I do this silly thing on X (Twitter) that I call “Buzz’s Bedtime Stories.” I tell stories about my life experiences. And I’ve had some blessed experiences. Some are about my military flying over the years, but most are about my experiences working for the Clinton White House. I thought I’d bring them to RedState. This is one of my favorites, and it’s the time I probably should’ve died. It’s a flying story, so don’t get too excited. The Clintons are soon! Snuggle up, get comfy, put on your pajamas, and let “Uncle Buzz” tell you a story before you drift off.
When I was the Operations Officer for a USAF C-141 squadron at Travis AFB, CA, we had a regular mission we called the “Coral Run,” where we flew to Hawaii, Johnston Atoll, Midway Island, and back to Honolulu. This mission, unlike some, was mostly moving personnel, logistical support, and food. It was a long day, and mostly in the middle of the night, island to island. It was also normally a lot of fun. We were supposed to spend that night at Midway before returning to Hawaii the next day, and we were looking forward to it, but not this night.
On our final approach to Midway at midnight, we hit severe turbulence at about 200 feet and ingested goony birds into two engines. They were bouncing off our cockpit and fuselage, too. I could see the faces of the goony birds in my windscreen. We were also getting hammered by the turbulence and rain. We lost one engine completely and the other was severely degraded but still operating at about 50 percent of capacity. I immediately initiated a go-around, and we climbed out to run checklists and assess the damages.
On the climb out, in addition to being down an engine and a half, we realized we’d also lost our dual inertial navigation systems (INS), the only means of reliably navigating back to Honolulu. These were pre-GPS aircraft navigation days. On the other hand, the weather was too bad to try to approach Midway again. I decided we needed to divert back to Honolulu, with better weather and maintenance capabilities, regardless of what we had left.
Initially, our only immediate option was to ask for a “DF steer” on the HF radios from Honolulu Center. Basically, we’re down to an archaic WWII technology means of picking up a radio signal and trying to “dead reckon” for about three more hours of flight.
In an absolute God thing, while I was wrestling our 300,000-pound beast into the sky, my flight engineer, “Smitty,” piped in on the interphone. Smitty happened to be an avid fisherman and just happened to have an original Garmin GPS in his helmet bag. He says, “Hey, will this work, boss?” I said, “F**k yeah, let’s give it a shot. Punch in HNL and give me a heading!” Approximately three hours later, based on Smitty’s GPS that we’d taped to the instrument panel, we picked up the islands and landed safely back in Honolulu. Sometimes, you feel God’s hand on your shoulder. We certainly did. Smitty hasn’t paid for a beer since.
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