December 23, 1931.

Ten miles off Cape Flattery, the 4-masted schooner Commodore furls its sails and picks up a towline from the tug Goliath, out of Neah Bay. It is late afternoon, blowing a gale, with waves to match. Conditions are so rough that in the process of getting the towline out the tug’s mate is injured, and has to be carried off the stern deck. The schooner manages to get the line aboard, and the Goliath gets under way, but cannot get synchronized with the schooner’s motion; the sea state is confused as well as high and steep, producing alternate slack and shock loads on the 2” steel cable. The 1,200 ft. line breaks at the tug’s chock, and the crew of the Commodore slowly hauls it aboard by brute strength. Vancouver Island is a deadly obstacle to leeward, so the schooner’s crew sets storm canvas, heaves-to, and hopes that another tug can come out to them. The Goliath heads for shore, to get help for the injured mate.

One month earlier:

The schooner Commodore is sailing out of Honolulu, bound for the Pacific Northwest. While in Hawaii, the ship offloaded over 1.5 million board feet of lumber, and it is now going home in ballast. A few days before departing, Captain Krantz and his crew host a party aboard. Among the guests is the captain of the 5-masted schooner Vigilant. It is reported that there is a bit of good-natured joshing between the two skippers, because Commodore had beaten Vigilant to Hawaii by three days.

But the two ships do not leave Hawaii together, or anything like it. Four days after the party the Commodore is heading for the Northwest. The ship is six days and over a thousand miles into its voyage by the time the Vigilant gets away on December 3rd.  The Vigilant is just a few feet longer than the Commodore (241ft. vs 234), so there is nothing to suggest that the Vigilant might have spotted its rival almost a week’s head start. Far more likely, the Commodore simply finished loading ballast first, and got under way; this is a working vessel, and will be back in Hawaii early in 1932 with another load of lumber. There is work to be done. Despite this, a reporter at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin gets it into his head that the two schooners are in fact racing, and he files a report to that effect. The story goes out over the wire, and within days newspapers all over America are running stories about a non-existent race. From this point on, the papers will be posting bulletins describing a neck-and-neck race across the Pacific.

Now it is possible that the lead boat “sailed into a hole,” and was overhauled, at least somewhat. But really, calling this a race is like saying that two similar aircraft departing at separate times are racing. These boats weren’t, they were taking rocks home as ballast, because Hawaii had no cargo for them. Their purpose was to get back to the Northwest lumber mills, to pick up another million or two board feet of lumber for the construction of Pearl Harbor. But public perception is a powerful thing, and millions thrilled to the image of two grizzled captains roaring insults at each other as they pounded along, as in Kipling’s Captains Courageous, which would be made into a movie just a few years later. And other schooners were in the news at the time, like the Canadian Bluenose and the American Gertrude Thebaud, which had just completed a race series, won by the Bluenose. This was also the Great Depression, and Americans really needed a break from the bleak circumstances of their time. So the Oakland Tribune reported, at about the halfway point, that the Vigilant was just 375 miles back, but appeared to have lost its radio aerial. The Hartford Courant reported some days later that the Commodore was, “breasting the heavy swells of the Pacific tonight,” and wondering why the Vigilant hadn’t been heard from for some time. The Nanaimo Daily News said that the schooners were, “…focusing the glasses of all who admire sailing vessels,” before going on at some length about their “flash predecessors” and the “secrets of the winds.” Later on, the two skippers and their crews speak only of a grueling passage, with storms and calms all the way across the Pacific resulting in an unusually slow crossing for both vessels.

Finally, on December 22^nd, the word goes out that Commodore is only 40 miles from picking up a tug at Cape Flattery, with Vigilant nowhere in sight. The Los Angeles Times, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Pittsburgh Press, and many other papers declare the Commodore the winner of the “historic race.” The acclaim is premature. Conditions are deteriorating quickly, with a building southeast wind barring the way, and in retrospect the failure of the Goliath’s towline seems inevitable. But worse is yet to come.

