Much changed in Patrol Squadron 9’s corner of its hangar at Moffett Field between the fall of 1978 and the summer of 1979. Through the continuous process of renewal common to all Navy commands, during those eight months perhaps a dozen officers and fifty, or more, enlisted men checked out of the squadron at the end of their tours of duty, taking with them the experience they had gained over the past two or three years. Some went to other assignments; others left the Navy and became civilians again. A like number of new men reported aboard. Most of them were young kids in their first full-time job, right out of high school, right out of Navy schools. Many were away from home for the first time, too. Even some old-timers, the salty senior petty officers who normally would be expected to provide leadership and instruction on the hangar deck, were new to the mission and the aircraft when they checked in.1
The skipper, Bud Powers, left Moffett Field for the Pentagon and his next assignment as head of the Navy staff’s nuclear division. Pete Cressy “fleeted up” to CO, meaning that Cressy made the scheduled move, and replaced Powers at the helm of the Golden Eagles. Cdr. Carter Nute reported aboard to become the squadron’s executive officer, its second in command, replacing Cressy. At the change of command ceremony that marked her husband’s departure, Paula Powers was unexpectedly called to the dais to receive an award from Admiral Pringle for her services to the squadron and its families during the trial. For a moment, memories from October and November came flooding back and she thought about refusing it, but she did not.
Crew 6 was reconstituted around its tacco, Matt Gibbons. Renumbered and renamed as “Lethal Eleven” (for its presumed sub-hunting skills), on its 1979 deployment to the western Pacific the crew would participate in life-saving operations for boat people fleeing Vietnam, belying its moniker.2
Ed Caylor, who took over Crew 7 in December, filed for divorce from his wife in January. Out of earshot of the news media, she had greeted his return from the USSR two months earlier with the stunning complaint that its timing had conflicted with her exam schedule at school. But that frigid welcome was not the reason for the break; it was Barbara’s suspected drug abuse that had alienated and impoverished him. Their marriage, solemnized by the same Chaplain Dick McCue who had presided at the 2 November memorial services for Grigsby and Miller, lasted barely three years.
Some things, however, had not changed; they were irreversible. The Grigsbys (Loreen and her two daughters) and the Millers (Karen, her two daughters, and her son) were without a husband and father. Phyllis Davis, Paul and Delores Rodriguez, and Guillermo Garcia and Frances Laly all continued to mourn the sudden loss of their young sons.
With memorial services done, accident reports moving up the chain of command, and a new commanding officer in place, Patrol Squadron 9 got on with what it had to do.
On 2 April, the survivors of old Crew 6 flew to Eielson AFB in Fairbanks for a three-day “rescue seminar” hosted by the 24th SRS. In company with Carter’s and Feldkamp’s crews, they toured each other’s aircraft, drank and talked about the rescue, and, in sober moments, pondered their mortality in a way unfamiliar to most young men. For the unique occasion, Det. 1, on Shemya, was reduced to a single alert aircraft and crew, freeing Carter and Feldkamp to join in the celebration of life.
Later in April, three months before the Misawa Air Base deployment began, a squadron liaison team flew west to introduce the Golden Eagles to their new operational boss, Commo. Jerry MacKay.3 MacKay, the commander of Task Force 72, the Seventh Fleet’s patrol and reconnaissance force, had his headquarters at Kami Seya, Japan, near Atsugi.
Jerry MacKay’s command included deployed squadrons at Misawa and Naha, Japan, and Cubi Point in the Philippines. These three supported occasional detachments throughout the Western Pacific and on faraway Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia, in turn, ran an aircraft in and out of Bandar Abbas, Iran, for surveillance of the North Arabian Sea and support of the aircraft carrier battle group often on “Camel Station,” the wryly named counterpart to the “Yankee” and “Dixie” carrier stations of the air war in Vietnam.
MacKay, a trim native Canadian with watery blue eyes, was known for his brusque, no-nonsense approach to business. The visiting team must have expected a crisp hello and a quick pass to the chief of staff. Even so, his curt greeting was a shock. MacKay told Cressy that the squadron’s reputation had preceded it. He did not want it working for him in the western Pacific. True to form, Cressy quickly replied that Patrol Squadron 9 would perform better than any squadron MacKay had ever seen.
