Homesick for his wife and stepchildren, he'd asked a few days earlier to be returned from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, where he'd been posted, to the USAF base at Langley, Virginia. But his request for leave had been refused.
Bitterly disappointed, the young Vietnam veteran took himself off to a military colleague's house party, where he began drinking heavily and then, according to colleagues, to behave erratically and combatively. His friends persuaded him to go to bed, but Meyer escaped through a window.
Soon after, Suffolk police found him wandering the A11 road and arrested him for being drunk and disorderly. He was escorted back to his barracks and told to sleep it off. But Meyer had other ideas. Big ideas.
Breaking into the room of a Capt Upton, Meyer stole the key to his truck. Using the name "Capt Epstein", Meyer then called an aircraft dispatcher and demanded that aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130, be fuelled for a flight to the USA.
The ground crew obediently followed their superior's orders and the bogus captain climbed aboard, released the brakes and taxied hurriedly from the hardstand towards runway 29. His engines roared.
Completely alone in the cockpit of the stolen 60-tonne, four-engine military transporter plane, an aircraft he was not qualified to fly, the 23-year-old serviceman steeled himself and thrust his throttles forward. Shortly before 05:10 on the dawn of the drizzly, overcast morning of 23 May, he was airborne.
After an hour and forty-five minutes in flight, Meyer crashed into the English Channel.
A few days later, small pieces of wreckage of the Hercules, including a life raft washed up near the shores of the Channel Island of Alderney. The mechanic's body was never found.
http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43800089
I was stationed at Mildenhall when this happened. The next day or so all aircraft were chained to the tie downs in the ramp
ReplyDeleteDang... well, I was impressed he got it fueled and in the air!
DeleteI enlisted in the USAF in 1978, and by that time this story was a well repeated bit of Air Force Lore. Though his actions were drastic, illegal and dangerous, you can't help but empathize with a poor guy who simply wanted to go home. As a C-130 crew chief he would have known most of the systems on the aircraft, including how to do an engine start and run through the preflight checks. I am told (but can't confirm) that in that era crew chief's at times would be allowed to taxi aircraft rather than call in a flight crew. Couple his knowledge of the C-130 as a crew chief with his private pilot's experience this escapade isn't so far fetched. Lord willing one day they'll find some of the wreckage and maybe something to give his family some closure. There's speculation that Meyer was shot down, but it's more likely that because he was flying at low level and with no one else on the flight deck the C-130 just got to be more than he could handle on his own and he stalled, or got disoriented (alcohol was involved after all) and crashed.
ReplyDelete