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"Tower to Seven-seven on approach: Your number three engine is on fire!": "Seven-seven to tower: Really?" by Martin Rush 767th Bomb Squadron The mission was to have been our third sortie. Intelligence described it as a "milk run" to Yugoslavia, and I was flying co-pilot. We had run our second mission three days before, and had logged four hours and thirty-five minutes on it. We logged three hours and thirty-five minutes on this one, but since we didn't get to the target, we didn't get any credit for it. We took off in turn, and slowly climbed to the formation where we took our place in the seven plane box. Nowadays, when I'm on a commercial flight and am pushed back into my seat by the force of those big engines that drive those heavy planes straight up into the high altitudes, I remember how painfully weak our old-fashioned windmill engines were. They barely got us off the ground by the end of the runway, and the long, labored process of chasing the swarm of planes we were trying to catch and join. My pilot was Bob Hess, whose bodily configuration earned him the sobriquet of "Satch" (short for satchel-ass), for the size of his beam, and of course, only behind his back. He laughed once when one of the boys referred to his derriere and said, "Well, you can't drive a spike with a tack hammer." We made fun of him, but we respected him for his expertise. He had been an old hillside pilot back in Pennsylvania, and told of having landed with pontoons on freshly wet grass once in an emergency. Later, he died as he would have wanted to. He stayed in the Air Corps after the war, and blew up in a B-29 on a training flight out in California. Every flight was for him a high adventure, and if the rest of us were pretty scared, he bolstered our spirits by his insistence on doing everything strictly according to regulations. We had slipped into our place in the formation, and I was concerned about the number three engine, which was just outside my window. I had synchronized the props, first by tachometers, then finer synchronization by changing prop pitch until you got rid of the changing shadows seen by sighting through the two props on the left, then the two props on the right. Final synchronization was by killing the sound "beat" of the two left props being a little off timing from the right. If you listened, you could hear a varoom-varoom-varoom. I would then speed up or slow down the right pair to sound-synch with the left with gentle nudges on the pitch of the props, resulting in the sweet smooth roar of our well-synchronized engines. I'm pretty hard of hearing now, and I like to attribute it to my glory days as a B-24 pilot and co-pilot. Well worth it to have had such a once-in-a-lifetime privilege. That number three engine, just outside my right-side window, sounded rough. It vibrated, to my ear, and didn't sound right. As we climbed up to altitude, the exhaust stream hitting the little bucket wheels locked into the supercharger on the bottom of the engine made a funny vibrating sound. When I leaned over and touched Hess's arm and directed his ear to the engine, he shouted in my ear, so we were not on the intercom and would perhaps spook the crew, "One of the buckets from the bucketwheel has been thrown off." I knew that this meant that one of the little cigarette-sized coffin-shaped boxes locked into the finely balanced supercharger wheel was gone, and so the wheel, which whirled several thousand revolutions per minute to pump extra oxygen to the engine in the thin altitude, would be vibrating, worse every minute. "Cut off the supercharger to that engine. It'll tear hell out of the engine if you don't. We'll fly her on three and a half engines." It was too late. One of the gunners called up and said, "We're dripping raw gasoline off the number three engine." I called back and said, "Thanks." The vibration had torn loose a gas line. Hess motioned me to lean over to him, and shouted, "We'd better go home." He called the Group Leader and notified him we were aborting, although we were half-way across the Adriatic. I was thinking about how twenty minutes was all you could count on if you had to ditch this time of year in the chilly water below us. We rolled out of formation, and headed back for the Gargano Promontory, the spur of Italy's boot. From there we would be able to see Mount Volture, and a direct line to it led over the airstrip. Despite a leaking gas line, the engine was still putting out power. As we got down to lower altitude, the other engines lost their advantage from the supercharger and number three was carrying its full load. We entered the landing pattern downwind, did two right angle turns and got on the approach. As we did so, Hess cut back on power to let us sink down for the landing and all four engines burped out a little ball of flame. This was a normally harmless event called "torching." Unfortunately, the