Mayday Over Wichita (9 page)

When a plane lands with its gross weight in excess of its maximum design (as it pertains to the structural design and landing weight for the respective plane), it is considered an overweight landing. According to Rick Colella, a flight operations engineer for Boeing, “A pilot may consider making an overweight landing when a situation arises that requires the airplane to return to the takeoff airport or divert to another airport soon after takeoff.”
¹⁴⁴
Raggy 42, for reasons unknown at the time, declared an emergency shortly after takeoff. This led Delbert J. Massey, a controller working at the FAA Tower that morning, to believe that “there was some small malfunction and [Capt. Szmuc] was going to come back” to McConnell. Massey, upon hearing the distress call, cleared Szmuc to come back and land at McConnell. As Massey stated, “I thought he might swing around and land at Municipal, which the runway is capable of handling.” According to Massey, “My first thought was to recover the airplane and get him back, but this never did come to pass.”
¹⁴⁵

After the mayday call, Capt. Szmuc was attempting to either head back to McConnell or the municipal airport to land. But given the plane's low altitude and heavy weight, they first needed to abandon the excess fuel in order to return. General (Gen.) Murray M. Bywater, who headed the crash investigation for the air force, told the press the day after the crash, “[Capt. Szmuc] was dumping fuel because of his heavy load.” Gen. Bywater noted how the fuel gushed out of the KC-135 as a conspicuous, “thick stream of white vapor”—which indicated that Raggy 42 was facing engine or control difficulties of some sort.
¹⁴⁶
Indeed, Klem reported a vapor trail “pouring out of the aft fuselage,” but “[t]here was no fire.”
¹⁴⁷
By Klem's estimate, “[Capt. Szmuc] put the plane in a steep bank and appeared to be headed for Municipal for a possible emergency landing.”
¹⁴⁸

E
YEWITNESS
A
CCOUNTS

By all accounts, the giant KC-135 was desperately jettisoning fuel. The plane began spilling out the heavy fuel over Wichita State University (WSU) while attempting to make the 180-degree turn back in the direction of McConnell and the municipal airport.
¹⁴⁹
A WSU security officer later reported fuel splashing on his face and police car as he watched Raggy 42 fly over.
¹⁵⁰
Another veteran pilot, O. B. Hill, was driving east on 21
^st
Street near Waco Street when he saw Raggy 42. Hill remembered that it was a bright, clear morning, and he could see the dense vapor trail flowing from the plane. According to Hill, the pilot tried to “give the left motors a blast and get the plane up in the air. As he blasted the engines, the tail appeared to go straight up, and the ship went into the ground.”
¹⁵¹

Most reports that day were nearly identical. Bob Kirkpatrick, who watched Raggy 42 from his office at WSU, recalled, “I turned to a man in my office and told him the plane was too low” and then saw how it “banked steeply and went straight down without being completely turned over.” Sedgwick County Sheriff's Deputy Gilbert Roman, who was also on the WSU campus, reported that Raggy 42 was “in a bank at the time.” Roman estimated the plane was “flying at less than 100 feet and losing altitude all the time” and “[a]t about 2500 and Grove [Street], or so, something metallic dropped from the tail of the plane, and a white vapor was coming from the tail.” In the final moments before the crash, according to Roman, “it seemed as though the engine cut off. Then it went into a steep bank and nose-dived…Then there was a terrific boom and a huge ball of fire.”
¹⁵²
Other witnesses repeatedly declared, “The tail end went up and the nose straight down. The plane hit like a ball of fire.”
¹⁵³

E
SCAPE

One other emergency procedure taken by the crew just before the crash involved blowing open Raggy 42's escape hatch, located directly underneath the nose of the plane.
¹⁵⁴
A witness remembered, “I saw something that looked like a large piece of cloth whip out of the plane. And then something about the size of a mattress flew out.”
¹⁵⁵
This was a personnel parachute. Parachutes were removed from the KC-135s for cost and timesaving initiatives in 2008, but they were mandatory equipment in 1965. An article marking the end of onboard parachutes for the KC-135 fleet noted, “It is difficult to find a crew member who would grab a parachute and jump out of a KC-135 in trouble. It is statistically safer to stay with the aircraft, especially when flying over enemy territory.”
¹⁵⁶

This was not the case aboard Raggy 42. One of the airmen did try to escape out of the hatch but was later found half a block away, in the backyard of a residence. None of the remains were identifiable to determine which crew member it was.
¹⁵⁷
Author Joseph Heywood, who served from 1965 to 1970 as a KC-135 navigator in the 46
^th
ARS, recorded his experiences while flying aboard a KC-135 in the 1960s in his book
Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter
. Heywood mentions a crash that occurred on July 30, 1968, in Northern California when a KC-135 took off from Castle AFB on a refueling training mission. According to the records, “[T]he crew was conducting a practice emergency descent from FL390 to FL230. After a sharp turn, the vertical stabilizer separated, and the airplane crashed in a timberland forest on Mount Lassen.”
¹⁵⁸
All nine crew members were killed. Although it is not known if the crew members attempted to escape the plane, Heywood provided some insight into the futility of parachutes aboard the KC-135:

Only two people have been able to safely parachute from a KC-135 in its 13 years of military service. Our tankers do not have ejection seats. We have to unstrap from our positions, stand, and drop down an escape chute to be free of the bird. If the plane is in an unusual altitude, the G-forces keep you pinned in place and there is no way out. We all know that bailing out of a tanker is a poor option, but nobody talks about it
.
¹⁵⁹

According to the air force investigators, Capt. Szmuc, “in conjunction with his Mayday call…evidently instituted bailout procedures,” and at least one of the crew members tried to escape the sinking ship.
¹⁶⁰
But, as Heywood notes, escape is somewhat futile, especially if the altitude and position of the plane is abnormal, as it was on Raggy 42.

