[Vhfcn-l] Fwd: Suspended in Midair with Little Chance of Survival

Sun Aug 1 23:45:24 EDT 2021

Great story! Thanks for posting

Blue36

On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 7:39 PM James Evans via Vhfcn-l <
vhfcn-l at lists.vhfcn.org> wrote:

> >>
> >>
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> >> LITTLE KNOWN PIECE OF HISTORY?
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> >> Suspended in Midair with Little Chance of Survival…>> …>> …>> then
> another plane came to his rescue
> >>>>>>  <>Almost 80 years after it unfolded in the sky over San Diego, a
> nearly impossible rescue mission remains one of the most daring feats in
> aeronautical history.
> >>>>>> Courtesy Rick Lawrence (portrait), Shutterstock (4),  archive.org <
> http://archive.org/>  (government document)
> >>>>>> It began like any other May morning in California. The sky was
> blue, the sun hot. A slight breeze riffled the glistening waters of San
> Diego Bay. At the naval airbase on North Island, all was calm.
> >>>>>> At 9:45 a.m., Walter Osipoff, a sandy-haired 23-year-old Marine
> second lieutenant from Akron, Ohio, boarded a DC-2 transport for a routine
> parachute jump. Lt. Bill Lowrey, a 34-year-old Navy test pilot from New
> Orleans, was already putting his observation plane through its paces. And
> John McCants, a husky 41-year-old aviation chief machinist’s mate from
> Jordan, Montana, was checking out the aircraft that he was scheduled to fly
> later. Before the sun was high in the noonday sky, these three men would be
> linked forever in one of history’s most spectacular midair rescues.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Osipoff was a seasoned parachutist, a former collegiate wrestling
> and gymnastics star. He had joined the National Guard and then the Marines
> in 1938. He had already made more than 20 jumps by May 15, 1941.
> >>>>>> That morning, his DC-2 took off and headed for Kearney Mesa, where
> Osipoff would supervise practice jumps by 12 of his men. Three separate
> canvas cylinders, containing ammunition and rifles, were also to be
> parachuted overboard as part of the exercise.
> >>>>>> Nine of the men had already jumped when Osipoff, standing a few
> inches from the plane’s door, started to toss out the last cargo container
> Somehow the automatic-release cord of his backpack parachute became looped
> over the cylinder, and his chute was suddenly ripped open. He tried to grab
> hold of the quickly billowing silk, but the next thing he knew he had been
> jerked from the plane—sucked out with such force that the impact of his
> body ripped a 2.5-foot gash in the DC-2’s aluminum fuselage.
> >>>>>> Instead of flowing free, Osipoff’s open parachute now wrapped
> itself around the plane’s tail wheel. The chute’s chest strap and one leg
> strap had broken; only the second leg strap was still holding—and it had
> slipped down to Osipoff’s ankle. One by one, 24 of the 28 lines between his
> precariously attached harness and the parachute snapped. He was now hanging
> some 12 feet below and 15 feet behind the tail of the plane. Four parachute
> shroud lines twisted around his left leg were all that kept him from being
> pitched to the earth.
> >>>>>> Dangling there upside down, Osipoff had enough presence of mind to
> not try to release his emergency parachute. With the plane pulling him one
> way and the emergency chute pulling him another, he realized that he would
> be torn in half. Conscious all the while, he knew that he was hanging by
> one leg, spinning andbouncing—and he was aware that his ribs hurt. He did
> not know then that two ribs and three vertebrae had been fractured.
> >>>>>> Inside the plane, the DC-2 crew struggled to pull Osipoff to
> safety, but they could not reach him. The aircraft was starting to run low
> on fuel, but an emergency landing with Osipoff dragging behind would
> certainly smash him to death. And pilot Harold Johnson had no radio contact
> with the ground.
> >>>>>> To attract attention below, Johnson eased the transport down to 300
> feet and              started circling North Island. A few people at the
> base noticed the plane coming by every few minutes, but they assumed that
> it was towing some sort of target.
> >>>>>> Meanwhile, Bill Lowrey had landed his plane and was walking toward
> his office when he glanced upward. He and John McCants, who was working
> nearby, saw at the same time the figure dangling from the plane. As the
> DC-2 circled once again, Lowrey yelled to McCants, “There’s a man hanging
> on that line. Do you suppose we can get him?” McCants answered grimly, “We
> can try.”
> >>>>>> Lowrey shouted to his mechanics to get his plane ready for takeoff.
> It was an SOC-1, a two-seat, open-cockpit observation plane, less than 27
> feet long. Recalled Lowrey afterward, “I didn’t even know how much fuel it
