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Out of Control
Captain Brian Udell, an F-15E fighter pilot will acknowledge the anniversary of that fateful night without celebration because his Weapons Officer, Captain Dennis White, was killed during his ejection. Or he drowned after parachuting into a heavy sea at night.
Udell miraculously survived one of the fastest known ejections in history at 780 statute miles per hour. On the other hand, exposing his body to the impact of supersonic speed extracted a personal price.
On a pitch dark evening, Udell and White took off from Seymour-Johnson AFB, in a four-ship formation. Their F-15E's were missioned to fly out over the Atlantic, split into pairs, then turn and engage. " We'd turn around and come at each other like we were in a jousting match," said Udell.
But that dark night, they were to rely totally on the aircraft's internal radar to ensure they'd never fly dangerously close to the opposing F-15's.
Udell and White were in one of those turns when their tragic saga began. "I was reading my heads-up display, and it showed me in a 60-degree turn with my nose tilted 10 degrees down and going 400 knots at 4,000 feet. Perfect ," Udell said.
"But as we're in that 60-degree turn, I start hearing a wind rush . . sort of like when you've increased your speed down the highway . . and you have to turn up the radio's volume.”
“In a jet fighter, this kind of special sound usually comes when you're accelerating beyond 500 knots."
"Uncomfortable with the sound, I flipped on the Electronic Attitude Direction Indicator to verify if we were going up or down, making a turn, right side up or inverted, and our airspeed as well as the altitude.”
“And it says I'm pointed DOWN at a STEEP ANGLE at 600 plus knots . . rapidly picking up more knots."
Because he didn't know which set of instruments was telling the truth, Udell moved his controls . . back and forth. The electronic back up system he was looking was showing changes but the heads-up display was stuck . . completely.
“Like an enormous toy lawn dart, we were screaming toward the Atlantic in absolute darkness.”
"The minimum altitude before ejecting out of an out-of-control aircraft is 10,000 feet. And the maximum safe ejection using our ACES II ejection seat was 600 knots. So I had to make a quick decision."
"By this time we had penetrated 10,000 feet. And we were already exceeding 600 knots" on a pitch black night.”
I yelled to White : ' BAIL OUT ! . BAIL OUT ! '
While descending rapidly through 4,500 feet . . traveling faster than a rifle bullet . . White ejected.
Then passing through just 3,000 feet headed down at more than 780 mph . . Udell punched.
" I made the decision to bail out at 10M. I got into good body position and pulled the ejection handles passing through 6M. I left the aircraft at 3M. Just below 1M my parachute opened," he said, taking a deep breath.
"I've crunched the numbers. If I'd waited for another half second, I would have impacted the water in the seat," he added [ as he clapped his hands together in a ' pop ' that echoed across the room. ]
As Udell floated down to a wave-tossed swell system of high-seas. Later, he couldn't recall the granite-hard shock wave as his body dealt with the sound barrier. Memory of the 3 seconds that his unprotected 190 pound body slammed through nearly solid air had been mercifully erased from his brain.
Now, slowly descending under a good chute, Udell felt as though he'd been hit by a speeding train. His helmet and oxygen mask were ripped off his head. His gloves and watch were ripped off his hands. And his wallet and a water bottle were propelled right through the bottoms of his G-suit pockets. Beneath his flight suit, his T-shirt had been shredded. It was interesting to later observe Udell's shoes laces that were tightly imbedded in the leather of his flight boots.
Udell had no clue to the extent of his injuries, and began going through his post-ejection checklist. "You check the parachute canopy to make sure it's deployed properly ," said Udell. " I wasn't dropping like a rock, I figured it must be OK. And there was no visor or oxygen mask to be concerned with since my entire helmet had been sucked off."
He attempted to inflate his life preserver, but it had been shredded in the ejection. He figured he'd better reel in his life raft [ that automatically deploys during ejection ] to ensure he had some kind of flotation device when entering the water. That's when he discovered his left arm was injured. He hauled in the raft with his teeth and right arm. "Just about the time I got my hand on the raft, I hit the water."
His struggle to get into the raft then began.
He'd been trained in different techniques to board the one-man rubber dingy. But with two arms and two legs. He was down to ONE LIMB . . even if that ONE LIMB HAD ALSO BEEN pulled loose and DISLOCATED with the other three . . but had somehow twisted around and managed to' pop ' back into place. A minor miracle had taken place within his small world containing a partially-shredded Mae West life vest.
After making several unsuccessful attempts, before he simply stopped struggling and started praying. "This was not - put-your-hands-together-and-bow-your-head-praying," Udell said candidly. "This was face-to-face, ' Hey, God . . I need your help' kind of praying."
He gave it one more try.
In heavy seas, he somehow managed to inch his way onto the tiny boat. Sitting inside, he had his right leg straight out in front of him except for the part below the knee dangling at an obscene 90-degree angle over the ' I hope there's not a shark side.'
With his single good arm he grabbed the lower leg and jerked it into the raft. It flopped 180 degrees in the other direction. He adjusted it until the entire limb pointed the same direction.
Then he did the same for his left ankle that had twisted around 180 degrees in another direction. " There was just nothing fastening them all together and the skin around them was distended out of proportion," he said, shaking his head.
Once he had crudely immobilized both useless legs and his useless left arm, Udell searched his 6-foot 1 frame for other injuries. Finding nothing life-threatening he let his training take over and clicked into a prevent-a-shock mentality. Then out of an emergency pack he drank some water and considered efforts to get warmer.