With night falling, and Vancouver Island looming to leeward, the schooner is met by a second tug, the Roosevelt. Built as a support vessel for Robert Peary’s Arctic explorations, and later converted to an oceangoing salvage tug, the Roosevelt has seen and survived terrible conditions in its long career, but it is now heading out into real violence. Despite this, they manage to get their towline aboard the Commodore at around 10 pm, and take up the slack. For four hours they keep at it, but can make no headway, and at last their towline too parts. This time it fails at the bow of the schooner. They try to pass the line a second time, and a third, but it is no use. By now waves are breaking into the tugboat, putting it in danger of sinking. The radio operator puts out a distress call, finishing it with: “For God’s sake hurry!” A short while later, as the radio room is flooding, he issues another, garbled message that ends, “…does not appear to have much chance to survive.” Coast Guard cutters from the U.S. and Canada rush to the area, but can find no trace of the Roosevelt, and newspapers report that it might have been lost with all hands. Happily, the crew pumps hard enough to gain a bit on the flooding, and the tug limps back into Neah Bay.

This leaves the Commodore drifting rapidly towards Vancouver Island.  There is no way they can beat to weather into the narrow entrance to the Straits, so instead of finding shelter inland, the schooner must come about, fighting its way clear of the rocks to leeward. They destroy several sails and spars in the process, all of which are absolutely essential to keeping the boat pointed where it needs to go. The crew, none of whom are under fifty years old (one of whom is 72), drags replacement parts up from below, and doggedly puts things to rights as the wind tops 70 knots. At last they heave-to about 200 miles northwest of the Cape. There they stay for ten brutal days, alternately bashing about in hurricane-force winds and slamming about in brief calms, amid huge swells.

Meanwhile the Vigilant is coming up, in relative comfort, on the same wind that gave the Commodore such a beating. Things get even nicer for them as the storm eases, and the wind goes southwest. On January 4^th, the now-recovered tug Roosevelt takes the Vigilant in tow, bringing it into the Straits without difficulty. About 5 hours later, the Commodore makes its weary way back to Cape Flattery, and is picked up by the Goliath. The same newspapers that had lauded the Commodore as the winner now laud the Vigilant, even though at the end they trailed in elapsed time to the Cape by an additional four days. But no matter, the papers had their race, and their readers had their thrills. Interviewed shortly thereafter, the captain of the Commodore describes accounts of the voyage as, “A bunch of you reporters trying to stir up trouble.” A crewmember of the Vigilant, writing years later, says that, “At Eagle Harbor, on Bainbridge Island, the Vigilant was declared the “winner,” though Captain Mellberg, like the crews on both schooners, had no idea they’d been racing.”

It would be easy to describe all this as a Depression-era example of fake news, but though the reporting is at least suspect in some of its details, the important truth is that some very tough human beings took some very large, ungainly, engineless ships through mountainous seas, because it was their job. Racing or not, they did the near-impossible, and then loaded up and did it again. And again.

Coda: I first saw the photograph of the Commodore hanging in a cabin aboard Nancy Erley’s boat. Nancy is now one of the most deeply-experienced sailors of our time, but back then she was living aboard a classic powerboat on Lake Union, and dreaming of the sea. She told me she had no idea what ship it was, but that something about it inspired her. We now know the story, but the picture says everything that needs saying: there is you, the viewer, looking out past a rough, threatening swell, to a ship that is somehow not overwhelmed.

This post will be easier to understand if you read last week’s, but to sum up, two soldiers are tangled up in their parachute rigging, their chutes are collapsed, and they are plummeting to the ground.

The jumpmasters immediately corrected their timing, and everyone else’s chute opened uneventfully. George reached the front of his queue, jumped, and looked down the line of parachutes trailing away below him. He immediately saw the two tangled chutes, and realized that one of them must belong to his friend Maria. As he watched, Bill’s reserve chute blossomed, filled, and collapsed. The pair continued their way-too-fast descent.

