Payette man recalls ocean rescue
Ed Parsons was on a routine flight when disaster struck
By Pat Caldwell
Argus Observer
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:59 AM PDT
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| Brig. Gen. Ed Parsons (ret.) looks through a photo album containing news clippings and pictures of his rescue from the Atlantic Ocean when he was a young pilot in the U.S. Air Force. |
Payette — At 40,000 feet, U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Ed Parsons suddenly faced a problem.
Sitting behind the controls of a F-102A jet, Parsons was flying high over the Atlantic Ocean on a night-training flight when he spotted a fire warning light erupt on his flight control panel.
“I got a steady fire warning light. That calls for an immediate shut down,” Parsons said, recently.
Parsons, 75, said he can remember that June night in 1959 vividly. Then, he was a 25-year-old new pilot on a routine night-training mission out of the Suffolk County Air Force base in New York.
“We were about 15 miles off Long Island,” Parsons said.
For Parsons, the night of June 8, 1959, stands as a clear demarcation line where training, innate know-how and a bit of luck all played key roles in saving his life.
“It was the first night mission for me. It was a routine training mission,” he said.
Mission goes awry
The Convair, F-102 was the U.S. Air Force’s mainstay in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was designed to intercept Soviet bombers.
Parsons was not exactly new to the aircraft that night, and the Payette native and University of Idaho graduate had been in the armed services since 1957.
The fire warning light did not send Parsons into a panic, either.
Instead, he focused on a number of steps he was trained to conduct in a crisis.
He turned the jet and moved the throttle of the fighter to “idle.”
The light continued to glow red. He called a mayday over the radio and then began to go through a list of emergency procedures.
He then shut down the fuel valves and turned the jet’s master switch to the “off” position for one minute.
When he turned the master switch back on the fire warning light continued to glow.
He then tested the fire warning circuit, but the light still remained on.
By this time the flight commander joined Parsons and looked over his plane but could not see any evidence of a fire.
“The flight commander joined me at 20,000 feet,” he said.
Parsons continued to work on emergency procedures, but in moments, the plane went into engine failure.
At once, Parsons was out of options.
Except for one — eject out of the aircraft over the ocean.
Parsons, though, said he didn’t have to make that decision.
“The flight commander made it, after we tried to start it, at 10,000 feet,” Parsons said.
Then things became very simple.
“He (the flight commander) had me blow the canopy at 4,000 feet. He told me, ‘You’ll go at 3,000 feet,’” Parsons said.
At 3,000 feet, Parsons ejected out of the crippled plane.
Hard landing
The ejection sequence out of the plane was sudden and shocking, Parsons said.
“It was dark. I tumbled, and then the chute opened up,” he said.
As he drifted down toward the water, Parsons said he heard an explosion in the distance that marked the end of his plane.
“I could see the lights of Long Island,” he said.
As he floated down, he eventually could make out the water.
He saw his survival pack hit the water, and then he hit the sea.
“It was cold,” he said.
He went under the water and then, as the flotation devices —called “water wings” — on his flight suit erupted, he came back up to the surface.
“The first thing I did was release the cokes on my harness and then located my raft,” he said.
The parachute, though, turned out to be a hindrance. The big chute kept dragging Parsons back down, but he finally broke free and crawled into a tiny, one-man raft.
“I couldn’t stretch my legs out. I settled down. Tried to bale the water out of it and then decided to leave it alone because it helped stabilize the raft,” he said.
In a sense Parsons was all alone on the open sea in the middle of the night but he said he wasn’t worried. At least not at first.
That’s because above in the night sky he could hear engines.
“Planes were over me all night,” he said.
Ocean Rescue
The sea was rough all night long, Parsons said, but at about 4:30 a.m. it was light enough for Parsons to dig out his survival kit. He dumped the contents of the kit between his legs in the raft and took stock.
It was a slightly depressing action.
“It (the kit) only had about a third of what it was supposed to. No radio. There was two flares, sea dye, shark dye and a little paddle that wouldn’t be much good,” Parsons said. At one point, Parsons said he was almost saved.
“I saw a boat and shot a flare across its bow. Bright red smoke. I blew a whistle (from the survival kit) and yelled. But it just kept going,” he said.
The encounter with the fishing boat was discouraging, he said.
“That was a setback,” he said.
Parsons, though, said he kept his spirits up by remembering he was not forgotten.
“I knew there would be other things coming,” he said.
As the sun came up help did, indeed, arrive, he said.
A Coast Guard seaplane began to fly over and Parsons set off a flare.
“I thought it would go past,” he said.
Parsons was wrong.
“Then it banked, came over dropping flares. Then our C-47 from base came over. They said later they couldn’t see me but knew I was there,” he said.
Within the hour, a helicopter arrived, circled and plucked Parsons from the sea.
And just like that he was on the way back to his base.
“They put me in the hospital,” Parsons said.
Back to duty
After three days in the hospital, Parsons was back on duty.
Parsons’ story, though, did not go unnoticed. In fact, his ordeal, for a brief time, was big news. Newspapers from Newsday in New York to the Idaho Statesman ran stories about his ditching and rescue. Headlines like “Jet Pilot Saved 7 Hours after Crash at Sea” or “Payette Pilot Saved” blared across the front of news tabs across the nation.
Parsons walked away from the ordeal in good health. Shark dye leaked over his hands, and his buttocks hurt from where the seat pack hit him during the ejection sequence, and some of his skin off the back of his legs was ripped off.
The Air Force never did find out what, exactly, happened to his jet fighter, Parsons said.
“Unknown internal failure. There was no fire. But it was night and we couldn’t see any smoke,” he said.
Parsons went on to record a great career in the U.S. Air Force and in the Idaho Air National Guard. He retired as a brigadier general in 1991 and then went back to his farm in Payette County.
Parsons concedes that night events could have gone terribly wrong.
But they didn’t.
“Things were right,” he said.
