35 Miles from Shore (10 page)

The decision to not carry life rafts was purely an economic one. ALM was able to fly without life rafts by claiming that the aircraft was never more than an hour away from a suitable landing field. Life rafts took up space and weight. Besides, management argued, the escape slides could be used in place of life rafts.
*

The differences between the two aircraft from a flight attendant's standpoint were minor. Some emergency equipment was stored in different locations. ALM's DC-9s had a rope and cargo tie down in the back of the plane, while the ONA DC-9 did not. Chris talked about the flight attendant call lights, which were located in a small strip in the ceiling just forward of the cockpit door. If a passenger pressed the call button, then the blue light would come on. If the cockpit called, then a red light would flash on. Two bells from the cockpit meant either take your seat for takeoff or come to the cockpit. There was no discussion of what three or more bells from the cockpit indicated.
⁵

The two topics that caused the most discussion were life vests and life rafts. All of the life vests on ONA's aircraft were the same size. ALM's aircraft carried two sizes of vests: one for adults and one for children. More than one person taking the class wanted to know what they were supposed to do if there were children on board. Chris pointed out that the vests that ONA carried were approved for use on anyone thirty-five pounds or greater.
⁶
She had one of ALM's
adult life vests and tried to demonstrate using a doll how the straps were to be tied between the legs of a child, as opposed to around the waist of an adult. Not everyone in the class was convinced that it was a workable solution.

The next discussion concerned the life rafts. Since ALM didn't carry life rafts aboard its DC-9s, several people wanted to know what the procedure was concerning the pre-positioning of life rafts in the event of a ditching. The procedure on the ALM DC-8 was to preposition the life rafts prior to ditching. In the case where there were no life rafts, as with the DC-9, they were told to remove the escape slides from their containers and pre-position the slides near the exits. Chris informed the class that because ONA did not have a raft tie-down kit, they were not to pre-position any of the life rafts, including the life raft stored in the coat closet.
*
⁷
Furthermore, the escape slides were to be disarmed so as not to interfere with the deployment of the life rafts.

There were a total of twenty-seven flight attendants qualified to fly the New York–St. Maarten route. The flights ran every Wednesday and Saturday. The flight attendants scheduled to work the St. Maarten flight would deadhead (ride as a non-revenue passenger) to New York on the ALM DC-8 on Tuesday. Work the roundtrip to St. Maarten and back on Wednesday. Have Thursday and Friday off in New York. Work the St. Maarten flight again on Saturday. Then deadhead back to Curaçao the next day. It was a grueling schedule, but the flight attendants liked it. The St. Maarten flights were much
easier to work than the long DC-8 flights from Curaçao to New York. They especially liked the two-day layover in New York City. They stayed in downtown Manhattan at the Edison Hotel on 47th Street and Broadway. It was an older hotel, but the staff was friendly and knew the ALM flight attendants on a first-name basis.

A
FTER DEVIATING WEST AROUND WEATHER,
B
ALSEY
descended to flight level 270, hoping for a smoother ride. He also slowed to .74 mach. Unable to get below the shelf of cirrus clouds, he once again asked for a lower altitude and was cleared to descend to FL 250. He then slowed to .72 mach. The ride improved, but the tradeoff for the smoother ride was a higher fuel burn
.

A time check at Grant intersection showed that they were running a few minutes behind flight plan. The deviations and power reductions were part of the reason, but it was also becoming apparent that the winds had shifted. Hugh theorized that a low-pressure area that they were counting on to provide a slight tail wind had shifted to the west and was instead giving them a slight headwind. A second time check seemed to verify Hugh's theory
.