The commodore’s cold welcome did not change the schedule. Absent a catastrophe, the carefully pieced together calendar for twelve squadrons was not going to be disrupted by MacKay’s doubts about the next one heading west to join him. It put Patrol Squadron 9 on notice, however. More than most, the Golden Eagles would have to prove themselves.
Just before the squadron took off for Japan, Buno. 159892, lost at sea, was finally replaced by another aircraft, Buno. 159505, bringing the squadron back up to its complement of nine aircraft. During the first few days of July 1979, Patrol Squadron 9’s aircraft began the two-day trip from Moffett Field to the Air Force base at Misawa, Japan, where the full squadron—approximately 350 officers and men, twelve crews, and nine aircraft—would be deployed for the next six months. They would stay in Misawa through its predictably heavy winter snows and return home in early January 1980.
Squadron flight crews crossing the Pacific staged through the Midway Islands, at the far western end of the Hawaiian island chain, fully eleven hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. Naval Air Facility Midway, the scene of the American triumph in June 1942, included three small islets. The largest was Sand Island, half the size of Shemya and only thirteen feet above the Pacific at its highest point. Eastern, the second largest, was just big enough for an abandoned World War II airfield. Between them lay tiny Spit Island, a punctuation point expressed as dry land, too small for any use. The three were embraced by a single, roughly circular coral reef. They lay, almost touching, in the southern half of the reef’s small lagoon, somnolent in the hot sun.
A landing approach in a P-3 to Sand Island’s runway on a moonless night—faint lights outlining a slender rectangle afloat in stygian darkness, nothing to give you scale or perspective—was like descending into an astronomical black hole, like ditching with your landing gear down.
Midway was more than just a stepping stone across the world’s largest ocean. It also secretly hosted the terminus of the Navy’s mid-Pacific SOSUS acoustic arrays. The Navy’s austere establishment on Midway gingerly shared its space with the island’s dominant life-form, the blue- and black-footed gooney birds that nested in huge numbers everywhere during the breeding season. At the right time of year, the birds’ unique mating ritual, a percussive clacking of big beaks that sounded like a crazed flamenco dancer’s castanets followed by an almost bovine exhalation, could be heard everywhere above the sound of the surf. Months later, sharks would fill the lagoon, snacking enthusiastically on the young albatross fledglings who spun in while learning how to fly.4
Sand Island was too compact and its ecology too delicate for cars. The residents rode bicycles, styled “horses,” exclusively, navigating carefully around the gooney bird nests spaced a few feet apart, on their way from place to place. Inevitably and rightly, the place had the look and feel of a leftover from an old war, a tropical backwater covered with guano. Patrol aircrews were glad to land there, and then glad to refuel and leave.
Caylor took Crew 7, now his crew, over, with John Branchflower in the right seat as copilot. Moffett to Midway was nine hours. Out of Midway, it was another eight or so flight hours to Japan. Over the course of several days in July, everything the squadron owned would be flown fifty-eight hundred nautical miles to Aomori Prefecture, Japan, at the north end of Honshu, either in its own aircraft or in a Military Airlift Command transport. (The return flow would bring Patrol Squadron 47 back to California after six months in the western Pacific.) If the move were done correctly, the exchange of squadrons would be seamless. The Golden Eagles would be flying their first operational patrols out of their new home even as some squadron gear was still being unpacked and stowed.
Patrol Squadron 9’s first aircraft arrived in Japan about the time that the Pacific Fleet commander finished reviewing Lieutenant Commander Dvorak’s report of his investigation into the loss of PD-2. The manual of the Navy judge advocate general prescribes a three-part format for formal investigations. The investigating officer is to report findings of fact, drawn from sworn testimony, to present his opinions based on these facts, and to make recommendations. Only after that is done is his work complete. Dvorak finished his investigation on 12 December and delivered his report to Bud Powers the same day. Beginning then, and for many months to follow, the aircraft investigation moved slowly up the chain of command. At each stop, the reviewing officer would add his endorsement (comments on everything said before) and send it on.
