Punching out beyond mach

Flight Journal, Feb 2002 by Gudaitis, Frank

August 4, 1953, is a day Capt. Arthur Ray Hawkins will never forget. Having lived through 142 conibat missions flying from carriers in the

Pacific and another 47 more with Fighter Squadron 191 in Korea, he was no stranger to flying in harm's way. Consequently, very little could have frightened him as much as what occurred on that midsummer day.

Hawkins, the leader of the Navy's Blue Angels flight demonstration team, and five other Blue Angels pilots were at the Grumman plant in Bethpage, Long Island. They had come to pick up some new Grumman F9F-6 Cougar airplanes. These Navy fighters were sweptwing versions of the straightwing F9F-5 Panthers, which they were replacing. The Cougars had other improvements. Hawkins never imagined that one of these improvements would nearly kill him that day.

The new, F9F-6, Cougars had a "flying tail." The horizontal stabilizer could be moved up or down to improve handling; this worked particularly well at high altitudes. But it was that "improvement" that malfunctioned on his Cougar and almost did Hawkins in.

The pilots familiarized themselves with their new mounts, flight-tested them, departed Bethpage and headed south for their home base, NAS in Corpus Christi, Texas. Their crosscountry flight took them to the Sewart Air Force Base in Smyrna, Tennessee, for lunch and refueling. Thus far, the flight had been uneventful. After lunch, they took off for the Lone Star State. Climbing to 40,000 feet, Hawkins had no indication of impending disaster. The controls felt a little loose, although that was to be expected at this high altitude, and he noticed that his plane's nose had dropped a little below the horizon. Usually, a slight pull-back on the control stick would level it off, but not this time. By now, he and the others were flying in line abreast somewhere over Mississippi. The nose of his Cougar continued to pitch down, and he then tried to adjust the elevator trim tab. Nothing! The nose continued to pitch down.

His dive now increased in angle and speed. He moved the trim tab until he had a full 15 degrees nose-up; the dive became steeper and faster. On the radio, he heard his teammate Lt. Wallace Rich yell, "There goes Hawk; he's in trouble."

Going into the first part of an outside loop, centrifugal force pulled him out of his seat. Not sure of what was wrong, he had very little time to react. Rapidly checking his instruments, he saw that his engine was delivering 90 percent power. When he applied more power, the gauge read 95 percent. That was not the problem! The dive angle was now around 35 degrees, and the airspeed increased.

He cut the power, dropped air brakes and activated the emergency trim tabs; all had no effect. He noticed that he had already passed Mach 1.0 and that the dive angle had increased to 50 degrees. His plane was now vertical, and the centrifugal force pushed him up against the canopy. A red haze began to affect his vision-the first stage of an impending redout. His last hope was to switch on the flying tail, apply full nose up-trim and input full pressure on the control stick. After switching on the flying tail, he was upside-down, hanging in his seatbelt harness. He knew he had to bail out, but he was unable to reach down to the lever to release the canopy. An emergency ejection-seat curtain near his head would arm the ejection seat, but it would not release the canopy. He had no other choice; he would have to fire himself out through the canopy! His vision was dimming and he would soon be unconscious.

He was now hanging four or five inches off the seat, and the ejection charge came up and hit him like a pile driver. Down he went, through the canopy-a desperate human traveling faster than the speed of sound.

After a brief blackout, he regained consciousness, reached for his ripcord handle and started to open his chute, but even in his groggy state, he realized that opening it at this speed would tear it to shreds. While tumbling over and over and moving forward, he soon found himself sitting upright in his seat. There he was, above 30,000 feet without oxygen; the force of the air had ripped away his helmet and his oxygen mask. He realized that he must free-fall as quickly as possible to reach air he could breathe. The lack of oxygen was graying him out. He knew that if he blacked out, he might not regain consciousness in time to open his parachute.

At around 29,000 thousand feet, he left his seat and pulled the ripcord. The chute opened with a shock so great he thought it had ripped into pieces, but it was intact. He then thought about the overall condition of his body: he was the first Navy pilot to be fired through the canopy. Navy tests made with dummies had resulted in many with their feet torn off, heads smashed in and legs shattered. Gratefully, he discovered that his head seemed to be OK and that his feet were still attached to his legs.

The immediate problem was a lack of oxygen. His vision was fading away. He heard a Blue Angels jet circle him, but he was too grayed out to see it. He felt the intense cold and at last blacked out. In intermittent moments of consciousness, he remembered something from his Navy flight training called "grunt breathing." In the event of a high-altitude bailout, you were instructed to take deep breaths, close your mouth and grunt hard. Doing so would increase the pressure on the air in your lungs and would force oxygen into your blood.