George watched all this, helpless. His official task for this jump was to carry the radio for the commander, but as a graduate of a Combat Lifesaver course he also had a medical bag. Medical attention probably wasn’t going to make any difference in this case, but you never know, so he pulled at his chute’s suspension lines to maximize his own descent rate. This is a hazardous move, itself possibly leading to chute collapse, but he had to do something. He could see that the two lieutenants were working at getting separated, but they were trapped by their lines. As they neared the ground, when all seemed lost, George saw Maria’s reserve chute open – and stay open.

It was an indescribably sweet sight, and the descent of the two soldiers slowed to a survivable rate. Note: a reserve parachute is much smaller, and much less aerodynamically effective than the primary chute. At the time of this jump, the reserve was 28sq. ft, and basically a very thin disc, while the primary was 34sq ft, with a deep parabolic shape. The difference in size and shape meant that, if you had to use the reserve, you would come down faster, and with less control. Having to bear the weight of two people made things even worse, but it was better than nothing. Maria played her control lines, working to keep the canopy open as it was battered by the still-fluttering mess of the three other parachutes.

It looked to George as though everything was going to be okay, but when the pair was still about 200 ft above the ground that last, precious reserve chute collapsed.

In normal circumstances a parachutist, using the equipment that was Army standard at the time, would hit the ground at about 15 mph, or 22 ft/sec. This is about as fast as you’d be going if you jumped off the top of a minivan. With a crosswind it can be more like running off the top of a van, but we’re still talking relatively low velocity. If a skydiver jumps out of an airplane, by the time they freefall 200 ft, they will be travelling at about 60 mph, or 88 ft/sec, about like a freefall off a 20-story building. It is just barely conceivable that a human being could survive an impact at that speed, but given the drag from all those flapping parachutes, and/or the possibility that the reserve collapsed at less than 200 ft, the soldiers might have  augered in at as little as 40 to 50 mph. Which would be like jumping off a building of merely 6 or 7 stories.

By any normal standards, this is still a guaranteed-fatal velocity, but Bill and Maria had two more factors on their side. One was that they were young and extraordinarily tough people; there are no couch potatoes in Airborne. The other factor is a crucial determinant of outcome for almost any jump, something almost as important as the parachute itself: the Prepare to Land Attitude.

When you are properly in the Attitude, your knees are slightly bent, your feet and knees are pressed together, your back is straight, your chin is tucked, your elbows are close to your side, and your hands are up, to protect your face. There is also a dynamic aspect to the Attitude. If you are coming in at any speed at all, you need to take a shoulder roll, to bleed off the force of the landing impact. A face plant does not accomplish this, nor does falling onto your back. Instead, you need to twist your body to one side as you are about to land, and roll onto the other side, progressively making contact with feet, calves, thighs, butt, and lats. This twist-and-roll is particularly valuable when, as is often the case in the military, you are landing in a breeze and/or swinging in a pendulum arc, but it is also a vital technique if you are coming down extra-fast.

As Bill and Maria neared the ground, observers there saw that Bill’s knees were locked back, and that his legs were apart. Maria, by contrast, was holding a textbook example of Attitude.

George watched as Maria hit, rolled several times, and then lay completely still. He feared the worst, but then she took a deep breath and shouted, “Mother—- that hurts!”. It turns out that she had severely sprained an ankle, suffered two hairline vertebrae fractures and some bruised ribs, but was otherwise okay. Bill did not fare nearly so well: six spiral fractures from knee to ankle on one leg; one break on the other; multiple broken ribs; several fractured vertebrae; concussion. The Attitude makes a difference.

One more note on procedure. A jump like this one typically takes 40 to 45 seconds. George came down as fast as he could, so his time in the air was almost certainly less than 40 seconds. But by the time he landed and went to help, an ambulance had rolled up, and medics were tending to the wounded. Just as the manual says they should.

There are any number of morals that might be appended to this story, things like Teamwork is Powerful, or Never Give Up, or Airborne is Awesome. But the one I like is both figuratively and literally apt. It comes from Archilocus, a soldier and poet of ancient Greece. He wrote that, “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”

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From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.