> had.” Turning to McCants, he said, “Let’s go!”
> >>>>>> Lowrey and McCants had never flown together before, but the two men
> seemed to take it for granted that they were going to attempt the
> impossible. “There was only one decision to be made,” Lowrey later said
> quietly, “and that was to go get him. How, we didn’t know. We had no time
> to plan.”
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Courtesy National Archives (Photo No. 127-N-522950)
> >>>>>> Lt. Col. John J Capolino, a Philadelphia artist, painted this scene
> of Osipoff’s rescue in the 1940s. It belongs to the National Museum of the
> Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia.
> >>>>>> Nor was there time to get through to their commanding officer and
> request permission for the flight. Lowrey simply told the tower, “Give me a
> green light. I’m taking off.” At the last moment, a Marine ran out to the
> plane with a hunting knife—for cutting Osipoff loose—and dumped it in
> McCants’s lap.
> >>>>>> As the SOC-1 roared aloft, all activity around San Diego seemed to
> stop. Civilians crowded rooftops, children stopped playing at recess, and
> the men of North Island strained their eyes upward. With murmured prayers
> and pounding hearts, the watchers agonized through every move in the
> impossible mission.
> >>>>>> Within minutes, Lowrey and McCants were under the transport, flying
> at 300 feet. They made five approaches, but the air proved too bumpy to try
> for a rescue. Since radio communication between the two planes was
> impossible, Lowrey hand-signaled Johnson to head out over the Pacific,
> where the air would be smoother, and they climbed to 3,000 feet. Johnson
> held his plane on a straight course and reduced speed to that of the
> smaller plane—100 miles an hour.
> >>>>>> Lowrey flew back and away from Osipoff, but level with him.
> McCants, who was in the open seat in back of Lowrey, saw that Osipoff was
> hanging by one              foot and that blood was dripping from his
> helmet. Lowrey edged the plane closer with such precision that his
> maneuvers jibed with the swings of Osipoff’s inert body. His timing had to
> be exact so that Osipoff did not smash into the SOC-1’s propeller.
> >>>>>> Finally, Lowrey slipped his upper left wing under Osipoff’s shroud
> lines, and McCants, standing upright in the rear cockpit—with the plane
> still going 100 miles an hour 3,000 feet above the sea— lunged for Osipoff.
> He grabbed him at the waist, and Osipoff flung his arms around McCants’s
> shoulders in a death grip.
> >>>>>> McCants pulled Osipoff into the plane, but since it was only a two-
> seater, the next problem was where to put him. As Lowrey eased the SOC-1
> forward to get some slack in the chute lines, McCants managed to stretch
> Osipoff’s body across the top of the fuselage, with Osipoff’s head in his
> lap.
> >>>>>> Because McCants was using both hands to hold Osipoff in a vise,
> there was no way for him to cut the cords that still attached Osipoff to
> the DC-2. Lowrey then nosed his plane inch by inch closer to the transport
> and, with incredible precision, used his propeller to cut the shroud lines.
> After hanging for 33 minutes between life and death, Osipoff was finally
> free.
> >>>>>> Lowrey had flown so close to the transport that he’d nicked a 12-
> inch gash in              its tail. But now the parachute, abruptly
> detached along with the shroud lines, drifted downward and wrapped itself
> around Lowrey’s rudder. That meant that Lowrey had to fly the SOC-1 without
> being able to control it properly and with most of Osipoff’s body still on
> the outside. Yet, five minutes later, Lowrey somehow managed to touch down
> at North Island, and the little plane rolled to a stop. Osipoff finally
> lost consciousness—but not before he heard sailors applauding the landing.
> >>>>>> Later on, after lunch, Lowrey and McCants went back to their usual
> duties. Three weeks later, both men were flown to Washington, DC, where
> Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox awarded them the Distinguished Flying
> Cross for executing “one of the most brilliant and daring rescues in naval
> history.”
> >>>>>> Osipoff spent the next six months in the hospital. The following
> January, completely recovered and newly promoted to first lieutenant, he
> went back to parachute jumping. The morning he was to make his first jump
> after the accident, he was cool and laconic, as usual. His friends, though,
> were nervous. One after another, they went up to reassure him. Each
> volunteered to jump first so he could follow.
> >>>>>> Osipoff grinned and shook his head. “The hell with that!” he said
> as he fastened his parachute. “I know damn well I’m going to make it.” And
> he did.
> >>>>>> This article first appeared in the May 1975 edition of Reader’s
> Digest.
> >>
> >>
> >
>
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