“1994: Rwanda (first segment) The weather was raw and blustery as we took off from Brize Norton Royal Air Force Base about sixty miles west of London for our eight hour flight to Kilgali, Rwanda with relief supplies and international relief officials. This tag team crew combination had one crew fly to England from the States. Then, my crew would fly to Kilgali and on to Mombassa, Kenya with the first crew dead-heading in the troop compartment. We would alternate crew days, one crew flying, one dead-heading, until we completed the mission. This mission followed a horrendous genocide by Rwandan Hutu tribesmen against their fellow Rwandan Tutsis. The Hutus killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis, and even Hutus seen as being sympathetic to the Tutsis, with machetes and other crude implements. The United States performed shamefully in this episode by failing to intervene in this known genocide while it was occurring. We had pledged to act to prevent such genocides, but were crippled in our resolve by the previous year’s military fiasco in Mogadishu, Somalia. This incident, portrayed in the movie “Black Hawk Down”, saw nineteen American soldiers killed by Somali militia forces as they tried to rescue crewmembers from two Black Hawk army helicopters. A lucky RPG shot had been brought down one the choppers inside the war lord controlled portion of the city, as outlined in the previous chapter. Now we would arrive a day late and a dollar short to help the Rwandans. This incident, too, resulted in a movie rendition, “Hotel Rwanda”. In that movie, one scene provides the audio of an actual news conference where the American State Department representative tries to explain to the press how many confirmed incidents of genocide, of which there were already several, would be required to constituted an official genocide declaration? Such a declaration would require American military intervention that we were loath to commit to after Mogadishu. In a tortured voice, the spokesperson floundered in her explanation that she was trying to reconcile genocide reports with the lack of a genocide declaration by the Clinton administration, something she obviously could not do successfully. As an American, I was sickened by the performance. Of all the places we have stuck our military nose inappropriately, in Rwanda we failed to act when it was imperative we do so to save, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of lives. On the flight, shortly after level off at FL330, the #3 engine fire light illuminated. A fire light is always a significant emergency, but this one would have further complications due to our high gross weight and the inclement weather. In a slight moment of amusement in the midst of potential catastrophe, the rookie copilot looked at me with saucer eyes and gasped: “Are we gonna…are we gonna shut it down?” I chuckled out loud and mocked him back: “Yessss!” (I freely admit I had a string of such rookie exclamations in my younger years, many worse. See: Co-pilot Lacklen with a face full of av gas in book one). I pulled the fire handle that shut off #3’s fuel and hydraulics, and fired one fire extinguisher bottle into the engine, as dictated by memorized Bold Print emergency procedures. Just as I prepared to fire the second bottle, the troop compartment loadmaster came up on interphone: “Pilot, Troop.” This was a serious breach of protocol, to interrupt a pilot in the middle of an emergency procedure, but in this case the troop loadmaster had crucial information. “Sir, is the fire on the #3 engine?” he asked. I said it was. He then continued: “The deadhead crew that flew the plane in from the States say they had the same thing and it was a faulty indication.” I asked the flight engineer to review the aircraft maintenance forms again to see if they showed what had been done to fix the system. The engineer said there was no such write-up in the forms. Alas, this is not uncommon, that significant problems are removed from the forms leaving the on-coming crew clueless about what happened on the previous mission. This report of a faulty indication put me in an opportunistic dilemma. Had I not known of the previous, bogus, fire light, I would have no choice but to make a dicey landing at Mildenhall AB, England that was just off our left wing. An engine fire demands you land expeditiously in case the fire cannot be extinguished. However, Mildenhall had a relatively short runway that would make landing my very heavy aircraft a demanding maneuver since it takes more runway to stop a heavy plane. Worse, the weather was abysmal, with low visibility and a direct crosswind near the limits of allowed conditions. But, if the engine was on fire, that is where I had to go. The report of a previous false indication, however, gave me an option. I thought for a moment, and then said to the crew: “Crew, pilot, we have no other indication of an engine fire except the fire light, which gave a false warning last flight. The engine temperature has dropped, there is no smoke from the engine, and there are no other indications that a fire actually occurred. Given that information, and the lousy weather at Mildenhall, I’m going to press on to Rhein Main AB, Germany (Frankfurt), an hour down the road, to take advantage of their long runway and good weather. Anyone have a problem with that?” No one answered, so at least I had five or six co-conspirators with me who could not say they thought it a bad idea at the time. It turns out it was a great idea because the fire light actually was another faulty indication, the weather at Frankfurt was clear, and we landed a lighter aircraft (due to fuel burn off) on a much longer runway.” (Excerpt from “Flying the Line, an Air Force Pilot’s Journey”, book three, not yet published. Book one web site: Saigon-tea).
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:59:32 +0000