by Phil Rowe
Our vintage B-25 Mitchell bomber droned toward El Paso in the clear west Texas sky. The view of El Capitan, Texas' highest peak, just to the north, was awesome, viewed from my front seat in the glassed nose of that ancient craft. It was a great day to be flying.
As a second lieutenant, fresh out of flight school, I was logging navigator flying time. Four hours a month was the required minimum to qualify for that extra $100 pay. Flight pay was a big part of my budget and I'd go to great lengths to earn it. This time I was grossly underpaid.
The right engine coughed intermittently, but I paid little heed. I was busy practicing my skills on the Norden bombsight. That WWII era, once-highly classified aiming device, served me now as a drift measuring instrument and ground speed computer.
The noises from the engine were not really unusual. B-25's made them all the time. Suddenly, I felt the plane lurch to the left. It was all I could do to hold onto the bombsight without being thrown off my stool. Next, I was sitting on the floor, slammed hard against the side of the fuselage. Something was seriously wrong. We were only 6,000 feet above the desert floor. Everything was turning around, spinning rapidly. We descended, twisting headlong toward the ground. This was serious.
My only escape was aft, through the crawl-way that passed under the cockpit. I'd try to make it to the belly hatch, located just behind the pilots' seats. I had to get to that hatch. We only had a few minutes before running out of altitude.
Above me the pilots struggled to regain control, to stop that spin and pull out in time. That coughing engine, which I had dismissed as just making normal noises, suddenly quit and before we knew it the plane was in a violent spin. We were spiraling toward disaster. I scratched and clawed my way aft, g-forces from the whirling aircraft holding me back. It was also an upward climb, because we were nose-down, descending rapidly. Fortunately, I was able to get one foot against a fuselage rib. I pushed hard with that foot and pulled mightily on the rib just ahead of me.
Slowly, I made progress. All I could think about was getting to that hatch, snapping the chest-pack parachute onto the harness I wore, and getting out before it was too late.
Nobody told me anything of our troubles over the intercom, before I left my stool by the bombsight. And now I was off interphone. No clue of what was really happening came from the pilots. I was on my own.
After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only a minute or so, I made it to the flooring just aft of the two pilots. I stood up, holding onto their seat backs to keep from falling again. The hatch was right behind me and was my next objective.
Just as I turned to lift the inner hatch cover, before pulling the hatch release handle to open my escape route, the copilot yelled at me.
"Hold it, Phil. Don't go."
He waved his left hand to signal me forward. I felt the airplane gradually become steady. We weren't spinning any more, and the ground wasn't racing up at us as fast.
"I've got it," the pilot yelled. "Hang on, boys."
Sure enough, with the ground just 1000' below us, our pilot indeed recovered from that frightening spin. I was a nervous wreck. I slumped on the floor, trying to regain my composure, then closed the inner hatch cover and sat there.
"C'mon up here onto the IP seat, Phil," the co-pilot suggested. "Look off to the right. We'll land there at Biggs in a couple minutes. Better strap in."
Biggs Air Force Base, just northeast of El Paso became our unplanned destination. We'd land there and get that engine fixed. Getting my feet on 'terra firma' sounded pretty good.
On the one good engine, our pilot flew us in to a smooth landing. He kept the speed up a little as we turned off the active runway and careened toward the ramp. It's hard to steer that bird on the ground on just one engine. You need a bit of forward momentum to negotiate the drive across the tarmac.
We made it, after a flight I'll never forget. My four hours for flight pay that month came the hard way.
Who was it that said, "Flying is really hours and hours of boredom, broken only by moments of stark terror" ?