The Airline Boss who Ditched in the Pacific

 

The Airline Boss who ditched in the Pacific

His father died when he was 12. The day after the funeral he went down to a glass company and talked them into a job, saying he was 14. That was the end of his schooling. He worked 12 hours a night, six nights a week, and turned his weekly $3.50 pay-check completely to his mother. Then he got a better job ($6 a week) in a foundry. Then at $10 a week at a shoe factory, and finally at a garage. He took correspondence courses in engineering and then began winning automobile races in 1910. Four years later he pushed a Blinzen Benz to the unbelievable world record of 134 miles per hour. When World War I started he was the driver of General Pershing. He then got into aviation, and when World War I ended, he was America’s highest scoring Ace with 26 victories.

In the 1930s he was a leader in the air-transport industry as the Chairman of Eastern Airlines, one of the leading airlines in the world- Edward Vernon Rickenbacker. 

The Atlanta crash

Rickenbacker often travelled for business on Eastern Air Lines flights. On February 26, 1941, he was a passenger on a Douglas DC-3 airliner that crashed just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Rickenbacker suffered grave injuries, being soaked in fuel, immobile, and trapped in the wreckage. In spite of his own critical wounds, Rickenbacker encouraged the other passengers, offered what consolation he could to those around him who were injured or dying, and guided the survivors who were still ambulatory to attempt to find help. The survivors were rescued after spending the night at the crash site. Rickenbacker barely survived. This was just the first time that the press announced his death while he was still alive.

In a dramatic retelling of the incident, Rickenbacker's autobiography relates his astonishing experiences. While he was still conscious but in terrible pain, Rickenbacker was left behind while some ambulances carried away bodies of the dead. When Rickenbacker arrived at a hospital, his injuries appeared so grotesque that the emergency surgeons and physicians left him for dead for some time. They instructed their assistants to "take care of the live ones." Rickenbacker's injuries included a fractured skull, other head injuries, a shattered left elbow with a crushed nerve, a paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, a broken pelvis in two places, a severed nerve in his left hip, and a broken left knee. Rickenbacker's left eyeball was also blown out of its socket.

It took many months in the hospital, followed by a long time at home, for Rickenbacker to heal from this multitude of injuries and to regain his full eyesight. 

 

Adrift at sea

One of Rickenbacker's most famous near-death experiences occurred in October 1942. He was sent on a tour of air bases in the Pacific Theatre of Operations to review both living conditions and operations. Rickenbacker was provided an older B-17D Flying Fortress  as transportation to the South Pacific. The bomber, (with a crew of eight) strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refuelling stop on Canton Island and was forced to ditch in a remote and little-travelled part of the Central Pacific Ocean.

 

The failure in navigation has been ascribed to an out-of-adjustment celestial navigation instrument, a bubble octant. The B-17's aircraft commander, former American Airlines pilot Captain William T. Cherry, Jr., was forced to ditch close to Japanese-held islands but the Americans were never spotted by Japanese patrol planes, and were adrift on the ocean for thousands of miles.

For 24 days, Rickenbacker, Army Captain Hans C. Adamson, his friend and business partner, and the rest of the 8 crewmen drifted in life rafts at sea. Rickenbacker was still suffering somewhat from his earlier airplane crash, and Capt. Adamson sustained serious injuries during the ditching. The other crewmen who were in the B-17, named Bartek, Reynolds, Whittaker, Cherry, Kaczmarczyk, and De Angelis, were hurt to varying degrees. The crewmen's food supply ran out after three days. Then, on the eighth day, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker's head. He warily and cautiously captured it, and then the survivors meticulously divided it into equal parts and used part of it for fishing bait. They lived on sporadic rainwater that fell and similar food "miracles", like fingerlings that they caught with their bare hands.

Rickenbacker assumed leadership, encouraging and browbeating the others to keep their spirits up. One crewman, Alexander Kaczmarczyk, was suffering from dehydration. He drank sea water, knowing it was a bad idea. He died and was buried at sea. The U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy's patrol planes planned to abandon the search for the lost B-17 crewmen after just over two weeks, but Rickenbacker's wife persuaded them to extend it another week. The services agreed to do so. Once again, the newspapers and radio broadcasts reported that Rickenbacker was dead.

The seven split up. Cherry rowed off in the small raft and was rescued on day 23. Reynolds, De Angelis, and Whittwaker found a small island, close to another, inhabited one. The natives of the second one were hosting an allied radio station, so all was good for the men. Reynolds was extremely close to death. A U.S. Navy patrol plane spotted and rescued the 3 survivors on November 13. All were suffering from hyperthermia, sunburn, dehydration, and near-starvation. After recuperating in a military hospital Rickenbacker resumed his journey and completed his assignment.

Rickenbacker had thought that he had been lost for 21 days and wrote a book about this experience titled Seven Came Through.