Taken together, what both procedures—the jettisoning of fuel and the escape hatch activation—suggest is that Raggy 42 was doomed and, despite all efforts, was going to crash. The flight was unsalvageable. Losing speed, unable to gain altitude and incapable of escaping, the crew was left with only one option: to brace for impact.

8

RECOVERING VICTIMS

There was no rescuing to be done. Everybody knew that
.

There was only recovering
.

—John Husar
, Wichita Eagle,
1985
¹⁶¹

Despite their readiness, no amount of training could have emotionally prepared the emergency responders for what terror lay just beyond the drenched piles of rubble. “Everywhere you walked,” said one reporter, “there were scenes of horror. Near the center of the tragedy, the ground was littered with roasted chunks of human flesh.”
¹⁶²
Recovering the remains was a challenge, not only because victims were buried beneath the rubble, but also because of the crowds of media personnel and law enforcement who converged on the site to more closely examine the holocaust. “There were so many reporters, photographers, firemen, and law enforcement officials grouped around leaders,” according to one account, “that an Air Force sergeant asked members of the group to move because they were standing amid pieces of bodies.”
¹⁶³

The air force personnel focused on recovering the bodies of the crew members in the deep crater left by the plane while firefighters concentrated on removing bodies from the houses along Piatt. A family acquainted with a majority of the victims was enlisted to help firemen identify those who had lived in the homes that were now being searched. Crews worked tirelessly from both intersections of 20
^th
and Piatt, encountering ghastly discoveries as they went. Reflecting on the horrible images years later, Dennis McBride, a medic from McConnell and one of the first responders to the scene, detailed the grotesque findings:

Wreckage from the KC-135.
Larry Hatteberg
, KAKE TV.

The thing I cannot get out of my mind is this person starting his car—you know how you lean forward to turn the key when you start your car. This person was in that position. But instead of a person, it was a charred skeleton. We found the same kind of thing later on with a person who was stepping out of a bathtub
.
¹⁶⁴

The houses that had been standing only hours before were now in ashes, and responders had to take their time digging out corpses from amongst the ruins. This was the point at which civilian help finally waned. Deputy Chief Simpson recollected, “[T]hey said they had to get back. They had had enough…they didn't want any part of removing bodies. I don't mind telling you, it bothered me, with all my years of experience.”
¹⁶⁵

Capt. Raymond L. Wert with the Salvation Army later reminisced on the eerie quiet that occurred upon the discovery of corpses: “When they came across a dead body. I was struck by that, you could hear a pin drop; the men may have been joking and talking about each other, but when they came to a dead body, it was so quiet and so hushed. Nobody spoke.”
¹⁶⁶

One of the firemen recalled pulling out what he thought was a piece of rubber from the heap of plane fragments. Much to his surprise, it turned out to be a scorched human stomach instead.
¹⁶⁷
Rescue efforts went on throughout the day as more and more bodies were found among the wreckage. Reporters watched and recorded while firemen and members of the air force used “long grappling poles to retrieve the torn and mangled remains of the crew from the muddy water and fuel-filled ditch in the street.”
¹⁶⁸
It was not a job for the squeamish. These sights would not be easily forgotten. And yet, the worst sight to endure was the finding of small children. Fire Capt. Lawrence E. Black, a twenty-year veteran with the WFD, described one image that would haunt him for the rest of his life:

There was a house that had been burnt to the foundation, I would say, and I saw two small children that were burned…this type of thing I don't ever get over regardless of how long I have been on a job, or how long I will stay…But these two small kids looked like they might have been dolls that had burned. One of them looked like the head had exploded, the other like the stomach. I mean, this is the type of thing we looked at
.
¹⁶⁹

Fire Capt. Earl Tanner was one of the first to arrive on the scene. He vividly recalled a house he and his men approached on Piatt where Raggy 42's boom, torn off by the collision, was lying in the yard. In front of the torched home, there was a man sitting dead in a vehicle. The man to whom he had been speaking only seconds before on the front porch was dead, a woman inside the kitchen was dead and two children in the backyard, still on their tricycles, were dead—all burned alive instantly and simultaneously by the intense heat. Tanner, now eighty-seven years old, adamantly declares that no fire before or after the Piatt disaster in Wichita ever compared to that of January 16, 1965.
¹⁷⁰

Litter bearers made continual trips from the rubble to the field behind Razook's supermarket where the bodies were collected. Once tagged, they were sent to a makeshift morgue in the auditorium of the City and County Health Department at 1900 East 9
^th
Street. Some were underneath blankets, others were in rubber bags. During one trip, a reporter asked the man carrying a litter how many bodies were beneath the smoldering blanket. The man replied that he “could not tell.”
¹⁷¹
The intensity of the explosion left most bodies burned beyond recognition. Only charred flight suits helped to identify the airmen from the civilians.