1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

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Capetonian

1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#1 Post by Capetonian » Sun Jul 08, 2018 11:05 am

In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, a homesick, hungover mechanic in the US Air Force stole a plane from his base in East Anglia and set off for Virginia. Nearly two hours later, he disappeared suddenly over the English Channel. Did he simply crash or was he shot down? Emma Jane Kirby has been scouring the archives to find out.

I've known for some time that 23-year-old Sgt Paul Meyer called his wife from the cockpit of his stolen Hercules aircraft - Jane Goodson, as she's now called, told me this herself when she spoke to me from her home in Virginia.

"Honey!" he had told her triumphantly, waking her from a deep sleep. "I got a bird in the sky and I'm coming home!"

What I didn't realise then, however, was that the last 20 minutes or so of their conversation was recorded. And when the transcript of that recording was sent to me, I will admit that I sat down and wept.

By the time the tape recorder was rolling, Meyer's jubilation and bravado had left him. The cold reality of what he'd just done - and what lay ahead - had hit him squarely.
Media captionThe last conversation between the homesick mechanic and his wife, read by actors - from PM on BBC Radio 4

"Well, honey I'll be really honest with you," he admits. "I kind of think I made a big dang wrong mistake here. I feel like the biggest dodo around here right now. Over."

Jane, clearly petrified, has to still her own nerves as she tries to reassure her panicking husband.

"You are the most wonderful thing in this whole world, you hear?" she says. Honey, I'm going to bring you home, I'm going to fly you right in here, OK? Over."

Then Meyer's commanding officer tries to cut across the line. "Sgt Meyer! Sgt Meyer! This is Col Kingery, do you read me?" he says. "It's Col Kingery from Mildenhall. Over!"

Alone in the 37-tonne, four-engine transporter plane he was not qualified to fly, Meyer - unsure of his direction and unsure of what he was doing - tells his wife desperately: "Everything will be all worth it if I can just kiss your sweet lips one more time. Over."

And Jane, his wife of just 55 days, promises him: "You'll get to kiss my sweet lips until we are old and grey in the rocking chairs in Missouri. Over."

Twenty minutes later, after Meyer has switched the plane to autopilot, the call cuts off. Meyer's final recorded words are: "I'm doing all right, I'm doing all right, uh."

Although he'd passed the USAF's "human reliability test" comfortably in the weeks before being posted to the UK, it's clear that Meyer had not been "doing all right" for some time. A Vietnam veteran, he'd been suffering from flashbacks and nightmares and - homesick and unhappy - he was reportedly drinking heavily.

In 1969, Sgt Ralph Howard Vincent, known by the nickname Sgt Mac, was serving in the 48th Air Police squadron at RAF Lakenheath, a few miles from Meyer's Mildenhall base. The first time he met Paul Meyer in a Suffolk pub, he thinks, Meyer had passed out from the amount of drink he'd consumed. He remembers banging a table to ask Meyer if he and his friends could share it with him, and Meyer, slumped across it, failed to stir.

It was only when the others bought a round that Meyer lifted his head, pushed his empty pint glass towards them and said: "I'll let you sit here if you buy me a drink!"

Sgt Mac spent two long evenings in the pub with Meyer and distinctly recalls Meyer ranting against the USAF, which he said was forcing him to work long hours away from his beloved family. He talked a lot, says Sgt Mac, about his "beautiful wife" and "wonderful step-children" and advised Sgt Mac to settle down and get married too, even though he was only 21. He also offered him some recipes for cooking squirrel. But it was a conversation about flying that really struck Sgt Mac.

"Paul came up with a proposition," he explains. "He said he wanted to get a private pilot's licence so he could fly home on leave… and he wanted to split the cost 50:50 with me… Looking back, I don't think he just got in that plane and took off. I think this was long-planned."

Sgt Mac took a liking to Meyer and made plans to meet him again in the pub. But a few days later, just before breakfast, he remembers hearing a loud roar and his barracks at RAF Lakenheath shaking. He didn't know it then but it was Meyer who'd taken off in the stolen Hercules, on his way home.

In his beautiful Cambridge garden, Vic Blickem shakes his head as he remembers that day. Back then Blickem worked for the USAF at Mildenhall in the casualty assistance office and it was his job to write to his superiors to tell them what had happened, so they could co-ordinate assistance to Meyer's family. He remembers struggling to fill in the paperwork.

