LE F T: Survivors
of the Flying
Tiger crash are
shown at the rail
of rescue ship
Celerina, Sept.
28, 1962, as it
neared Antwerp,
Belgium.
R I G HT: A circa
1962 Super H
Constellation
fuel dumping and
firewall junction
box (located at a
flight engineer’s
workstation).
tion, velocity, or height, Murray said he intended to
f ly into the wind, toward the swells, and touch down
between two of them. His colleagues were perplexed.
The manual read: “Never land into the face of a swell
or within 45 degrees of it.” These same instructions
were also in all the Navy tip sheets, Flight Safety
Foundation bulletins, Air Line Pilots Association
newsletters, and Civil Aeronautics Board accident
reports. Murray explained: “In almost every ditch-
ing training session, after a discussion of why it’s
better to land parallel to the swells, there’d always
be an old-time f lying-boat captain who landed
his Sikorsky or Boeing into the swells.” The Coast
Guard’s instructions were “sensible in theory,” he
added, but they didn’t apply to Connie’s unprece-
dented situation. Because Murray felt the stiff winds
at sea level would cut his speed and minimize side-
ways drift, the Flying Tiger captain said he intended
to ditch like the f lying-boat captains.
Where to touch down was the next question, but
a “height perception illusion,” unique to ditching,
hindered Murray’s vision. For the human eye to pro-
cess inputs, it needs a canvas of crisp, discrete focal
points on which to paint a comprehensible picture.
Seldom is this a problem when landing at an airport,
since the trees, telephone poles, and air traffic con-
trol towers create a concrete referential pointillism
easily processed by the eye. But during a ditching
over active water, the sky merges into the sea, bleeds
into the horizon, and plays tricks on a pilot’s eyes,
wreaking havoc with their depth perception. Illu-
sions lead pilots to hit the water at the wrong spotor angle; too soon or too late; too slow or too fast.
As he dipped Connie below 2,000 feet, Murray
could discern the direction of the swells. He esti-
mated their height to be between 15 and 20 feet,
the interval separating them 150 to 175 feet. Were
he to hit a swell, it would act as a ferocious impact
force-multiplier against the aircraft. At best, he
had 12 feet of wiggle room to lay down the 163-foot
plane. With winds buffeting Connie 15 to 25 feet in
every direction, and the possibility of hidden sec-
ondary swells beneath the whitecaps below, he’d
have to perfectly calibrate the point and manner
of impact.
Then, it started to rain like mad. But as the
moon emerged from hiding and lightened the sky,
Murray’s height-perception illusion dissipated
and he could more clearly make out the distance
bet ween swells: about 200 feet, crest to crest. That
gave him a 37-foot margin of error—for a plane
traveling 176 feet per second. The waves were high
and powerful enough to snap Connie’s wings off
and send the four life rafts tucked in their bays to
the bottom of the sea.
The optimal descent slope was 25 feet per sec-
ond, but Flying Tiger 923 was heading toward the
sea at 34 fps. Murray fought to f latten the grade,
but gravity was tugging Connie toward the ocean.
If he didn’t elevate fast, they’d hit the water at a
catastrophic angle and velocity.
He wrestled against the opposing winds, strug-
gling to maintain an even keel. Were either wing to
clip one of the powerful swells, Connie would f lip50 November/December 2021
AP PHOTO (SURVIVORS); COURTESY PETER W. FREY (BOX)