gkainz
Final Approach
got in an email today - I suspect a quick google search could turn up more info ... but it's a good read as is, in my opinion... Wow!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 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 about 600 knots [
nearly 700 mph ] . rapidly picking up more speed."
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, they 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
unprotected 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 embedded 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
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 it's not the 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 himself 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 could not 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 hand 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
flight mate: " 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 Survival man Jim Peterson fished Udell out
of the raft and fastened him into a litter. "He was in a lot of
pain, but he just bit his lip and dealt with it," Peterson said. "I
even accidentally 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 old 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 to myself : 'All right Doc . . pain medication, please
! "
Udell said wistfully. "But without a 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,"
and shuddered at the thought. "His face was puffed up to the size of
a basketball. 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 snapped out of joint
three more times before they managed get it stabilized.
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, he took his 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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 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 about 600 knots [
nearly 700 mph ] . rapidly picking up more speed."
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, they 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
unprotected 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 embedded 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
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 it's not the 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 himself 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 could not 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 hand 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
flight mate: " 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 Survival man Jim Peterson fished Udell out
of the raft and fastened him into a litter. "He was in a lot of
pain, but he just bit his lip and dealt with it," Peterson said. "I
even accidentally 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 old 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 to myself : 'All right Doc . . pain medication, please
! "
Udell said wistfully. "But without a 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,"
and shuddered at the thought. "His face was puffed up to the size of
a basketball. 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 snapped out of joint
three more times before they managed get it stabilized.
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, he took his 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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