" When the raft deploys, only the main donut ring inflates," he explained. " The raft's bottom and the side spray shields must each be manually inflated. Otherwise, I'm still hanging down in the water, and the waves were crashing over me."
At that point, chilled to the bone, Udell tried to inflate the bottom section of the raft. "But when I first put the inflation tube in my mouth and tried to blow, I couldn't create a seal around the tube," he said. " I reached up and touched my face for the first time and it felt like a dish of kid's Play Dough. My lips were especially deformed. During the ejection, some blood vessels and underlying soft tissue in my face had burst and my whole face had no definition."
Despite his desperate situation, he laughed when considered that he looked like Mush Mouth in a Fat Albert cartoon. "I stuck the tube back in my mouth," he said, still chuckling. " but the only way I could get a seal around the tube was to hold it between my teeth then clamp my fingers of my one good around my lips. My lips protruded beyond my hand's first three fingers, so they were hanging out there pretty far."
Udell inflated the bottom of the raft, and finally puffed up the spray shields. And after bailing out water with plastic bags from his survival kit, he finally began to warm." I was exhausted and wanted to sleep . . but was afraid I'd never wake up again," he said.
Meanwhile, the three other F-15E crews, incredibly had managed to pinpoint the crash site [within two miles] based on his last radio communications. The Coast Guard was on the way.
Udell spent four hours in the night water before a Coast Guard helicopter found him. Even though his bulging lips could barely form the syllables, Udell kept hollering out to the empty sea for his flightmate: " DENNNNNNISSS ! " ... No answer. He also thought of his wife, Kristi who was four months pregnant with their first kid.
Clumsily energizing an emergency radio, he directed the Coast Guard helicopter to his location. " Because I didn't want the rotor wash to knock me out of the raft, I asked them not to hover too close," he said. Aviation Survivalman Jim Peterson fished Udell out of the raft and fastened him into a litter.
"The downed pilot was in a lot of pain. He just bit his lip and dealt with it," Peterson said. "I even accidently bumped his legs a few times, but he never complained. Considering that he was all busted up . . he was a very strong man."
Later, Udell admitted, he was so weakened by his exertion in the cold water he'd had difficulty even depressing the button on his emergency radio.
And now cold struck again. " When he [ Peterson ] secured me in the litter, the helicopter flew overhead and lowered its winch, its rotors kicked up the wind and waves, and spray that felt like steel needles were hitting and gave an additional chill. Then they got me up inside. . . I certainly owe those rescue guys a lot."
Once in the helicopter, the Coast Guard rescue crew rushed the downed pilot to the nearest hospital. " When I arrived at the hospital, it seemed like 20 or 30 doctors and female nurses surrounded me," Udell said.
" Within seconds I was buck naked. And all I could think about was that good ol' mom's advice : ' Brian . . make sure you have clean underwear on. Because you never know when you'll be in an accident.' "
Soon an orthopedic surgeon walks in. He looks at the X-ray. " Right knee dislocated . .left ankle broken . . left arm dislocated," the doctor said.
”I'm thinking, 'All right Doc . . hit me with that pain medication, please.' "
Udell said wistfully. "But without a hi, hello or how are you, that doctor walks up to me, grabs my right knee.
And POP !
He snaps it back into place. As I start screaming, he goes to my left ankle, POP ! I'm screaming even louder. Then he takes my left arm , POP !
The doctors finally administered morphine, and I slipped into a happier place. "
Kristi Udell arrived in the hospital emergency room just as her husband began wailing in anguish, But a doctor explained what was going on. Kristi said, "When I saw him, he looked vaguely familiar," shuddering at the thought. "His face was puffed up to the size of a basket-ball. And he had a gash that extended across one of his eyes."
He asked, "How do I look ?"
" Great !" she lied.
In addition to his mangled face and broken and dislocated limbs .. he had a gash across his chest .. broken rib ..the back of his right thigh was stitched together after having been slashed open .. both naked arms grotesquely black and blue .. and various other scrapes, cuts and bruises maligned his entire body.
On the other hand . . he was ALIVE !
The Udells were told that White didn't make it. The violent forces during his ejection had killed him instantly. Still choking up at White's memory, Udell said : "That was a depressing time for me. I had held up pretty good until then. However, when I found out he was gone and left behind a wife and two kids . . I kinda lost it."
Doctors gave Udell additional morphine to help him sleep. Unfortunately, the drug seemed to cause unpleasant dreams. " I dreamt someone jumped on my leg, and the dream was so real it caused me to jerk so hard in reaction, that I popped my left knee back out of its socket." Because his left leg was already in a cast, it wasn't until three days later that doctors discovered the knee dislocated had a second time. " My kneecap was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and laid over to the side kind of funny," Udell said. Various tendons and ligaments in the left knee had been torn apart, so nothing held his knee in place.
It slipped out of joint three more times before they managed to stabilized it.
After four surgeries and with six stainless steel screws in each leg, Udell began intensive physical therapy and his trek . . to walk . . and perhaps even fly again. Nearly two months after the accident, Udell took a first step.
By the sixth month, he felt he was ready to fly again .. it was something nobody had thought possible. And ten months after the injury, after going through a battery of tests and getting waivers for the metal screws, Udell flew again. On his second flight, he zoomed over the same area where he crashed.
"I was just so excited getting back in the cockpit and I was so busy, I didn't occur to me to get scared," said Udell, whose father, retired Air Force pilot, began teaching him how to fly when he was 9.
"Love to fly . . it is all I've ever wanted to do."
[ abridged from private source ]
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