It was 4:00AM and we were prepping our PBY for a SAR mission. I had been awakened at 2:00AM and I went to bed at 11:00PM the preceding night giving me about 3 hours of sleep. A tug had blown up near Buffalo in Eastern Lake Erie. We were to work in concert with an Air Force B-17 SAR aircraft. When we arrived at the site of the reported explosion it was daylight but there was a very heavy fog cover obscuring the lake surface. It took the Air Force pilot about two hours of flying nearly blind to return to his base at Selfridge Field in Michigan. The Coast Guard pilots decided to press on. We were flying at 500 feet or lower but we could not find any evidence of wreckage or even an oil slick. Our pilots decided to go to the Buffalo airport and refuel and then return to our base in Traverse City, Michigan. I loaded about 1200 gallons of 115/145 octane fuel into the wing tanks, Added some oil to the engine tanks and checked the general condition of the PBY.
Upon starting the engines the pilots realized that I had been on the engineering panel since 4:00AM and it was now 6:00PM. They asked the Chief mechanic to relieve me and he stated that he had a commercial pilot’s license and he would only relieve a pilot. Needles to say the pilot insisted and I was relieved. We had four bunks on the P Boat and I quickly retired to one of the bunks and promptly fell asleep.
On the return trip we encountered severe icing conditions. The exhaust wing warmers were barely able to counter the ice and the gasoline heater in the tail wasn’t doing much better. The props were starting to ice up so the pilots turned on the anti icing alcohol pump, which was located about 4 feet from my bunk. I continued to sleep. Then the pump caught fire and just a few feet from my head the crew was fighting the fire, which was only two feet from the APU fuel tank. I continued to sleep. The ice built up on the props and was slung off in big chunks which hit the left side of the aircraft and in the process broke the navigators window allowing cold air to enter the aircraft and this overpowered the internal gasoline heaters rendering them useless. I continued to sleep. By this time the pilot had rung the bailout bell two times and if he rang it one more time the crew would have to bail out. I continued to sleep.
We had lost some of our radio communications and later the pilot told me that if we had to fly 20-30 miles further we would have crashed. Upon landing I was awakened and told to open the hangar doors allowing the aircraft to taxi into the hangar as opposed to being towed in backwards. When I turned the hard stand lights on I looked at the plane. Two of our radio antennae were hanging over the tail, the aircraft was covered in ice and the left side of the aircraft in the area of the cockpit was severely damaged by ice being thrown from the props.
Since that time I have never been able to sleep on an aircraft.