No crewmember had survived to explain why LE-8 flew into a mountain on Hiero, why LJ-4 hit the water near the Azores, or why LC-7 came apart in the air over western Maine. There was no last-minute radio transmission from any of these aircraft that hinted at what might have gone wrong during the final minutes of flight, and nothing was later found at any site that led investigators toward a definitive conclusion. No cockpit recorders to reveal anything said or audible in the cockpit and any flight or engine parameters during the last moments leading up to impact. None of the questions that accident investigators asked themselves, while they pondered the sudden and mysterious loss of aircraft, had any obvious answers.
PD-2 was different. Most of the crew had survived, including two of three pilots and one of the two flight engineers. Their testimony, coupled with the observations of the other five living crewmembers, made it possible to assemble an answer to the fundamental question—what had happened—even though the two key players were gone.
Jim Dvorak first focused his investigation on the cause of the overspeed. He had a logical place to begin his inquiry: it was almost certain that loss of hydraulic fluid had led to loss of control of the prop, and just two weeks before PD-2 went to Adak, its no. 1 and 2 propeller controls had been filled with MIL-H-83282 fluid during routine servicing. Because the new hydraulic fluid had been put into the no. 1 prop so recently, the fluid itself became the subject of intense scrutiny. Perhaps, by attacking internal seals or otherwise, it had caused leaks that led to the loss of control.
MIL-H-83282 was quickly exonerated by the investigation. Even though the new fluid was known to have a slightly more powerful detergent action than the old (which resulted in a “de-sludging” action that could contaminate filters), there was no evidence that fluid properties had caused the failure.
With 159892 sunk in twenty-four hundred fathoms of salt water, obviously no inspection of the assembly was possible, but Hamilton Standard representatives concluded, based on statements from Ed Caylor, John Wagner, and Ed Flow, and their own knowledge of the system, that there were four possible causes for the initial prop malfunction.
First, a “ring” seal could have failed, allowing fluid to leak out of the prop. The fact that certain cockpit warning lights did not illuminate undercut that hypothesis. Second, certain other seals could have failed, resulting in a fluid leak and loss of pressure inside of the prop. The sudden loss of control was inconsistent with this hypothesis, however. Third, some foreign object could have found its way into the prop during overhaul, and that object could have damaged a seal, leading to an internal leak. Finally, and, based on symptoms and historic experience, most likely in the eyes of the manufacturer’s experts, the soft metal bearing (called the “Babbit transfer bearing”) that supported the prop shaft could have peeled apart under high pressure, leading to a massive internal leak. This would have resulted in a quick loss of control fluid, followed by an overspeed as centrifugal twisting moment spun the blades flat toward high rpm.
Their conclusion was that the prior failure of one or more adjacent neoprene O-ring seals—penny parts in a quarter-million-dollar prop—set the stage for failure of the bearing. The problem was not entirely new. Other prop controls had failed this way before, although no other failures had resulted in the loss of an aircraft. The solution was smaller-diameter O-rings. Approved parts were already in the Navy’s logistic pipeline.
Bud Powers lost his battle with Charlie Prindle for an immediate, fleet-wide program to change the suspect O-ring seals. Such a program would have required cycling nearly one thousand gearboxes through overhaul facilities in California and Florida. The Naval Air Systems Command’s “urgent” program to make the change was not finished until December 1980, more than two years after PD-2 went down. Prindle’s gamble—that is what it was—paid off. No other P-3 was lost for this reason before his slower remedial program was finished.5
But why had a prop overspeed forced a ditching?
The fact that the prescribed emergency procedure had not been fully executed, against the backdrop of all the other data Lt. Cdr. Jim Dvorak had compiled during the six weeks he studied the loss of AF 586, led to his unambiguous conclusion, presented as “Opinion 7.” In clear and unemotional language, Dvorak said that his contemporary, Jerry Grigsby, had made a fatal error: “The ultimate cause of the ditch was catastrophic failure of the reduction gearbox, which resulted in multiple engine fires and eventually became uncontrollable, and extreme vibrations of the No. 1 engine and propeller assembly. The failure of the gearbox was a direct result of the ‘Propeller Fails-to-Feather’ procedures not being completed, in that oil was not restored to the gearbox after engine shutdown utilizing the E-handle.”
