It seemed like a hundred times that I'd glanced at my fuel gauge hoping to see more instead of less fuel. But this time the needle was resting on ZERO. I knew that it could only be a few more minutes, or perhaps seconds, before my engine would flame out. For the umpteenth time I mentally went through the ejection procedure. "Head back against the headrest; feet in the stirrups; raise the handles to jettison the canopy, and squeeze the trigger. Unfasten the seat belt and kick the seat away. Pull the 'LD' ring and pray the chute opens!" I decided that when the engine started winding down, I'd use what airspeed I had to `zoom' from the 1000 feet we were flying at, to closer to the recommended eject altitude of 5000 feet.
It was the Summer of 1955, and my squadron, the 311th Fighter Bomber Squadron, had recently deployed from our base at Osan, Korea, to Taiwan. As I remember it, the Communist Chinese were threatening the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan. In fact, the Communists were routinely shelling the offshore islands of Matsu and Quemoy. President Eisenhower wanted a U.S. presence in the area and fighter squadrons from throughout the Far East were being rotated on a two-week schedule into an old Japanese-built air base near the village of Chiai on the western side of the island and only a few miles from the Taiwan Strait.
It was a sleepy afternoon in the middle weekend of our deployment. The base was actually shut down for the day. How much so, I wouldn't learn until later. The day before, Saturday, our Operations Officer, Capt. Lou Weber, asked me if I'd like to fly his wing on a cross-country to Clark Field just north of Manila. He had some paperwork to deliver and we'd spend the night at Clark. The prospect of sleeping in a real bed at a BOQ, and spending Saturday evening in a real officer's club stag bar was very inviting. Also, a young 2nd balloon fighter pilot couldn't resist an offer like that from his boss.
All had gone quite well. The trip down to the Philippines on Saturday was uneventful, and the flight back to Taiwan on Sunday afternoon started out with beautiful clear skies. However, soon after crossing the southern tip of Taiwan, we had a solid undercast of clouds. Not to worry. The clouds appeared to be at 5000 feet or so. We proceeded on a direct course for Chiai. When our time and distance suggested that we were near the base, neither of us could receive the radio beacon. Also, our calls to the tower were not being answered. Very soon, it became evident that when the Nationalist Chinese shut down a base, they went home for the day! Because the Americans were standing down for the day, there were no U.S. personnel on duty either.
We quickly realized that we were (1) somewhere over the west coast of Taiwan (we could see mountains sticking through the clouds east of us); (2) we were flying over an undercast of unknown depth; (3) we didn't have enough fuel to go anywhere else; and (4) there was no one to talk to but each other. That's when I really got interested in the fuel gauge. Needless to say, Lou was taking considerable interest in both our fuel gauges. There was no point in holding at altitude over a place we couldn't accurately identify. Besides, sooner or later we were going to descend, either under power, glide, or by parachute. This was the first of many times that I'd review the ejection procedure.
We decided (actually Lou decided and I agreed) to penetrate the cloud deck toward the water and return to the coast under the clouds, hoping to find something we'd recognize near the base. There was a gunnery range on the shore we'd been using all week and felt we could find. From there we'd go direct to the field. All the time, we're both making blind calls on the emergency frequency hoping someone with some radar would hear us. We got under the clouds and were pretty much in the clear at around 1000 feet. We got to the coast pretty quickly but weren't having much luck finding anything we could recognize. Besides hanging onto Lou's wing, I too was trying to see something I might know, and of course I couldn't keep from glancing at that pesky fuel gauge. It wasn't getting any better!!!
I was so busy that I missed a radio frequency change that Lou had signaled. We were back in the clouds and I had just noticed the fuel gauge was on empty. As I was tightening my harness and thinking "Bail Out!", Lou gave me the hand signal to lower my flaps. I didn't like that. I had no idea what he was thinking, but getting the air-plane `dirty' was going to cost me altitude that I wanted for bailing out.
Trusting Lou's judgment (after all I was just a wingman), I lowered the flaps. Now he gave me `Gear down!' This really blew my mind. Then I realized that I hadn't heard anything on the radio for several minutes. Frantically, I started pushing frequency buttons. On the third button I heard a voice calmly say, "You're on the centerline, on the glide slope. You're one quarter mile from touchdown. You should have the runway in sight and you're cleared to land." And there it was, right in front of us - the most beautiful stretch of concrete I'd ever seen!
Apparently, the sergeant who ran the mobile GCA unit we'd brought with us to Taiwan, had heard us flying around and sensed that we might need some help getting down. He'd gone over and fired up the unit and caught Lou on one of our frequency changes that I had missed. He found us just in time, and like an angel, had delivered us to that gorgeous runway.
When my airplane was refueled in the next morning, the mechanic said it took only 8 gallons less than what the manual said was maxi-mum fuel capacity! I figured that to be about one minute of flight. NO SWEAT!
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from the President of the F-86 Sabre Pilots Association or the editor of Sabre Jet
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