Next week, the Commodore and the Vigilant

The U.S. Army is very, very good at launching large numbers of parachutists from airplanes. Dozens, scores, hundreds of soldiers at a time, every jumper equipped with reliable gear, every jumper prepared with comprehensive, rigorous training, supervised by jumpmasters who have spent more time airborne — in and out of airplanes — than many people have spent walking, and backed by a system that has been supplying, organizing, practicing, and executing jumps for so long, and in so many places and circumstances (including, yes, many where the gravity-associated hazards are relatively trivial), that every conceivable variable, every possible hazard, failure mode, catastrophe, and malfunction, every likely and unlikely combination of recalcitrant equipment and human folly has long ago been recognized, taken into account, and given a place in the manual. Well, there are always exceptions. This is the story of one.

In order to stay qualified, every Airborne member must make a “proficiency jump” at least once every 90 days. Some units and specialties might require more frequent jumps to maintain qualification. For this exercise there were 100 soldiers aboard a C-17 Globemaster 3. Half were seated on either side of the fuselage, with a Humvee in the middle, right aft. The idea was to put the ramp door down on the first pass over the target, launch the vehicle, and then circle around and launch the personnel. The vehicle was to go out first for reasons that might be obvious once you think about it. Not obvious? Just imagine yourself on the ground after a bad landing. You’ve broken your leg, and aren’t moving real well. The last thing you need is a 5-ton truck floating down onto you. This is the kind of thing the manual helps with. The difficulties with this particular exercise started with a glitch in the ramp mechanism, preventing the Humvee drop.

To appreciate what happened next, it would be useful to know a bit about the logistics of mass jumps. Every soldier’s primary chute has a static line that runs from the pack, then up and over the inboard shoulder. That way it won’t be under an arm or around your neck when you turn outboard at the door to jump. The tether terminates in a robust clip. For walking around before the jump, the clip is secured to a gear loop on the soldier’s chest. The chute is held in place by cotton webbing with an 80 lb. break strength. When the paratrooper leaves the plane and fetches up at the end of the static line, the force tears out the cotton webbing, and the chute deploys. It’s a brutally simple, wonderfully reliable arrangement, but it can be compromised. For instance, it is possible for the rigger to use a stronger webbing than the 80 lb. cotton (the penalties for this are understandably severe).

It is also possible for a jumper somehow to misreeve or tangle the static line before a jump, getting it stuck behind a D-ring, strap, or the like. If this happens the static line might not tear the webbing out, and the jumper can end up hanging on the outside of the plane, slamming repeatedly and violently against the fuselage in the slipstream. But there’s a procedure for this, too: if the jumper is still conscious and uninjured (and you can tell because, as per training for this unlikely eventuality, they’ll be curled up in a ball, with no limp limbs), then the jumpmaster will just cut the static line. That’s what reserve chutes are for. If the jumper is unconscious or significantly injured, the jumpmaster will arrange to haul the person back inboard, then proceed with getting the rest of the people out. This is yet another of the many screwups that the system is prepared to deal with.

