass rumble like distant artillery. The problem on Shemya, however, was not visibility or the winds, now out of the west at thirty knots with gusts only to forty-six (powerful but pretty much down Runway 28), or even the lightning flashes almost concealed in the flurries. It was ice on the ground. Shemya’s runways and taxiways were glazed with it, making any aircraft movement on the ground perilous even in still air.
The winds on Adak built throughout the morning. At 10:43 A.M., Duty Section One on watch in Adak Tower gave up in the face of high winds, and a forecast calling for more of the same throughout the next fourteen hours. That is when the watch told Anchorage Center and the FAA Flight Service Station at Cold Bay that the airfield was being closed. Section One then shuttered the tower’s windows and the watch team abandoned their perch because of high winds.
Finding of Fact. S.A.R. operations were suspended by the North Pacific S.A.R. Coordinator at 1740 0n 29 October 1978.
The North Pacific SAR coordinator, at the Coast Guard’s 17th District headquarters in Juneau had assumed control of AF 586 SAR operations from his counterpart in Adak late the same evening the airplane went down, at 10:08 P.M. The changeover to the mainland reflected the superior resources and greater expertise in managing such an effort at the district headquarters. Beginning then, Juneau assumed overall responsibility for the general direction of the search.
A series of eight situation reports from Juneau over the next seventy-two hours kept all concerned informed of progress in marshalling search and rescue assets, operations underway and plans for the future. Juneau’s morose Situation Report No. 7, transmitted near midday, Sunday, prepared everybody for the inevitable. “Chance of survival of man in water for period of time since aircraft ditched in given weather conditions on station is considered remote,” it said. Yielding reluctantly to reality and force majeure, the SAR coordinator in Alaska then went on to recommend to the Third Fleet commander and his own service’s superior in San Francisco that the search “be suspended pending further developments.”
Over the course of the next few hours, the commander of the U.S. Third Fleet and the commanders in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and of the joint service Pacific Command agreed. “Suspension” was a euphemism; everyone knew that he was talking about ending the search for Grigsby and Miller.
Early Sunday evening, with no search mission flown since midafternoon, Friday, and another twelve hours of grounding weather forecast for Adak and Shemya, Juneau put the recommendation in effect, reluctantly conceded both men’s bodies to the sea, and released all participating units to normal operations. Later, the Department of State was requested to inform the Soviet Union that AF 586’s SAR effort had been suspended as of 6:40 A.M., Monday, Moscow time. Implementing instructions to the embassy emphasized that this was a “suspension for the time being.”
The public explanation came in a press release on Monday, 30 October:
The Coast Guard has suspended its search for the two missing crewmembers of the Navy P-3 aircraft, which ditched in the North Pacific on Thursday with 15 persons aboard. . . . Ten crewmembers and three bodies were recovered by a Russian fishing trawler in the remote ocean area west of the Aleutian Islands last Friday. . . . Late Saturday afternoon the third of the downed aircraft’s three life rafts was located, however, there were no persons in the raft. Fifty-foot seas on Saturday and 22-foot seas on Sunday have decreased the chances that the two missing crewmembers could still survive. Winds gusting to 60 and 70 knots have hampered search aircraft operations throughout the search. . . . The extremely remote possibility that the two men could still be alive in the frigid water and the danger of continued air and surface operations, due to the severe weather, were critical in the decision to suspend the search.
Now Event AK 262 was really over.
