Remembering Phil

Being the Best Can Save Your Life . . . Sometimes

I was sitting at my desk the other day, preparing to go TDY, when I had what a friend calls a "cranial sidebar." For a moment, my mind drifted back over 10 years and came to rest with my old friend Phil. Phil is gone now. He died in a flight mishap far from his home in the middle of the night.

Phil was a buddy from my first assignment, back when I was a tanker copilot. Our base was one of Strategic Air Command's northern tier bases with the usual long winters and remote locations. Squadrons would get kind of tight up north and ours was no exception. Phil was one of the folks that made the squadron a fun place to work and live. He would have squadron parties at his house, and he always had a smile and good word to say. But one of the things that made him very easy to like was that he was very easy to respect. He had a great reputation as a pilot, partly based on his flying skill and partly based on the way he treated his crew. When you flew with Phil, you really felt like you were part of his team, not one of his servants.

He was about to upgrade when I showed up, so he spent most of the time that I knew him as an aircraft commander (AC). He was something of a legendary figure among the copilots, though. In those days, SAC copilots got to fly T-37s or T-38s to build time and experience toward upgrade in what was called the Accelerated Copilot Enrichment (ACE) program. When Phil was a copilot, he used to fly ACE every chance he could. By the time it was his turn to upgrade to AC, he had something like 500 ACE hours more than twice what the normal copilot would have accumulated.

His interest and love of flying was complete. He had earned an aeronautical engineering degree before entering pilot training. He was also a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association and was building his own plane. Phil really knew what he was doing around airplanes and the KC-135 was no exception.

Phil knew the systems of the tanker backward and forward. I once had an emergency procedures simulator with him and his copilot. It was one of those sims where you build the impossible, multiple-catastrophe scenario just to "pimp" your buddies. For the crew, the idea is to see how long you can survive before you inevitably crash. Phil was incredible. As soon as I could get the sim to fail something, they were isolating the system or shutting something down. As fast as I could pile on the emergencies, Phil and his copilot would take the appropriate corrective action to keep flying. The really impressive thing about Phil was that no matter how obscure the situation, he always knew what the proper response should be. In fact, when I started to pile things on faster and faster, Phil would have the checklist from the Dash One completed before his copilot could find it in the book. His systems knowledge was so thorough that he immediately knew the implications of each failure and how to make the best of the situation. I ended up having to dial up the gross weight and drag settings to force them to crash.

Eventually, Phil PCS'd and we lost touch. Some time after he had left, we got word that he had been killed in a flight mishap. Most of us that knew him were amazed. How could this have happened to Phil, of all people? The tanker is a pretty safe airplane and few pilots were as knowledgeable or as talented as Phil. It just didn't make sense. When the safety board released their findings, it was the same old story. Links in a chain of events, any one of which would have saved the crew - had it been broken. Their situation had involved some things from the preflight, some errors during the flight, and finally a system failure that caused several other systems to fail or be degraded. It was just like in the simulator, only this time there was total darkness and rising terrain.

Shortly after the accident, it was my turn to upgrade. While I was at the school, I took the training pretty seriously. Like a lot of people in that situation, I wanted to do well so I could get a special certificate, letter, or some other form of personal recognition when I graduated. Then I thought about Phil. I realized that no matter how much I wanted to be the best in my class, it was really beside the point. My real concern should have been to be the best that I could be, regardless of my classmates. As dedicated, knowledgeable, and talented as my friend Phil was, it ultimately didn't save him. He was confronted with a real world situation that overwhelmed even his capabilities. If it happened to him, it could certainly happen to me or anyone else. I never wanted to find myself in a dangerous situation wishing I had studied just a little harder, or trained just a little more. Thinking about my friend Phil, his crew, and their families focused my approach to training at school and from then on.

Now, I am on the verge of going back to a flying job. Sitting in my C-3 (cubicle with three walls) at Scott, I am filling out training RIPs and starting my outprocessing, getting ready to go to training at Altus. There are lots of things to do to get ready, but none more important than remembering Phil.

Maj William D. Murdoch, 21 AS, Travis AFB CA

Maj Murdoch is currently assigned to the 21st Airlift Squadron, Travis AFB CA, where he serves as the Director of Operations. Priorto this, Maj Murdoch's flying assignments included tours at Wurtsmith AFB Ml and Grisssom AFB IN, before PCSing to the Combat Crew Training School (CCTS) at Castle AFB CA to serve a tour as a KC-135 Instructor Pilot. Maj Murdoch then moved to Scott AFB IL, where he served as a member of the HQ AMC Inspector General team (the time the article was written).

Copyright Superintendent of Documents, Military Airlift Command May/Jun 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved