Typhoon Diana, Desert Shield, Aug 1990 At times it seemed that the better a mission began the worse it eventually became. My most vivid example came in the very early days of Desert Shield on a 6,000 mile mission segment from Hickam AFB, Hawaii to U-Tapao AB, Thailand. In the middle of this fourteen-hour mission we became deathly entangled with developing Typhoon Diana, a storm we were not told anything about which had camped out over our only alternate air base on Guam. From a bright exotic beginning in tropical Hawaii we progressively flew into the clutches of one of nature’s most horrific events. Worse, as we arrived in the depths of the storm, with a full load of Marines and their equipment, we were out of gas with nowhere to land except in the roiling ocean beneath the storm. I had done nothing wrong and as I struggled with implications of our plight. I pondered how I had wound up in the most dire position I had ever experienced. Lord knows I got into enough fixes when it had been my fault, but I had made no mistakes this time. Yet now I was one bad break from near certain catastrophe. I also ruefully remembered a joke I had told my students as a C-5 instructor pilot: “If you are ditching at night and, when you turn on the landing lights, you see the face of a 60-foot wave coming at you, what do you do?” This always stumped the students until I gave the wise-ass answer: “You turn off the landing lights!” The flippancy of this humor now mocked me as I had to anticipate what my landing lights might reveal if I had to ditch in a Pacific typhoon. Eight hours west over the island of Guam we were scheduled to meet three KC-135 air refueling tankers to replenish our fuel load for the further six-hour flight to Thailand. This represented a challenge, even in good weather. Our training flights required us to get ten minutes “on the boom”, five with tanker autopilot-on, five with tanker autopilot-off. (Autopilot-off is about three times as demanding as autopilot-on because the tanker is no longer as stable a platform). This Guam refueling would take almost an hour of boom time, far beyond our normal practice requirement. We felt pretty well prepared for this. I had been air refueling for twenty years since, as a B-52 pilot in the 1970s, I had refueled on every mission. I had continued to carry air refueling qualification for ten years as a C-5 pilot. However, my copilot, Maj Pete Gray, was on his first flight after air refueling qualification. He had never done it for real, and now he’d get to perform in catastrophic conditions during a war his first time out of the chute. It was the luck of the draw for him, but it would take every ounce of effort from each of us when the time came. Mission planning at Hickam Base Operations the morning of the departure; we paid our required visit to the weather forecaster. He did not know the conditions around Guam, eight hours and almost 4,000 miles of ocean away, as intimately as he did the Hawaiian weather. He had to depend on Guam for their forecast and it called for “isolated thunderstorms”, almost a standard tropical condition. There were almost never zero thunderstorms, so “isolated” did not ring alarm bells. Several hours after our takeoff, however, the Guam forecaster issued the typhoon development warning for Guam and the surrounding area. We didn’t know this until three hours out of Guam, by which time it was too late to do anything about it. The first realization we had trouble came during an HF (High Frequency) radio call to the tankers on the ground at Andersen AFB, Guam, about three hours before our air refueling rendezvous. I found the lead aircraft commander (tanker lead) and told him we were on time for the refueling. In a somewhat strained voice he told me he didn’t know if they were going to get airborne or not. I looked at Pete as if I had misheard the transmission. Why would that be, I asked? The tanker pilot fairly pleaded that there were so many thunderstorms around the field he didn’t know if he could take off. The import of this hit me immediately: I told him: “If you can’t take off, how am I supposed to land? Because if you can’t meet me for air refueling, I must land almost immediately on Guam since I’ll be out of fuel. I’m barely going to make it as it is.” The tanker pilot assured me they would do everything in their power to get to us. They did. An hour out of Guam, and well after dark, we realized what the tanker pilots had hinted in their strained voices. It began as heavy static on our radios, a sign of static electricity in the air that increases in the vicinity of thunderstorms. Soon the storms were evident as well. Our weather radar screen painted progressive lines of intense thunderstorms ahead, the spiral arms of the developing typhoon. Had I been anywhere else in the world, I’d have turned around, but I couldn’t turn around. There was nothing to turn around to except empty ocean. As we tried to pick our way around the lines of storms we hit moderate turbulence that shook the plane and made it shudder randomly, occasionally buffeting us off our altitude. Then, the ghostly apparitions began -- St. Elmo’s fire. This glowing, clinging, static electric aura usually starts on the windshield wipers, cocooning them in a white, green, or blue halo effect. For us it appeared as stark white lightning bolt-shaped discharges on the windscreen, jagged multi-pronged miniature bolts that sizzled momentarily before the eyes before disappearing. St. Elmo’s fire is nature’s method of warning you to leave the area because severe convective activity is nearby, and it certainly was. Unfortunately, we had no choice but to continue deeper into the developing storm. Meanwhile, the three tankers floundered in the depths of the storm and suffered for it. On the common interplane frequency we heard their tense, shouted, radio calls as they attempted to evade the dozens of