18th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Korea

DUAL DINGHY DENTS...

As the enemy's noose drew tighter around our base at Taegu, South Korea, during the dark days of summer, 1950, there were still moments of humor ...and pathos, depending upon your point of view, when we could look on the brighter side, and enjoy a few moments of levity, or wonder at the sometimes odd turns of events

A pair of similar incidents ... occuring around the same time, helps to point out how the 'fickle fingered fates' controlled our daily destinies.

Lieutenant Phil Conserva returned from a frontline close-support mission near Kiggye, with a bullet hole through the belly of his F-51 Mustang, indicating passage of a bullet straight up through the bottom of the fuselage below the cockpit, and into the seat pan which held his one-man life raft. Fortunately, the big .50 caliber machine gun slug was almost spent when it struck the steel CO2 cylinder inside his life-raft pack ... where it stopped, harmlessly.

Had it not hit the small 3" by 8 inch steel cylinder, it surely would have come up through the seat and killed or seriously wounded Conserva.

He showed the slug and the dented cylinder to all, and we figured he was one very lucky individual!

Two days after Conserva's episode with the bullet thru the life raft, Captain Frank Buzze, our Maintenance Officer, came back from another close-support mission with a similar hole through the underside of the fuselage, into his cockpit and up though the seat.

However, Buzze's bullet had come up through the left side of the seat, instead of the right, as it had with Conserva's machine gun slug.

... But, in Buzze's case, the life raft had been placed in the seat backwards, with the steel cylinder on the opposite side from where it would normally be positioned ...

But once again, the bullet had hit the steel compressed air cylinder and stopped!

Frank Buzze, too, had the .50 caliber slug and the dented CO2 cylinder to show for his phenomenal luck!

Two almost-indentical, stranger than fiction incidents in the same unit, at the same base within two days!

Phil Conserva survived 100 combat missions in Korea, only to be killed in an aircraft accident three years later while flying F-84 jets over England. Frank Buzze went on to complete a long and successful Air Force career, retiring as a Colonel to Florida.

Accidental airborne inflation of the seat-pack life rafts was an infrequent, but ever-present, potentially serious hazard, when the rapidly-inflating rubber one-man life raft on which the pilot was tighly strapped in place by his seatbelt, could explosively expand between his legs to press forward against the airplane's control stick with sufficient force to overpower most pilots' resistance.

Instant deflation of the expanding raft was mandatory to prevent airborne catastrophe, because the rapidly-swelling rubber doughnut would inevitably force the control stick forward, making the nose of the aircraft go down...into an uncontrollable dive.

To prevent such a situation, most pilots would carry an open, short-bladed knife, or a sharpened nail, readily available in the shoulder pocket of their Flight Jackets or taped to their instrument panel, to quickly puncture the monstrous demons. Our airplanes were ultimately equipped with a sharpened nail taped to the top of the instrument cowling ... within immediate reach for just such an emergency.

I experienced just one accidental inflation of a life raft, ... while flying at 5000 feet seventy miles inside North Korea, it suddenly began to inflate and, as predicted, the monstrous rubber tube forced it's way forward between my legs to press against the control column, forcing the nose down. A very unpleasant sensation!

I quickly rolled the Mustang into a vertical bank so that the unwanted control forces would result in an uncomfortable, high 'G', outside turn, rather than it's pushing me into the much more dangerous, uncontrollable dive ... and simultaneously grabbed the sharpened nail from atop the instrument panel cowling, and with several quick stabbing strokes was able to puncture the big tube, but not without several anxious seconds of wondering whether the air pressure would come into, or go out of the raft at the faster rate.

The emergency was over within two minutes, as the raft quickly deflated. It took much, much longer for my adrenalin flow to settle back to normal!

Duane E. 'Bud' Biteman,
Lt. Col, USAF, Ret
‘...One of those Old, Bold Fighter Pilots’
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