Captain Mike Carns and Major Ted Dowd
14 March 1969
F4-E 67-0268
By Mike Carns
Introduction
In 2015 I asked Mike if he would write the story of the aircraft “incident” he had at Udorn while we were at Korat. All I had heard while at Korat was that Mike had had to recover at Udorn from a mission. I did not know any of the particulars. Below is Mike’s story. Wow! Note that the airplane involved in this story is 67-0268. That is the airplane memorialized in Keith Ferris’ “Bad News for Uncle Ho”. Some of Mike’s original 2015 story has been updated as additional facts have been discovered, like the tail number and date of the incident. The real heroes of this incident were the crew members of the tanker. Unfortunately, I could find no evidence that they ever were recognized for their efforts. Mike was in the front seat for his first Tiger FAC check-out mission and Ted was the instructor pilot in the back seat. A great tale of airmanship by all. Don Drinnon
9 May 2015
Don
Just returned to CONUS tonight and read your note….
I do remember a mission something like what Ted describes when he was in my back seat. Seems to me it was somewhere between May and July…it is too long ago to remember. What I can recall goes something like this:
We were tasked by Cricket, the call sign of the airborne command post, to put a flight into an area on a group of gun emplacements. We got up there well northeast, up near Happy Valley, an area in Laos, and while doing a recce realized they were already shooting at us…knew it was going to be a tricky mission.
I do not remember exactly how it went but going down the chute there were tracers surrounding the canopy (I think I still have some of it on Tiger Film). We fired the marker rocket, started the turn, telling the aircraft behind us to go ‘high release’ due to rather “generous” ground fire swirling around us.
Somewhere in the turn/climb, I realized that we had lost PC-1 (one of the two redundant flight control hydraulic systems), assuming it was because of strikes on the aircraft. We struggled to gain altitude and I felt burner was necessary. I think we got up to around 12K-15K and then kinda “looked around”.
Noting that PC-1 was gone, I thought I’d better declare an emergency for fuel…could see that the internal fuel was decreasing, assuming that the drop tanks were not feeding, plus fuel was streaming from both wings. I couldn’t see much from the front seat and as we tried to take stock (heading west), a flight of two F-105s came up alongside and one of them…Cookie Flight, as I recall, said: looks like you’re hit bad…one flap gone, 1/2 of an aileron gone, half of the left stabilator gone and part of the tail. My recollection was that it was flyable but we had to keep the speed up to keep one wing from rolling off.
A tanker up on Green Anchor Extended (could have been Orange but I think it was Green) came up on Guard and asked where we were and said he’d come get us (illegal as hell). Ted read out our coordinates. I said that we might be pulling contrails because we could see fuel streaming out of both wings….and all we had left was fuselage fuel.
The tanker was pretty amazing. We spotted him quite early…he said he was at full throttle. We said that he would have to turn on us because we could not maneuver. Somehow, he bent his way around the turn, rolled out and we approached him quickly. The fuel was now down in the 2000-pound range as I recall, and going south fast. The boomer started talking in “open mike”, telling the Tanker AC which way to turn and what speed to change to. We plodded straight ahead and as our fuel passed through around 800 pounds, the boomer “stuck” us with a hell of a thump.
The AC then came on the intercom and said that he would “tow” us to Udorn and where did we want to be dropped off? I said that I did not think I could turn and would like a drop at 25 miles lined up with the runway. He then started gently pulling us around using the boom…we never disconnected…for probably 20-30 minutes…and suddenly he said, “Udorn at 12 o’clock dead ahead, pulled the boom and moved off to the left.
We were showing 12,700 pounds of fuel…full. I then tried to determine what sort of landing speed we could tolerate and as we decreased speed through 230, I could not keep it level, using burner to pick up the wing. So, 230 it was.
By that point, I noticed that the utility hydraulic pressure was zero and knew we would have to blow down the gear…and, near as we could tell, it seemed to go down. Then it was all concentration. All I remember was making sure I touched down before the first cable (Udorn had five) and as soon as we did, the left, then the right tires blew (max tire speed was 193). The left tire blowing first started us in a drift to the left side of the runway, cutting the first cable instantly.
I recall pushing the right brake (pneumatic at this point) but nothing seemed to happen. The second cable came up pretty fast and by that time we were probably halfway between the centerline and the edge of the runway…and the second cable couldn’t hold us either…and snapped, (my recollection was that it was the second cable that whacked us) this time whacking the left side of the aircraft and putting a slash in it from the front of the intake all the way back to the tail (I didn’t sense a thing…saw it after we dismounted). Finally, perhaps 10 feet before departing the runway on the left, the third cable caught the landing gear, or something, and we trundled out into the grassy area tilted well to the left. The left main had been ground down by at least half its extension…looked like a fat stub.
The aircraft came to a halt in a severe left tilt (30 degrees?). I shut down the engines, raised the canopy, and got down the ladder to the ground without incident. Admittedly, the aircraft was quite a mess, especially the left main “stub” but the right main was also ground down (no wheel on either stub). The fire crews came up but did not spray the aircraft that I am aware of. There was no fire that I recall.
I remember leaning on the wing and filling out the forms. Eventually a blue car came up, asked us if we were OK (yes, we were) and he took us to the Bar, not the Flight Surgeon. It was about 1030 in the morning, I think. We joked about the mission, called down to Korat and they said to stand by, the C-47 would be sent up to pick us up. Sometime after lunch, we boarded the Gooney and headed south….
And, believe it or not, to the best of my recollection, no one ever asked us anything else “official” about the incident….
My recollection, which could be absolutely wrong, was that the aircraft was crated at Udorn and shipped back to Ogden, Utah, refitted, and was flyable again within the year. I have no way of verifying that because I do not know what the tail number was. (Now we have learned it was 67-0268 and the airplane was transferred to Turkey in 1987).
Mike
Note: While this loss happened after we all had left Korat, I’ve included this in our 469th history album since the aircraft lost was F-4E 67-0293. Charlie Jones and Ed Figueroa flew the plane from Eglin to Korat, but once 293 arrived in Korat, Art Jones’ and my names were painted on the canopy rails. The “Third Tiger Loss” was my airplane and I am not over it. A piece of trivia…I was Ted Sweeting’s Instructor at Webb AFB in Primary Pilot Training. Don Drinnon
