Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [47]
Those who survived accidents often found ways to acknowledge to the rest of us that they had cheated an unkind fate. They had a bit of an aura about them.
There was a terrific pilot named Mark Postai who was stationed with me in England in 1976. He was a very smart, skinny guy in his mid-twenties, with dark hair and an olive complexion. He had majored in aeronautical engineering at the University of Kansas.
On August 14, 1976, Mark took off from runway 6 at RAF Lakenheath, heading to the northeast, and there was a thick forest off the end of the runway. He had a flight control malfunction that made the airplane unflyable, but he and his backseater were able to eject successfully before the plane crashed into the forest and exploded in a fireball. They survived, uninjured.
When Mark made it back to the base, someone told him: “You know that forest belongs to the Queen of England.”
He replied, with a smile, “Please tell the Queen I’m sorry I burned down half of her forest.”
Mark lived in the officers’ quarters assigned to bachelors, and a week or so after the accident, he invited us into his room for a party. “I want you guys to see something,” he told us.
Air Force personnel had searched the woods and found the ejection seat that had saved his life. In appreciation, Mark had put it on display in the corner of the room. “Go ahead, sit in it,” he said. We all had drinks in our hands—there was a nurse from the base in the room with us also, I recall—and it just seemed like a very appropriate thing to do, to plant ourselves in that seat and feel the magic. Maybe it offered us reassurance that an ejection seat might save our lives someday also.
Mark told us how it felt to eject, how his heart was pounding. We all knew the science behind ejection seats, of course. A sequence of events must happen to get you out of the jet. Once you pull the ejection handle, the canopy flies off. Then there’s a ballistic charge, which is similar to a cannon shell that catapults you out of the airplane. And once you get a certain distance from the aircraft, a rocket motor sustains you and keeps you moving with a slightly more gentle acceleration. After the rocket finishes firing, the parachute deploys itself. The seat falls away, and you parachute down to the ground.
That’s if all goes well, as it did for Mark.
The night of his party, he proudly showed us the letter he had received from Martin-Baker Aircraft Company Ltd., which billed itself as “a producer of ejection and crashworthy seats.” Evidently, they sent one of these letters to every pilot who had used one of their seats and lived. In the letter, they told Mark: “You were the 4,132nd person to be saved by a Martin-Baker ejector seat.” (The British say “ejector” instead of “ejection.”)
Like me, Mark’s next assignment back in the States was at Nellis, flying the F-4. Because of his skill as a pilot, and his engineering training, he was asked to be in a special “test and evaluation” squadron. The group operated in great secrecy. I figured he was flying stealth fighters.
Mark ended up marrying a young and very attractive woman named Linda. His life was coming together. And then one day, we got word that he had died in an accident. None of us knew what kind of plane he had been flying, but we were told that his death resulted from, of all things, an attempted ejection that had failed.
Only recently, more than two decades later, did I learn through the aviation magazine Air & Space what had happened to Mark. The article offered a look at how the United States worked to get inside knowledge about enemy planes during the cold war, especially Soviet MiGs. The story briefly touched on an American pilot who died ejecting from a MiG-23 in