Black Lightning

Another story from my US Air Force days that my grandchildren often ask me to tell.

Part of my assignment as an aircraft maintenance officer at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, was to be part of an accident investigation board and head of the base crash/recovery team. This is a story of an Air Force plane from our base that crashed near McCook, Nebraska.

Six expert pilots from Offutt AFB were returning from a conference at Moffett Naval Air Station at the south end of San Francisco Bay. They were flying in a T-39 jet, a small 2-engine airplane sometimes called a Sabre Liner, which had seats for 4 passengers in addition to the crew of pilot and co-pilot.

They stopped at Francis E. Warren AFB at Cheyenne, Wyoming for refueling. As they were ready to leave, they received a report of thunderstorms developing along their route home, along with a recommendation that they stay overnight there in Cheyenne. After discussing the thunderstorms, they thought they would be able to get past them, and so decided to get home.

As they got over Nebraska, they received a report that a large thunderhead was looming directly in their path. After finding out that it was at about 36,000 feet, they decided to fly over it. The maximum altitude for a T-39 was 42,000 feet, at which altitude the air was so thin that there was just barely enough flowing through the engines to keep them going. Any air turbulence at that altitude would cause the engines to shut down. They call that a "flame-out".

Just as they got to the thunderhead, it bloomed to 45,000 feet. They were flying at maximum altitude, and the updraft from the storm caused a double engine flame-out.

They immediately began to plummet toward the ground, but felt they had plenty of time to get an airstart on the engines. That's where the plane gets up enough speed to force air through the engines fast enough to restart them. They were flying through the thunderstorm as they fell. Monitoring the guages, the pilot and copilot were surprised that there was no reading on the engine rpm guage. But they felt they must have enough speed up to start the engines, so they started the fuel flow and ignited the spark to start the engine.

They immediately had an engine fire warning light, so the emergency fuel shut off was engaged. Now they were getting too close to the ground for comfort, so they tried again to get an air start, with no results, forgetting that the fuel was shut off at the emergency shut off.

Now it was too late for anything but emergency landing procedures. They spotted a truck weighing station along side a highway. The lighting from that facility supplied what they felt like they needed for a landing on that highway. They turned and lined up on the road and let down the landing gear.

Just as they were about to touch down, they saw vehicle brake lights come on a short distance ahead of them. Rather than run into someone from behind, they turned sharply to the right into the highway barrow pit. The landing gear were sheared off, and the plane slid on its belly. Suddenly they hit a hill, which was actually the side of another road which ran at a right angle to the one they tried to land on.

The sudden change propelled them back into the air, broke the wings off the fuselage and broke the tail off the plane. The plane spun half way around and finally crashed going backward into an irrigation canal on the other side of that road.

Only the pilot was injured. His upper right cheek bone was broken when he bounced off the back of his seat and hit the steering wheel. The group opened the door and scrambled out. They saw lights from a farmhouse about 200 yards away and made their way over through the rain.

At the farmhouse they managed to telephone Offutt AFB to report the crash, and then sat down to await rescuers. As they chatted with the wife in the home, the farmer and his hired hand came in, having been out adjusting irrigation gates to allow for the storm waters.

They described their crash to the farmer, and he replied, "So that's what that noise was. My pickup truck must have been the vehicle whose brake lights you saw. I was just turning onto that side road. We heard a loud bang, and the truck was sprayed with mud. We couldn't see what could have caused it. It sounded like lightning, but there was no flash. So we decided it must have been black lightning."

Everyone got a good laugh out of that. But it was also very sobering when they realized how close they had been to death, as the plane had apparently bounced right over the top of the pickup.

As the accident investigation proceeded early the next morning, my chief assistant on the crash recovery team pointed out to me the probable cause of the lack of airflow through the engines, which prevented them from airstarting. The lens on the nose wheel light had been broken our, and there were large spherical dents in the metal reflector for the light. Hailstones the size of marbles had dented that reflector. Apparently the engine intakes had filled with hail as they dove through the thunderstorm, thus preventing any flow of air. By the time we got to the scene, all the hail had melted, but the evidence was there in the nose wheel light.

The ultimate cause of the crash was "get-home-itis" on the part of the crew and passengers.