Throughout the flight, Balsey had been taking periodic fuel readings. Douglas Aircraft was still working on the fuel burn discrepancy and wanted ONA to continue to track the fuel burns. Balsey made entries into a fuel log every thirty minutes. As a result, he had been monitoring the fuel situation more closely than usual. Even with the deviations and the
lower altitude, Balsey calculated that they would land with more than the legally required fuel reserve. He pulled out the weather documents and once again reviewed the weather for St. Maarten. The forecast was reported as:

Scattered clouds at 2500 feet, variable to 1500 feet, variable to broken, 10,000 feet overcast, 6 miles visibility, haze, wind 110 degrees at 10 kts. gusting to 15 kts
.
*
¹

The forecast also carried a warning for a chance of thunderstorms, with visibilities of 1½ miles and ceilings as low as 500 feet possible. The forecasted weather for St. Thomas, the planned alternate, was similar to that of St. Maarten
.

There was nothing in the forecast to warrant concern. There was a mention of thunderstorms, but there were always thunderstorms in the forecast for the Caribbean, especially in the spring as the colder air masses over the Atlantic collided with the warm air masses over the Caribbean. The only thing in the forecast that could have been considered out of the ordinary was the mention of a visibility restriction due to haze. Haze is not normally a factor in the Caribbean, especially the farther away you get from the larger islands. What the weather documents didn't say was that the haze in the forecast was caused by a sand storm that had occurred over Africa a few days earlier. The blue skies over the Caribbean were obscured by millions of minute particles of sand and dust. These minute particles, in turn, acted as condensation nuclei – the seeds of cloud formation. Thunderstorms grew in number and intensity as ALM 980 proceeded along its course
.

On the island of St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the thunderstorms were the source of much frustration for twenty-three-year-old pilot Bill Bohlke. The flight school he operated was unable to launch a single aircraft due to the stormy weather. Thunderstorms and high winds had plagued the island all afternoon. Sitting in the office with Bill were two pilots—George Johnson, a low time flight instructor, and Andy Titus, a student pilot. They were hoping the weather would improve so they could go flying. But just when the weather looked like it might clear up, the winds would start swirling and another band of showers would pass through. So they talked and drank coffee. The only flying this day would be hangar flying.

Bill was a little on edge this day even without the weather. His wife Tuddy (pronounced Toody) was nine months pregnant with their first child. Tuddy worked at the airport with Bill and had gone to work as she had been doing throughout her pregnancy. She had left work a few hours earlier, though, after feeling what she thought were labor pains. She drove to a girlfriend's house to rest.

Bill's dad, Bill Bohlke Sr., started the first commuter airline in the region in 1964. In 1968, Bill's dad sold the commuter airline and formed Caribbean Air Services, which flew cargo over many of the same routes that the commuter airline flew. Bill flew for his dad, building up flight time in light twin aircraft like the Cessna 310 and the Piper Aztec.

Bill Jr. was a garrulous young man who had flown long enough in the Caribbean that he could identify islands solely by their silhouettes. He had a young face and a stocky build. Family and friends still referred to him as Billy, a moniker he didn't encourage. He was also a budding airline pilot. When his dad sold the commuter airline, he took a job as a flight engineer on a Boeing 727 with Trans Caribbean Airways. He had returned to St. Croix a few months earlier after having been furloughed for the second time. Bill had spent
some time in the Air National Guard and knew of several guardsmen who had used VA benefits for flight training. He decided to start his own flight school on St. Croix with the hope of drawing students with VA benefits. He had been operating the flight school for several months. There hadn't been too many days when the weather had kept his aircraft on the ground. This day, however, was unusually stormy. In all his time flying in the Caribbean he could remember only one or two times when the thunderstorms were as relentless as they were that afternoon.
²

One person who did manage to get some work done at the airport that afternoon was George Stoute. George worked as an aircraft mechanic for Bill's dad. George was from the island of Barbados. He was well liked and an excellent mechanic. George Stoute was also a convicted murderer.