An internal failure in the propeller control had drained hydraulic pressure from the blade pitch change mechanism, permitting the overspeed. The overspeed, alone, was survivable. The subsequent catastrophic failure of the gearbox was not, however, and that had happened because the gearbox was allowed to run dry. Dvorak opined that this pilot error—failure to restore lubricating oil—committed just minutes after no. 1 was restarted, had doomed AF 586 and cost Grigsby and four others their lives. “The judgment decision not to restore oil to the reduction gearbox after the fails to feather,” he wrote, “must be considered the primary cause of the gearbox failure which resulted in the ditch.”
In their separate, sequential reviews early in 1979 of the JAG investigation of the accident, Rear Admiral Prindle and Vice Adm. Robert Coogan, commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, both focused on this fact. Both came to the same conclusion about the ditching. The cause was pilot error, a failure to complete the “prop fails-to-feather” emergency checklist.
Unlike Prindle, a maritime patrol pilot who had both administrative and operational roles in the Navy’s bifurcated chain of command, Vice Admiral Coogan was neither a former patrol plane pilot nor an operator. He was responsible for the support and efficient management of the Pacific Fleet’s carriers, aviation squadrons, and air stations. It was left to the operational commanders to tell the ships and aircraft squadrons of the Pacific Fleet where to go and what to do when they got there. Coogan was in the loop because PD-2 “belonged” to him. He, or more properly his command, was the custodian of the aircraft that was lost, and he would have to account for its removal from the Navy aircraft inventory.
Differences in perspective aside, Coogan’s conclusion was essentially identical to Prindle’s: “Commander Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet specifically concurs . . . that the gear box failure was a direct result of the plane commander’s failure to follow the prescribed ‘fails-to-feather’ procedure. Had the oil tank shut off valve circuit breaker been deactivated by re-inserting the E-handle and pulling the circuit breaker immediately after engine shutdown, the aircraft would only have been subjected to a three engine ferry operation to Shemya with a windmilling pitch-locked propeller.”
The manufacturers’ technical representatives thought so, too. If Grigsby had enough fuel, one of them told Dvorak in November, he could have flown his aircraft all the way to Moffett Field on three engines in the condition it was in.
Others were not so sure.
Ed Caylor—who saw from the right seat that nothing Grigsby, Flow, and he had done in the cockpit during 90 minutes of troubleshooting and emergency procedures seemed to work—suspected years later that, with the oil tank valve open, the windmilling prop would have “scavenged,” mechanically sucked, the remaining six or seven gallons of lubricating oil out of the tank eventually. If so, that would have simply delayed the first of the nacelle fires that eventually would push AF 586 into the water. Others he had consulted in the years since the accident thought so, too.
Later versions of the flight manual would seem to lend some support to that view. Pilots and flight engineers are now warned, when operating with a pitchlocked propeller, “Extended operation with a decoupled windmilling propeller after an unsuccessful attempt to feather will ultimately result in oil depletion for that engine and reduction gearbox. . . . Failure of the reduction gearbox due to oil starvation can result in a fire and/or propeller separation from the aircraft.”
If Caylor and his confidants were right, with the circuit breaker reset and oil flowing to the gearbox, PD-2 might have flown gamely on until far away from Sinyavin or any other rescue vessel and then, well short of land, gone into the water to its fate. In the vacant seas near Attu, the crew’s only hope for survival would have been CGC Jarvis. In view of the weather, Jarvis would still not have made it to the rafts in time. It is probable that under this new scenario, PD-2 ditching Thursday late afternoon and 100–150 miles farther east, everyone in the rafts (perhaps excepting Gibbons) would have died of exposure waiting for the cutter to appear.
At the end, Crew 6’s survival came down to several things.