number three engine, just outside my window, was dripping hundred octane gasoline off the trailing edge of the wing. The whole engine was suddenly a roaring ball of flame. The tower called us to say our right inboard engine was on fire, and I felt like being sarcastic, if I hadn't been so busy. The only thing between me and all that roaring flame was a thin quarter-inch-thick sheet of Plexiglas window. The heat coming through the glass would have fried an egg. The next six minutes may be the longest six minutes I will ever experience in my life. The aircraft checklist had a special segment under "In case of fire during flight," as I remember it. It started out with cutting out all electrical power to the engine, then cutting off all fuel, both by shutting off pumps and closing fuel lines. About then it said to activate the fire extinguisher, a handle down on the floor which I had looked at and touched experimentally, but never otherwise bothered. Now was the time. I reached down and gave it a smart tug, and since I couldn't feel anything happening through the cable, I just kept pulling, and it came dangling out on the floor in my hand. The fire at my right shoulder was burning cheerily away, and it never wavered from the effect of the fire extinguisher, that I could notice. I remember wondering if it was simply a handle to pull to make you feel better, like the "window" (chaff), the little spaghetti sized pieces of tin foil our gunners threw out by the handfuls through the open windows to confuse the enemy radar. I was told later that it had little or no effect on the radar, but was very reassuring to our crew when we were in the midst of enemy flak. It gave them something to do. Well, during that interminable six minutes, I seemed to have a lot to do. Feather the prop (my first time for that, too). Then suddenly we were whistling into another greased landing by our superb pilot, who had full flaps down to slow us up. We were strewing gunners the whole length of the runway. One at a time, like paratroopers, they dove through the rear belly door, rolling as they hit. Like us, they were mindful of the full load of bombs in our bomb bay, which with the right wing on fire, was a bad combination. As soon as we came to a stop, I had my usual checklist to run, and suddenly, as always when I get into a task, I was all alone. All switches off, cowlings open, all auxiliary engines turned off, and on and on. And outside my window by my shoulder that crazy fire was still roaring away. Finally I got to the item which read, "Replace checklist on hook." As I hung it up, I thought it sure is lonely in here. Everybody's gone and I'm all alone. I unfastened my seat belt and getting ready to get out, looked to my left, and there sat Hess, that big stupid lovable Pilot, patiently watching me. "What in the hell are you doing here?" I hollered nervously. "I thought you'd be gone." "I'm the goddamed pilot of this aircraft. I'm the last one to leave. Get your ass out of here before it blows." With him behind me, I squeezed between the seats and out through the bomb bays and all those armed bombs. As we ran awkwardly away with our parachutes bumping our legs, the spray wagons came roaring up and began to douse the fire with sudsy foam. Meadows, our gutsy Engineer, stood there defiantly squirting the inferno with a little hand held extinguisher, until Hess threatened to court martial him if he didn't move away with us. By the time we were a hundred yards away, we looked back over our shoulders and we could see the fire was snuffed out. We paused, and as the big I-beam in the wing melted through, the right wing majestically folded, lowering the right engines to the ground. As we stood there looking at the ruined aircraft, I asked Hess, "What are we doing off the runway? How come we're here out on the grass? As though I was a stupid little child, he answered patiently, "We're out on the grass because I ran us out on the grass. If we'd blown up on the runway, it would have made it impossible for anybody else to land." Oh of course, why didn't I think of that. Small wonder that they promoted him to Operations Officer, which left our crew without a pilot, and so I was checked out in the left seat and became the pilot. Actually, I sort of liked it better being second in command. When you're the pilot, they make you sign a receipt for the airplane every time before you leave the ground on a mission. That way if anything happens to it, it's your responsibility, and you owe the government or somebody two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a missing airplane. Part of my mind was worrying about that, along with everything else, on all the missions after that. I kind of liked having Hess be in charge. He was a heck-of-a good guy. Come to think of it, we were all, rather wonderful back in those glorious days, weren't we? |
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