Summertime, Manila non-stop to Honolulu, is about a nine hour flight, an all night deal. Our first two hours had been a bitch, torrential rain, turbulence, the works. In severe-clear for the past half-hour, Captain Chuck Cooper finally succumbed to his exhaustion.
While Chuck was hanging comatose in his seatbelt harness, Roy Steele, our Co-pilot was gently maneuvering the DC-10 around storm cells, using the heading select knob on the flight guidance panel.
I’m tonight’s Second Officer, Flight Engineer, sitting sideways, back at the panel, monitoring systems. My mind wanders to an impression of last night’s fun, and I laugh out loud. I can see clearly now Captain Chuck, balls-naked, sloshing around on a rubber mattress, slick with hot soapy water, being worked over by two Philipina girls.
Roy Steele and I have snuck the Mama-San’s karaoke machine microphone into Chuck’s “private” room. I hold the mike to his mouth, as he makes a noble attempt at “You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh…,” particularly hard to accomplish with your dick being sucked by one girl, and you’re singing through the fine, straight pussy-hairs of a second girl, who’s sitting on your face.
Hearing this unique rendition over the loud-speaker system, the Mama-San freaks out! Roy and I split post-haste, and head for Rosie’s café for breakfast, then it’s back to the hotel for our afternoon siesta, before our flight home. I don’t know what time Captain Chuck left his two friends.
As I start to nod off myself, my head growing heavy, I notice that the engine gauges for the number two engine are doing a jig, they start rolling back, and then they quit.
“Power loss #2!” I yell out.
Chuck, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot, is awake immediately, instantly focused. Roy, pushes up the power on the two remaining engines, applies rudder, and is controlling the airplane.
Three things come to mind immediately. First, we can’t maintain this altitude with only two working engines (I break out the “drift-down” charts that tell us by weight, what altitude we can maintain). Second, it’s got to be fuel contamination, so we are going to lose the #1 and #3 engines. And third, we are in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean, it’s the dead of night, hours from anywhere. Ditching, injuries, blood, sharks… fuckin’ Manila, what a shithole, giving us watered down gasoline.
Jet engines don’t just quit for no reason. Fuel starvation should be the only cause, yet all our fuel boost pumps are on, still feeding from the 85,000 pounds of aux-tank fuel, direct to all engines. We have “source"-"force"-and “course"… there is nothing wrong, which leaves only the possibility of contaminated fuel from Manila. Anything can be in the fuel we got in the Philippines, the place is an aviation joke, but this is no joke.
As we start our drift down, we go through the emergency engine failure checklist methodically, as we are trained to do, yet terror has gripped my heart. If we do have contaminated fuel, since all three engines have been feeding from the same tank, we are only minutes away from disaster. No way will we survive the loss of another engine.
Roy Steele, out of his own anxiety, asks me if I’ve “been fucking with the fuel pumps?”
“No, Roy! Are you nuts?”
Chuck confirms that all the switches are as they should be, and have not been touched since takeoff.
I’m burning mad at Roy’s question. “How can you ask me something like that?”
“Sorry. In the Air Force I had a guy fuck with the switches out of boredom, I was just checking….” (this said with a twinge of embarrassment.)
We attempt an air restart of the number two engine, and it lights back up, shit-hot. Back in business, we divert, making a bee-line for Guam. The Chamorrons we have working for us in maintenance cannot find any reason for the engine failure. The fuel filters are clear, no metal shavings or other contaminants. Houston Maintenance Control clears us to continue to Honolulu, and so we leave Guam for Hawaii, with the remainder of the flight uneventful.
Next day, I return to Guam on a new pairing, with Captain Stan Poyner, a truly class guy. Stan had worked for MacDonald Douglas as a test pilot, and he listened with interest to my story about the engine failure.
Checking in at the Tumon Bay Hilton, one of my buddies from another crew comes over, wanting to know if I’ve heard about the shitbird second-officer who had been fucking with the fuel system, almost causing us to lose a DC-10?” He was talking about me, though he didn’t know it, and Guam based mechanics had been spreading this bullshit.
Furious, I am ready to confront the entire maintenance crew at Agana, when another friend, Captain Craig Chapman, gives me some good advise. “Forget it. If you go out there and create a scene, it will only make it worse.”
Flying from Tokyo to Saipan, Stan Poyner tells me that “turning off the boost pumps would not shut down the #2 engine, anyway. Its a myth. That engine would still suction feed fuel, even sixty-feet up in the tail.”
On our climb-out from Saipan to Guam, Stan turns and indicates to me with his fingers (so that no words get on the cockpit voice recorder) for me to shut off the #2 fuel boost pumps. Aghast, I shake my head “No!” He commandingly gestures this order again. I reluctantly shut-off the engine #2 fuel tank boost pumps. We fly all the way back to Guam with the #2 switches and pumps off, yet the engine keeps running, not even a hiccup… but who could I tell it to?
Stan had taken this chance with his rank, and his career, just to make me feel better, to make me know that even had the switches been turned off, I could not have been responsible.
There are some wonderful and insane people in this business of aviation. Stan Poyner is one of them.