First, the glacial coolness of the crew in the tube. Reflecting Matt Gibbons’s leadership, the young tactical crew remained tightly disciplined throughout the protracted emergency, systematically dealing with mission security and then turning to preparing for their own survival. Their professionalism swept their two passengers, one of whom had no aviation experience, along with it. When PD-2 hit the water and the lights went out, every man aboard moved quickly to execute his responsibilities. Despite the astonishing speed with which the aircraft sank, no one alive failed to escape.
Second, there was the structural integrity of PD-2 when forward motion on the surface of the sea stopped. This depended almost entirely on Jerry Grigsby’s skill as an aviator. If he had misread the swells or mishandled the splashdown, PD-2 would have shattered on water entry and sunk immediately (as did JB 022, off Cubi Point), drowning everyone who had managed to survive the impact. Grigsby’s skill made the ditching survivable. His expertise in “water landings” gave them all a minute, or two or three, to escape the sinking aircraft.
Nevertheless, the investigation disclosed that six areas on the aircraft, which could have been expected to remain intact, failed on impact, threatening the lives of Forshay, Hemmer, and Reynolds. (The circumstances and cause of Miller’s death remained a mystery. Some thought he had been crushed by the galley refrigerator, torn free from its attachment to the deck.) On 16 November, even before Dvorak had completed his investigation, Lockheed submitted a proposal to the Navy for “Structural Improvements to Increase Ditching Capability.”6 The approved program focused on strengthening interior galley and lavatory fittings in the aft fuselage, where Miller had died and Ball and Reynolds had nearly been trapped in the sinking aircraft.
Third, the successful launch of the life rafts played a part in the crew’s survival. PD-2 went down so quickly that the crew was hard-pressed to get out of the aircraft alive before it sank. Of the survival equipment prescribed for ditching (three 2.5-gallon drinking-water breakers, two first aid kits, the emergency sonobuoy, and three rafts), only the minimum, essential gear was carried out of the emergency hatches: two of the three rafts. Conditions in the Mark-7 almost certainly resulted in the early deaths of the three sensor operators. Had Reynolds, Garcia, and Rodriguez been in the marginally better protected Mark-12, instead of the swamped Mark-7, it is possible the three would have been picked up alive by Sinyavin.
And finally, there was the timely arrival of a rescue vessel. As soon as each man stepped through an overwing escape hatch and jumped into the water, a clock began to tick. Under the conditions off Shemya, anyone not in a raft after several hours would almost certainly be dead of exposure. In a raft, thanks to its protection and the enveloping QD-1 suits, survival time was extended to between ten and eighteen to twenty-four hours, with those in the Mark-12 at the longer end of the scale.
Juneau, recognizing the urgency of getting a ship to the site, immediately interrogated the AMVER database for nearby candidates and directed Adak and Honolulu to transmit the usual urgent appeals for assistance over emergency frequencies. That unsuccessful effort went so far as to include a radio exchange with the chief of the Soviet Bering Sea Expedition, afloat in the trawler Tajikistan, seeking his help in communicating with naval auxiliary vessels thought to be in the area.7 Success finally came with the State Department’s appeal to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, prompted by information from Scone 92.
Had Sinyavin been ten to fifteen miles closer to the SAR datum when she came about to head northeast, it is possible that all thirteen of the crew would have survived. Ten or fifteen miles farther away, perhaps only three of the four in the Mark-12 would have survived.
A chain of events made the survival of the ten possible, beginning with AF 586’s success in finding the trawler and ditching fairly close aboard. The next link was CG 1500’s appearance on station, which freed XF 675 to look for a surface ship. Then came Scone 92’s call to Washington, reporting that a ship (Sinyavin) was only hours sailing time away from the rafts. Washington’s plea for assistance and Moscow’s quick agreement to divert ships for SAR followed. CG 1500’s guidance saved Sinyavin from what could have been a long or even fruitless search for two small rafts under storm conditions. Finally, the courage and seamanship of Sinyavin’s small boat crew was the last link in the successful rescue.
Even a single failure in the chain of events would have cost the last ten crewmen their lives.