With each mission, a pilot risks not returning. Instructor pilots repeat safety procedures so many times, by the time a student pilot graduates, the procedures are routine.
Mike Hainsey and Plato Rhyne credit such in-depth training with saving their lives 26 years ago, when a routine mission at Columbus Air Force Base went terribly wrong, leaving both men fighting for their lives.
Friday afternoon, as a crowd of instructors and students listened in Faulkner Auditorium at 50th Flying Training Squadron, the two men shared their story for the first time.
Hainsey now is the executive director of Golden Triangle Regional Airport and Rhyne is the owner and president of Atlanta-based Airline Apps, an online application service provider, which accepts and processes employment applications for airlines.
But on Jan. 17, 1986, Hainsey was an instructor pilot at CAFB and Rhyne was a student pilot flying his last sortie before graduation. It was a beautiful day for a flight — sunny, with a low bank of clouds — picture-perfect in every way.
Rhyne was flying acrobatics, positioning himself to enter a vertical loop, when the left wing failed, folding over the top of the T-38 Talon twin-jet trainer aircraft and unleashing a chain of events which worsened by the minute.
With gravitational forces hitting from every direction and the plane making between five and six revolutions per second, the cockpit became a hellish chaos of noise, violence and confusion. At that point, it was each man for himself, struggling to survive.
Mission: Eject
Rhyne fought to get his hands on the ejection handles, but it was impossible to position his body properly for an ideal ejection. He emerged from the cockpit headfirst, plummeting through 2,000 feet of clouds which obscured the ground.
He tried to pull the ripcord for his parachute, but he was tangled up in the rope and the parachute more closely resembled a trash bag over his head. Rhyne felt like he was going to black out and he realized he had been holding his breath.
He took a breath and calmly assessed the parachute situation, making it as functional as he could for landing. Suddenly he heard the distinctive chop-chop sound of a Huey helicopter.
“I was a little paranoid,” Rhyne recalled of his last thoughts, as he hit the ground. “A helicopter was trying to kill me; my airplane had tried to kill me; my parachute tried to kill me.”
In a surreal moment he had often imagined, he sat in a field and drank from the water bottle in his pack.
He didn’t know whether his instructor was alive or dead.
Mission: Survive
Hainsey was unconscious, hanging upside down from a tree. When he gained consciousness, he realized two things: He had vomited into his face mask and he had no idea what had happened.
He didn’t remember being trapped in the cockpit, as the T-38 became a fireball. He didn’t remember ejecting, amid a wall of 5,000 to 6,000-degree flames which melted parts of his flight suit and left him with second- and third-degree burns. He didn’t remember seeing the treetops in which he was ensnared.
He, too, heard the Huey helicopter. Frantically, he tried to catch the pilot’s attention, but his attempts only made him fall farther. He grabbed the trunk of the tree and held on as tightly as he could, until his arms became too fatigued.
Then, he let go.
The plane crashed in a remote field near Pontotoc, where a farmer saw it and, along with the Huey’s pilots, rushed to the injured men’s aid.
Hainsey and Rhyne, safe at last, stared at one another, as they were flown home. The intense gravitational forces had ruptured the blood vessels around their eyes, leaving their eyes bloodshot and their vision clouded. Hainsey was burned badly and covered in blood from head to toe.
But they were alive.
“We should not be standing here today,” Rhyne told the crowd.
At first, Hainsey thought he or Rhyne had made an error. Later he learned the T-38 had hairline cracks, invisible to the human eye, which had weakened the wings and made them vulnerable.
Both agreed training was critical in helping them stay calm and focused as they followed through with the procedures they had been taught.
Though they had not seen one another in the 26 years since the crash, they came together Friday to impress upon the T-38 instructor pilots and student pilots the importance of remaining vigilant to the possibility of a malfunction and developing good safety habits from which they never deviate.
“The majority of accidents happen during takeoff and landing,” Hainsey said. “If you stay in the Air Force any length of time, something strange will happen where you have to react and not think.”
Flying high
But there was something else the duo wanted to stress to the pilots: No matter what happens, fly again as soon as possible.
“We’re both believers in getting back on the horse that threw you,” Hainsey said.
Because Rhyne’s final mission, which was required in order to graduate, was deemed a failure, he still had to fly one more sortie. He strapped himself in, flew the mission without incident and earned his wings.
Hainsey’s return to flight was delayed by a six-month hospital stay, but as soon as he was released, he knew he had to get back in the air.
The first thing he did was take a T-38 up and begin flying acrobatics, just as he and Rhyne were doing on that fateful winter day 26 years ago. Then he began setting up for a vertical loop, just like the one which folded their wing above their plane and nearly cost them their lives. This time, he executed the loop perfectly, with no malfunction. He made another loop. Perfect again.
And then, he made a third and final loop, not because he had to, but because he could.
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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