There are four jumpmasters, two at each exit door. One on each side is there to assist with the static lines, and to act as a safety. When it is time to jump, the jumpmasters check with the aircrew, and then begin giving a very specific series of commands. First is the order to stand up, then to hook up. On the latter command, everyone in the “stick” (line of jumpers) transfers their hook to a taut overhead cable that runs fore-and-aft, just inboard of the seats, on both sides of the plane (on really packed flights, as in the picture above, there are two inboard rows of seats). Then comes the command to check static lines. Next is the command to check all equipment. The jumpmasters already gave everyone a thorough inspection before the plane boarded, but in the next couple of minutes everyone is going to jump out of an airplane. So everyone checks again. They check the helmets’ chin straps, the parachutes’ leg and chest straps, any and all gear straps and lanyards. They check the up to 70 lbs(!) of gear they will be jumping with. And everyone pays particular attention to those static lines: You check your own static line in front of you, where you can see it, and you check the static line on the back of jumper ahead of you. It absolutely must run fair. When all is checked, the jumpmasters call out “Sound off for equipment check.” The forwardmost jumpers (they’ll be the last ones off), call out “OK,” and tap the back of the person in front of them. On receiving that signal, that person calls “OK,” then taps the next person, and so on. The idea is that every jumper in both sticks confirms readiness. When the person at the front of the line feels that tap, they call out “OK jumpmaster,” and holds a “knife hand” (fingers straight, thumb laid down flush, palm  vertical) pointed right up in front of the jumpmaster’s face. Even this specific hand ritual speaks of deep institutional experience; these airplanes are noisy things, and lighting is not always ideal. There is no room for ambiguity or uncertainty, thus the string of verbal as well as physical signals along the length of the stick. But the lead jumper, instead of tapping the jumpmaster, emphatically extends a hand, formed to maximize visibility and minimize getting a sprained finger from what comes next: the jumpmaster makes an emphatic verbal acknowledgement, and then slaps the hand to make an equally emphatic physical acknowledgement.

Now the loadmasters — specialized Air Force crewmembers — raise the doors, latch them open, and let the cockpit crew know that all is ready, at which point the pilot will radio, “Army, your door.”

The jumpmasters conduct a careful ritual, checking the edges around the door for sharp spots. It wouldn’t do to have a static line get severed when it fetches up. With the door done, the jumpmaster on each side leans right out of the door and looks around, making sure that no other aircraft are in dangerous proximity, and not incidentally looking to see that they are not over the wrong target. It happens.

Up until now there has been a red “jump light” glowing in the cabin. At 30 seconds from go, an amber light replaces the red, the jumpmaster calls out “stand by,” and the first jumper turns to face out the door.

Finally a green light comes on and the jumpmaster says “green light go,” smacks the first jumper on the leg or butt, and the jump commences. A soldier goes out on one side of the plane, followed by a soldier from the other side. The two lines shuffle aft, jumpers leaving alternate sides of the plane at half-second intervals. That’s right, half-second intervals; the idea is to get an effective group on the ground as quickly as possible. To help keep the intervals from being too tight, no one moves towards the door until the person ahead of them is a full arm’s length away. Every mass jump that the army conducts sees each of these details — and more that we don’t have space for here — done consistently and scrupulously. Every step puts the jumpers that much further from potential catastrophe.

With all this in mind, let’s return to our plane with the jammed tail ramp. This is an extremely uncommon mechanical failure, because aircraft mechanics tend to be at least as thorough and skillful as parachutists, but sometimes things do break. The jumpmasters confer briefly and decide to scrub that part of the mission and move on to the next. As covered in the manual. People start going out the doors.

The soldier who related this story to me (we’ll call him George) was 3rd in line on his side of the plane, so he was to be the 5^th or 6th one out. A lieutenant he worked with (we’ll call her Maria), was on his side. Second in line on the other side was another lieutenant (we’ll call him Bill). Unfortunately, what should have been a routine jump was unbalanced by the unanticipated presence of the Humvee, which partially blocked the view between the two doors. The lines started out not-quite-synchronized, and Maria and Bill went out their respective doors almost simultaneously.

The slipstream of the plane swept both soldiers aft and inboard, canopies already deploying. In some cases when this happens, bodies will collide hard enough to knock one or both parties out. Bad. In this case the collision wasn’t too serious, but the two partially-deployed chutes immediately tangled and collapsed. The two soldiers were now locked together, heading for the ground at speed, and accelerating.

Next week: The Landing

Note: the names of the people in this story have been changed to protect privacy, and to respect an insistent humility.

Enjoy the story? Looking for more? You’re in luck! “Falling,” which in includes this and other tales from aloft, both thrilling and amusing, is now for sale on Amazon.com in handy e-book form! Or click here to get it on Apple iBooks!

From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.