individual thunderstorm cells and still remain in a loose three-ship formation. I felt a deep affinity for them because they were risking disaster to save me when they could have legitimately stayed on the ground and let me fend for myself trying to land on Guam. I spoke with the lead tanker pilot forty years later and he said they had approached their aircraft in driving monsoon rain with ankle deep water on the ramp. I take back every tanker “toad” joke I ever told. They were flying down at the refueling altitude, 17,000 feet, which was near the freezing level and meant they had all the worst effects of the thunderstorms, from lightning to turbulence. We had finally gotten up to 33,000 and remained mostly above the storms that seemed to top out at 28,000. Even above the storms, however, we were taking a beating. Normal regulations forbid flying within twenty miles of a thunderstorm, yet all of us were thrashing around well within five miles of numerous storms. We had to. I don’t know if the tanker squadron commanders gave their pilots a waiver to do so, or if they just looked the other way, but war-time demands dictated we do this. The troops I carried had to reinforce our forces in Saudi Arabia as fast as possible, so all the stops came out to get them there. Tanker lead decided the scheduled air refueling track near Guam would be impossible to use, so he directed us 200 miles north of Guam where we hoped the air would be clearer and the storms less intense. This proved a fateful decision. While the storms were slightly less severe, it meant we had to get the gas from the tankers; if we could not, we would not have enough gas to return to Guam to land. I realized this later, I did not realize it then. Going north meant the air refueling might be a do-or-ditch event. The storms were slightly less numerous to the north, but the turbulence continued. Finally, the tanker cell approached us from the west and we relaxed somewhat. As the tankers closed to within 50 miles, however, we discovered a squall line of thunderstorms across the path between the tankers and us. Tanker lead invited me to descend to 17,000 feet to meet them. I told him, incredulously, there was no way I was descending into that line of storms, and that I’d meet him on the other side. We picked a low notch in the cloud tops and flew through. The tankers apparently miscalculated and made their 180 degree turn to our westerly heading near or within the squall line. Tense voices on the interplane frequency became shouts and near screams as the three aircraft lost sight of each other and were buffeted heavily by the storms. Somewhere in the mayhem they performed a cell formation breakup procedure, because when we all emerged on the west side of the storms the tankers were arrayed below us with ten miles lateral separation between them, the center tanker 16,000 feet directly below us. For what seemed like the fourth time in five minutes, the flight engineer reminded me of how little fuel we had. We were below 30,000 lbs, which sounds adequate, but is not. We always try to land with a minimum of 20,000 lbs since the gauges become unreliable below 16,000 lbs. and engine flameout can occur. Most troubling, we were still about 20,000 lbs. worth of fuel away from Guam. This would, indeed, be a ‘you-bet-your-ass’ refueling. I called the middle tanker, below me: “What number are you, in the middle?” He responded: “I’m tanker #2.” I said: “No, you are now tanker #1 and we are on the way down. Also, just to warn you, if we don’t get this gas right now, we are going swimming.” We swooped down through the ink black sky to prepare for the refueling contact. As we approached the pre-contact position 50-feet behind the tanker, the last bit of misfortune arrived. The boom operator said, “Ah, I hate to tell you this, MAC, but we don’t have our autopilot tonight. The other guys do, but we don’t, sorry.” I will fess up now that all this gave me a perverse glee. There are many things I cannot do well, but there is one I could, and that was air refueling. I had learned the essential secret as a B-52 pilot on active duty and had used this secret to often shame my fellow pilots behind the tanker. I was among the two or three most proficient air refueling pilots in the wing and I shamelessly showed off and hot-dogged on training flights, demanding to get my turn during weather, or when the tanker was maneuvering and the refueling more difficult. Still, even in my confidence, there could be trouble. Occasionally, the tanker or receiver air refueling system suffers a mechanical failure. For some failures, there is no remedy and there will be no air refueling. If this happened now, we were going swimming, no matter how big an air refueling hot-shot I thought I was. The rear end of the tanker, lit up in ghostly profile, hovered before us in the utter blackness like some sort of alien space ship, more ghostly chimera than airplane. In some ways it appeared to be a large manta ray with two radiant eyes that were the under-wing illumination lights of the tanker. Night refueling is more difficult than daylight because less of the tanker is visible and, therefore, fewer clues are provided about its relative movement. More unfortunate, the tanker made constant quick turns to avoid the storms which aggravated our job trying to stay with him. Finally I could put to use twenty years of practice. After all those scrimmages, it was now game time. The tanker shuddered and bounced in the turbulence in front of us. I aimed my eyes at the tanker’s director lights, but took the entire aircraft into my field of view and called “Stabilized, pre-contact.” (Excerpt from “Flying the Line, an Air Force Pilot’s Journey,” book two, not yet published. Book one web site: Saigon-tea.)
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 16:44:15 +0000
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