"ONE OF MY MISSILES HAS FIRED!"

Air Classics, Aug 2004 by De Hare, Robert L

At 2400 Saturday, he took his last sip of water, wrapped himself up in his parachute, crawled under the raft, and went to sleep. he did not awake until about 0800 Sunday morning. he felt much better and made his way up a little hill, taking his mirror and radio with him and draped the rest of his parachute out in as wide a pattern as possible.

Then Capt. Obel heard the first sound of a C-47's engines. He signaled with the mirror and talked on the radio. The mirror did the trick.

Two hours after Capt. Obel's rescue on Sunday morning, positive identification was made of the body of Capt. Gineris at the Sandia Hospital.

It had been a grim three days.

There had been deep tragedy for three families. Small notes in the back pages of newspapers across the country spelled out the heartbreak - the simple epitaphs of courageous men who had died in the service of their country: "Funeral services for Capt. Peter J. Gineris, 30, were held at the St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Albuquerque..." "The body of Capt. Stephen Carter, 29, East Hartford, Connecticut, will be sent to Hartford..." "In lieu of flowers, Mrs. Particia Bair, widow of second Lt. Glenn V. Bair, requested that donations be made in her husband's name to Wasatch Academy, Mt. Pleasant, Utah... "

Sergeant Mieras, who had gone on the flight at the last moment, had suffered frostbite in his broken leg. His foot had to be amputated at Sandia Base Hospital.

The pilot of the F-100, Lt. James W. Van Scyoc, waited for the results of the official investigation. Hit hard by the tragedy, his condition approached a state of shock. He knew he hadn't fired the missile intentionally.

What human error or mechanical quirk had sent the bomber into oblivion?

For the Air Force and the nation this stacked-up as one of the worst of peace-time aerial mishaps, bad enough in itself and frightening in addition because of the questions it seemed to open about our missile defenses, about the Sidewinder, about air defense exercises that took place in the skies over the nation day after day.

But there also had been other factors.

Men had performed selflessly and heroically, many men - the doctors, the troopers, the convoy drivers, the Lee Ranch employees, the search pilots, and, especially, the helicopter crews - had braved death innumerable times in the face of brawling, churning winds, low ceilings, snow, and ice.

Finding Capt. Blodgett, Sgt. Singleton and Capt. Jackson, two of them badly injured - snatching them just in time from the path of the blizzard - had been great good fortune.

And it was also good fortune that Sgt. Mieras had found the line cabin, that no members of the search party had died in the lash of the gale, that Capt. Wheldon had looked back at just the right moment and that none of the searchers on foot or horseback had tripped one of the many cyanide pellet traps.

Several weeks later, Jim Van Scyoc was completely cleared of any responsibility for the accident. All his safety controls were in the proper position as the examination revealed. His two missiles had been programmed to fire in a certain sequence, and the second missile was the one that had let go. Major General Perry B. Griffith, USAF's Deputy Inspector General for Safety, released the official conclusions of the investigating board. The board found after the engineers at Albuquerque stripped down the firing circuits that the Sidewinder was accidentally launched by a theoretical impossibility. A tiny drop of moisture had seeped into an electrical circuit in the left wing of the F-100. The moisture, it was judged, caused a short circuit between the aircraft's main electrical power line and the missile firing circuit. The pilot was found blameless. The Sidewinder had, in effect, fired itself.