George was a heavy drinker. On one particular day in June 1966, George had been drinking when he learned that his girlfriend had been cheating on him. George spotted his girlfriend and her brother sitting in a car. He confronted her. There was a brief exchange and then the car sped off. George jumped into his car and pursued the pair through the narrow streets of St. Croix, eventually ending up at the front steps of the police station in Christianstead. He shot his girlfriend in the head as she sat in the car. Her brother was inside trying to get help. George was immediately arrested and later sentenced to a thirty-five-year prison sentence. He had been working as a mechanic for Bill's dad before the incident. Bill Bohlke Sr. had some influence on the island and worked out an arrangement with prison officials at the Richmond Penitentiary to let George out on a work release program four days a week. In return, George set up a machine shop in the prison and taught other inmates how to work on aircraft engines as well as maintain the prison's fleet of vehicles.
³
Elsewhere in the Caribbean soon to be rescuers went about their daily routine. One of those rescuers was twenty-one-year-old Corporal John Barber, a short but muscled marine with an angular face. John was on the flight deck of the
USS Guadalcanal
, which was anchored off the southern coast of Vieques Island, located just six miles from Puerto Rico.

The
USS Guadalcanal
, designated LPH-7, was an
Iwo Jima
class amphibious assault ship. The ship resembled an aircraft carrier but was considerably smaller. The flight deck could accommodate only helicopters and V/STOL (vertical/short takeoff and landing) aircraft. The ship's primary mission was to transport Marine assault troops along with their armament, vehicles, equipment, and support personnel. The landing force would arrive on land via helicopter, allowing for a dispersal of troops as well as eliminating the need for a concentrated beach assault. In addition to transporting up to seventeen hundred marines, the ship required another seven hundred men whose primary job was to operate and maintain the ship. Sometimes referred to as helicopter carriers, the ships were also used as the primary recovery vessels during the Apollo space program. The
Guadalcanal
was responsible for two such recoveries: the astronauts from
Gemini X
and the spacecraft and astronauts from
Apollo 9
.

John Barber had joined the Marine Corps in 1967, signing up with three high school classmates under the buddy system, which promised to keep the four together at least through boot camp. He had signed up for a four-year commitment, hoping to get a job working with helicopters. John had been interested in helicopters since the age of seven, after seeing helicopters bringing survivors from the
Andrea Doria
to the Brighton Marine hospital complex located behind the housing projects where he lived. The
Andrea Doria
, an Italian cruise ship, had collided with the Swedish ship
Stockholm
. The helicopters landed in the basketball courts behind Barber's house. The life and
death drama played out that day had a huge impact on the young boy from the Dorchester section of Boston. He knew from that point on that he would be involved in some manner with aviation. Following boot camp at Cherry Hill, North Carolina, John was assigned to aviation structural mechanic's school in Memphis, Tennessee. After graduating from mechanic's school at the end of 1967, he was assigned to the Marine Medium Helicopter squadron HMM-261 based at the Marine Corps Air Station, New River, Jacksonville, North Carolina. His job as a metal smith was not a flying position. But he was only nineteen. He figured he had lots of time to get the position he truly wanted, which was a flying position as a crew chief aboard a Marine helicopter.

By late 1969, Barber was certain that his next assignment was going to be Vietnam. He had been hearing stories from other guys in the squadron who had been to Vietnam. He had even volunteered to go. But in early November he was told that he would be going on another Caribbean cruise. It would be his second Caribbean cruise in two years. He was ambivalent about the assignment. On the one hand, he felt an obligation to serve a tour of duty closer to where the action was. On the other hand, there were worse assignments he could have drawn than cruising the Caribbean in the middle of winter in a relatively new, air-conditioned ship. More importantly, this cruise held out the promise of his being crossed-trained as a crew chief. He knew that a number of the crew chiefs going on the cruise were scheduled to complete their military commitments before the end of the cruise. He would be in the perfect position to move into one of the expected vacancies.

There was something else about this cruise that would be different from the previous one. John Barber was engaged. He had met a girl a few months earlier during a trip to Cape Cod. He had asked the girl, Kathy Vitt, to marry him. They hadn't set a date, but at least
John had something to look forward to when he returned. HMM-261 departed Morehead City, North Carolina aboard the
USS Guadalcanal
on January 13, 1970. The squadron consisted of two Bell UH-1E Huey helicopters and sixteen twin-engine Boeing CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters. The helicopters were supported by some three hundred marines including the pilots, mechanics, and miscellaneous support staff.