Punching Out at 15,000 Feet

Odd as it may seem, the first thought that crossed Lt. Col. John W. Capito’s mind as he felt the initial lash of freezing rain at 15,000 feet was of the 8-year-old boy at the airfield.

“Have you ever had to eject?” the youngster had asked as Capito prepared to jet off in his AV-8B Harrier.

“No, kid,” the 39-year-old Marine told him. “That never really happens.”

Capito knew better. Harrier pilots must always be prepared for an unscheduled ride up the rails. Considering the plane’s safety record, some say they feel “spring-loaded to eject.”

It is rarely a simple call, or one afforded much time for calculation. Reach down and pull the black-and-yellow rubberized handle at the right moment and you float to earth with the anticipation of free drinks at the officer’s club. Pull it a second late and your family faces a closed-casket funeral. Punch out before it is clear that the plane is doomed and you can expect a lifetime of second-guessing.

On March 31, 1985, Capito ejected into a battering storm over Long Island Sound. His harrowing descent to the 38-degree water below lasted nearly 20 minutes. While buffeted by gusting wind and pea-sized hail, he had plenty of time to contemplate the causes and consider the consequences.

His odyssey began at the Naval Air Station at South Weymouth, Mass., where the boy had posed his question. Capito was a Kentuckian, the son of a Marine, and an experienced aviator. Before joining a Harrier squadron in 1973, he had notched 130 missions in Vietnam in the F-4 Phantom.

Now he was second in command of the Harrier training squadron at the Marine air base in Cherry Point, N.C. He had been tapped to become the squadron’s commander in three months.

From the first time he saw it, Capito loved the pure power of the plane. “You see a Harrier hover and then a few seconds later accelerate at 400 knots and it’s just impressive,” he recalled. “It was loud and smoky and fast, all the things you wanted in an airplane.”

Like most Harrier pilots, Capito had survived several close calls. Early in his career, he forgot to adjust the plane’s thrust nozzles when accelerating out of a hover and sank to 20 feet above ground before recovering. In 1976, he flew his way out of an engine vibration and landed safely. Two years later, he descended vertically with inoperable landing gear.

On that dreary March day in 1985, Capito was flying an AV-8B, the new and improved version of the Harrier. Dozens of pilots had been forced to eject from the earlier model, the AV-8A, but Capito would become the first of 70 to bail out of the AV-8B. During preflight checks, Capito noticed that a small door on one of the intakes was sticking rather than flapping open as designed. He knocked it loose shortly before takeoff, satisfying himself it would not pose a problem.

The takeoff and climb were uneventful. But as Capito cruised up to about 26,000 feet, he felt a thump and then the telltale trembling that almost always announces an engine failure. “It was,” he said, “like being on a vibrating bed in a cheap motel.”

A compressor blade had cracked, probably from simple fatigue, an alarmingly common occurrence with the Harrier. It had happened to Capito three times before, and he had always managed to bring his plane home.

But this time the vibration was much worse. The blade fragments had punctured a fuel cell and sliced through an electrical cable.

“Flameout!” Capito radioed to his wingman as he attempted to restart the engine. It would be his last transmission. His power had vanished.

Capito knew what he was going to have to do, and was not particularly thrilled about it. He could see no more than 50 feet, and he knew it would be cold and wet outside the cockpit. He wasn’t sure where he was. Near Hartford, Conn., maybe, he thought.

Capito wanted to stay with the plane for a while, down to 5,000 feet if possible, so he could get under the weather. He fantasized that his Harrier might fix itself. But at about 15,000 feet, smoke started seeping into the cockpit. His decision was made for him. “If I wait too long,” he thought, “I’ll burn up the parachute.”

He had checked his harness, his helmet, his oxygen mask, his visor. He had tightened the seat restraints. He pulled the nose up to trim his airspeed to about 230 mph. It was time. He sat back, head flush against the headrest, feet on the rudder pedals, the position recommended to protect the spine. He yanked the handle. He kept his eyes wide open. This he did not want to miss.

