O P P O S I T E :
The Flying Tiger
923 plane in
1962, prior to
its ill-fated flight
over the Atlantic.
BELOW: Captain
John Murrayzero entries spoke of a transient f lash without an
accompanying alarm.
Murray sat in the left cockpit seat, beside first
officer Bob Parker. Navigator Sam “Hard Luck”
Nicholson and flight engineer Jim Garrett sat
behind them. The f light deck was a claustro-
phobic clutter of manuals, personal belongings,
f loor-to-ceiling electronics, and cigarette smoke.
To eliminate the potential for lethal drag, Murray
instructed Garrett to feather engine no. 3, then
stand by to discharge fire suppressant.
Garrett pulled the throttle back to idle and
feathered the engine’s propeller blades so they were
parallel to the slipstream, then he cut off the fuel-
air mixture control to disable the troubled engine.
A bell clanged, and slumbering passengers jolted
awake—it was a fire. Outside, crew members and
passengers could see the flaming engine oil and
white-hot steel fragments shooting from the no.
3 engine’s exhaust stacks. The pyrotechnics lit up
t he sk y.
Garrett raised his voice above the alarm bell:
“Ready to discharge, Captain.”
“Fire one bottle,” Murray said.
“Copy that.” Garrett lifted the small red spring-
loaded aluminum cover labeled eng. fire dhg.,
moved the switch to the discharge position, and
shot an extinguishing agent into the no. 3 engine.
The alarm stopped. The fire light on the control
panel went dark.ACCORDING TO AVIATION SAFETY NETWORK
statistics, which standardize accidents by passen-
ger-miles f lown, when Flying Tiger 923 took off
on September 23, 1962, air travel was 100 times
more dangerous than it is today. As for the Con-
stellation (“Connie”) series, nearly one of every
five built between 1950 and 1958 had crashed or
was otherwise out of commission. In March 1962,
two Connies met ill-fated ends within hours of one
another: One crashed in Alaska; the other disap-
peared somewhere over the Pacific.
Murray’s Connie had rolled off a Burbank assem-
bly line on February 20, 1958, but Howard Hughes
had conceived the plane back in 1937. Because
Connie used the same basic piston technology that
powered wagons in 1844 (as opposed to the jet tur-
bine first used in 1939), and because its Wright
reciprocating engine wasn’t as reliable as its chief
competitor’s Pratt & Whitney, Lockheed stopped
producing Constellations a few months after Mur-
ray’s plane was manufactured. Yet Murray himself
still found a lot to like in his plane. He liked her
range, ruggedness, and versatility, as well as her
unique triple tail fins. He’d f lown her 4,300 hours,
often in dire conditions. She’d never let him down.THE CRISIS SEEMED OVER BY 8:11 P.M., THREE
hours after takeoff. The fire was out, and any dam-
age seemed contained within the exhaust stacks.
Murray decided against shooting a second bottle of
suppressant.
But f light engineer Garrett, a recent hire, had
forgotten to close the no. 3 engine firewall. Moments
after he closed the no. 1 firewall—on the left out-
board engine—by mistake, his colleagues heard
what they described as “a shrill obscene snarl” from
the left side of the aircraft. “Runaway on number
one!” Parker yelled.
The error had triggered a chain reaction: When
the left outboard’s hydraulic subsystem stopped
pumping, blast air stopped cooling the generator,
and fuel and oil stopped f lowing to the motor and
governor. This caused the propeller to spin out of
control at close to the speed of sound. If the 13-foot
blades were to break free, the projectiles could
down the plane.
Murray muscled all the throttles back and decel-
erated Connie to 210 mph. Then he began easing
her nose up, leveraging the air current into a make-
shift brake. The blades slowed enough to allow
Garrett to feather the no. 1. The crew averted disas-
ter again.
But the plane had lost two of its four engines in
seven minutes. Connie was 972 miles from land,
hundreds from the nearest ship. Murray knew heNovember/December 2021 47THIS SPREAD: COURTESY FLYING TIGERS CLUB ARCHIVES (PLANE); COURTESY JOHN P. MURRAY (MURRAY)