"We were totally flummoxed - we didn't know if we should write Missing, Awol, Deserter, or what," he tells me. "So we came up with some form of words or other to get by… We wrote messages, I guess, for a couple of days then we were told not to send any more, and not to ask for updates and we were just shut down. We were shut out. I asked my section commander if he thought Meyer was shot down and he said: 'Well, of course.'"

The US Air Force still has a presence at RAF Mildenhall - it's now home to the 100th Refuelling Wing.

"See that older building there?" asks Dr Robert Mackey, the USAF wing historian, as we wander around the huge base with its lawns shrivelled by the searing summer heat. "That's where Meyer would have eaten his meals." We head towards the shade of a large tree, watching a Hercules thunder overhead. I ask Mackey how the USAF views the Meyer incident today.

"It was a series of bad decisions by people who should have known better," he says firmly. "And now we have systems in place to stop this kind of thing from ever happening again." The facts that Meyer had just come back from Vietnam and was newly married were major stress factors. "The Air Force may not have done what it needed to do to take care of a guy who was clearly in crisis."

Mackey can't pinpoint exactly the location of hard stand 21, from which Meyer taxied up the runway - the base has greatly changed over time and even the control tower is in its third reincarnation since 1969. A young bare-chested airman walks past us in shorts, eating ice cream.

"It was a different time," Mackey says. "Put yourself in the position of those guys - it was 1969, not 1999 - it was the Cold War and you never knew what was going on. Was he stealing the plane? Deserting? Going to East Germany? No-one knew. The system reacted - albeit slower than it could have been. It was a sad incident that resulted in a guy getting killed at the end."

So did the system react by shooting him down?

"No!" retorts Mackey. "No. You've read the transcripts I've read and that is not what happened."

But the transcript of the Mildenhall control tower's conversations with the squadron leader, Col Kingery, various radar posts and the USAF's Central Security Control, don't quite tally with the sparse account in the official USAF official Accident Report (all obtained by Sgt Mac through a freedom of information request, along with the transcript of the conversation between Meyer and his wife).

Capetonian

Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#2 Post by Capetonian » Sun Jul 08, 2018 11:07 am

Apparently not possible to post links from BBC.

To view the whole story add 694 to the following link :

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44711

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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#3 Post by Woody » Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:09 am

I’ve never heard about this escape taking place :)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49773399
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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#4 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:44 am

Woody wrote:
Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:09 am
I’ve never heard about this escape taking place :)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49773399
Fascinating... The rebels and lateral thinkers will not be tolerated...

From Category A error...

"Van Eijck went to a party at his barracks in Holland and got rather drunk. His commanding officer was at the party and also rather the worse for wear. He suggested to Van Eijck that they should talk frankly about the quality of the pilot training scheme (which was conducted jointly by the Belgian Air force and the Dutch Navy) and he invited Van Eijck to be honest. It was, he assured him, an off-the-record discussion.

to

"So he started plotting to find a way to extract himself from the force once and for all. "I told absolutely no-one," he smiles coyly. "If I had told someone it would not have worked."

Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience.

Perhaps the Dutch Navy was a little too fond of the demon drink...
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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#5 Post by ian16th » Sun Sep 22, 2019 9:48 am

TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:44 am
Perhaps the Dutch Navy was a little too fond of the demon drink...
Where else are they to get their 'Dutch Courage' from?
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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#6 Post by CharlieOneSix » Sun Sep 22, 2019 2:55 pm

When I saw the Van Eijck story I did a double take at the photo as it closely resembled one of me..... both taken in 1964, he was 21, I was 19...but I never stole an aircraft!

Van Eijck
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CharlieOneSix
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Chippie16.jpg
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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#7 Post by Mrs Ex-Ascot » Sun Sep 22, 2019 3:03 pm

C16 are you still doppelgangers?

I must say that I enjoyed reading our Cloggies story that ended well for him. :)
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Re: 1969 : Stolen USAF Herc crashes in English Channel

#8 Post by CharlieOneSix » Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:09 pm

Mrs Ex-A - no, far from being doppelgangers now. I still have a full head of hair!
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