Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [41]
I figured we’d be back for dinner. Rescue missions were nothing new. We’d recently saved a B-25 crew after they’d sputtered out of gas and ditched in the ocean a couple hundred miles from Oahu. I spotted them with the Zeiss binoculars I’d bought at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. From the sky, bobbing rafts look like mounds of water to the naked eye. I saw not only the rafts but smoke from a flare. We flew closer, radioed in, and circled for an hour until the PBY—a navy flying boat—picked up the crew.
For some reason during the flight out, our copilot, Cupernell, wanted to change seats with Phil, who I’m sure didn’t give it a second thought because sometimes he’d also let me fly the plane so I could log hours and be used as a third pilot in case of emergency, or to cover for him and Cupernell after they’d had a hard night in Honolulu and no sleep. I didn’t party much because I wanted to stay in top shape. A beer or two, that was my style. On the other hand, they’d stagger in after hours and, once aloft, take turns curling up on the radio deck for a nap.
WE ARRIVED IN the downed plane’s vicinity to find cloud cover at one thousand feet. Phil dipped to eight hundred to get a better look and called me to the cockpit while we circled so I could scan the sea for wreckage or a life raft.
Suddenly the RPMs on our number one (left outboard) motor dropped radically. It shook violently, sputtered, and died. Phil called the engineer forward to feather the props. Blades normally face nearly flat to the wind so they can cut into the air and pull the plane forward. However, when a motor stops, those surfaces are like a wall and everything slows. Feathering means to turn the blades edge-on to the wind. Think of it this way: you’re in a car doing seventy miles per hour. Put your hand out the window, palm forward, and the wind will blow it back. Turn the edge of your hand to the wind, and it slices right through. Feathering is possible because we had variable-pitch propellers, allowing a different blade angle for takeoff, cruising, or when the motor stopped.
After the Nauru raid a new engineer had joined our crew, a green kid just over from the States. He was so eager to help that he rushed into the cockpit and feathered the left inboard (or number-two) motor by mistake—and it died. That old musher could barely fly with four motors and no bombs; suddenly we had two motors out, both on the same side.
At first we seemed to glide, then the plane shuddered and we dropped like a rock. Remember that we were at eight hundred feet, flying beneath the clouds. Even at one thousand feet you don’t have much chance to do anything in an emergency, particularly restart a motor. Before you know it you hit the ground—or in our case the water—and all that’s left is an oil-slick fire and debris. Still, I would gladly have taken the extra two hundred feet and a few more seconds to try and save ourselves.
We had neither.
When props go out, most pilots immediately compensate by increasing the power to the engines that still work. All our power was on the right wing, and to boost thrust would force the plane sharply to the left and push it in a circle, causing the dead side to drop while the live side climbed. Flyers in similar situations had been killing themselves like that for years until a test pilot named Tony Lavier figured out that if you lose power completely on one side, you had to decrease power to the good engines. Then you level out. It seems unnatural, but it works.
Phil could throttle back to keep the plane from yawing to the left, but the Green Hornet itself was in such miserable shape that the maneuver would simply make us drop faster because we had no lift.
Caught between two bad options, Phil had no right choice.
He increased power hoping that if we stayed aloft even a little longer he might regain control, restart the motor, or attempt a water landing. It was no use. The Green