With a booming detonation, the canopy blew away and he felt the rockets fire beneath his seat. As the seat propelled him out of the aircraft, the concussive deceleration of his forward airspeed blew his helmet and oxygen mask right off his head. “It was like somebody just took a huge inflated baseball bat and hit me as hard as they could,” he said.

Still strapped in his seat, Capito tumbled backward in two somersaults. After a freefall of perhaps five seconds, he felt the reassuring tug of his parachute risers, saw the chute deploying and felt the seat separating from his body.

He was OK. He checked his watch, and then started obsessing about the intake door. Had that caused the flameout? He worried that the Marines would snatch away his command if his careless mistake had destroyed a plane. But the sting of icy hail brought him back to the present.

“Hold on,” he told himself. “You’re not out of this yet.”

He covered his bare head with his hands to fend off the hail. Lightning pierced the distance. Updrafts and downdrafts fought for his parachute. He thought he should have been falling about 1,000 feet a minute, but he could tell he wasn’t. He was mostly moving sideways.

Capito focused on his training, mentally reviewing the procedures for releasing his inflatable raft just before splashdown. “I can do this!” he yelled into the wind.

He wondered how far he was from shore. If he cut the right parachute lines, he could steer toward land, but he couldn’t remember which lines.

Finally, he broke out of the clouds to discover a view that was both breathtaking and eerie. He could see for miles around, and he was alone. No choppers. No Coast Guard cutters. Nothing.

As he approached the water, he pulled the handle that released and inflated the raft and watched it plunk into the sound. He followed right behind, unsnapping the parachute straps from his shoulders as his feet touched the water. He plunged into the frigid sea and then pulled the raft toward him with its lanyard. Weighted down by survival gear, Capito threw himself into the raft, got tossed out by a swell, and heaved himself in once more.

The air temperature was 40 degrees, and the drenched pilot could not stop shivering. He was no more than two or three miles from shore, not far from Montauk Point at the eastern tip of Long Island. But when he fired up flares, they barely seemed visible. And when he dropped a dye marker, it sank like a rock.

“I began to think I was going to be there for a while,” he said.

Fortunately for Capito, a Long Island pilot named John Duell and his son, Todd, 17, heard that a plane had crashed into the sound and took off in their single-engine Cessna. Todd spotted smoke from Capito’s flares and they summoned help.

Fifteen minutes later, a Coast Guard cutter arrived and pulled Capito aboard. Hypothermia had set in. Another hour and he might have been in trouble.

The doctors at Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport warmed Capito with blankets and fitted him with a neck brace as a precaution.

The Duells arrived with dry clothes and a premixed martini in a glass covered with plastic wrap. Because it was a Sunday afternoon and there were no motels nearby, the Duells invited the bedraggled pilot to stay with them.

After making sure Capito was comfortable, the Duells decided the day’s adventure should not get in the way of their traditional Sunday night outing to Skipper’s, a local seafood restaurant.

“John,” Duell informed his house guest, “we’re going out to have our Sunday night lobster. You can stay here and make calls and rest.”

Capito ripped off his neck brace. “Steamed or broiled?” he asked.

The next morning, the Marines arrived to take Capito to his base. A week later, he was back in a Harrier cockpit. After salvaging parts of the engine, Marine investigators concluded that the intake door had played no role in cracking the compressor blades. Capito got his command.

Now a developer in this Kansas City, Mo., suburb, Capito keeps one of his plane’s broken compressor blades mounted on a plaque like an aviator’s Oscar. Though he acknowledges the Harrier’s problems, he remains committed to the plane and to the community of pilots and mechanics who have made it their lives.

He will be 60 in three years. And on that birthday, John Capito wants to go skydiving, this time on his own terms. In the dim light of memory, his first ride down seems thrilling, even life-affirming. Once he broke through the clouds, the serenity was overwhelming.

“I would like to visit the quiet again,” he said.