When A Plane Ran Out Of Fuel At 41,000 Feet, Its Pilots Were Faced With A Stomach-churning Decision ( Part 2 )

The Gimli Glider,

PART II

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

But one man who certainly comes close to matching Pearson and Quintal's skill and bravery is Capt. William Mahoney. When in 2014 the pilot's landing gear malfunctioned above the ocean, he was left with a hair-raising decision. And the maneuver that Mahoney pulled off in the crisis will no doubt go down in history.

Flying a plane is really difficult. That's something we all know. Pilots are looked up to the world over, and none more so than military pilots. But that doesn't make the feat pulled off by Capt. Mahoney any less incredible. His story is one of broken hardware, difficult choices and perhaps the unlikeliest life-saving device that you've ever heard about.

Of all the branches of the U.S. armed forces, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) is perhaps the most famous. Its history goes back as far as the American War of Independence, beginning in Philadelphia in 1775. According to its official website, "the Marine Corps functions as a unique force, combining ground, aviation and amphibious assets."

It's a combination of the last two parts of the USMC remit that sets the scene for this story. The USS Bataan is a multi-purpose ship. At over 830 feet long and more than 100 feet wide, it's capable of carrying a large number of marines into operation. Not only can it launch landing craft and helicopters, but it's also designed to carry vertical take-off airplanes. Airplanes such the AV-8B Harrier.

The Harrier weighs in at around 31,000 pounds. It's capable of what's known as VSTOL. This essentially means that the aircraft can take off and land vertically, rather than using a runway like most other planes. And it's thanks to that ability that this amazing story unfolded.

Captain William Mahoney's flight started off normally. Mahoney, who is from the city of Athens in Georgia, was conducting operations with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. He was part of Marine Attack Squadron 223, which is also known as the Bulldogs. And Mahoney certainly showed some of the tenacity of his squadron's namesake that day.

But not long after takeoff, Mahoney noticed that he had a problem. And it was a big one. The landing gear at the front of his plane was malfunctioning. As soon as he realized, he slowed down, and contacted the control tower back on the USS Bataan .

Another pilot was at work in the control tower, and they set about researching the problem that Mahoney had encountered. At this point, the stricken jet was some 2,000 feet above the Bataan . But the two pilots decided that they needed to have a better look at what was going on underneath the plane. And that meant conducting a fly-by at a much lower altitude.

So Mahoney flew much lower - at just 300 feet - which allowed the pilot who was talking to him have a much clearer look at the broken landing gear. And that pilot had some pretty bad news for Mahoney. Talking to the official U.S. Marines website, Mahoney later explained that the tower "determined that my nose gear did not come back down."

That left Mahoney with a number of uncomfortable options. Either he could ditch the plane in the sea, losing the incredibly expensive machine in the process, or he could try and land it without the aid of the front landing gear. It was then that the tower remembered that the ship had something that could help.

The official name for the object is a crash cradle. But to the layman, it might more accurately be described as a stool. Albeit a stool that's designed to carry the full weight of the AV-B8 Harrier's nose. The stool meant that Mahoney could attempt an incredibly risky maneuver to bring the plane home safely.

The plan was a reasonably simple one. Or, at least a reasonably simple one to explain. Mahoney would have to slowly lower his plane using its VSTOL capabilities, bringing the nose with the broken landing gear to rest on the stool. Of course, in practice, it was far more difficult than that.

The first part of the maneuver involved Mahoney lowering the plane to just 20 feet above the deck of the ship. And despite the pressure, Mahoney told the Marines' website he had remained calm. "At this point I had kind of forgotten that I had no nose gear and I was just focused on landing, because that's what I had to do," he said.

Hovering just above the deck, Mahoney made sure that his plane was stable and perfectly lined up with the stool in order to make the audacious landing. But then another problem reared its head, making the final stretch of the landing even more perilous than everything that had come before it.

That's because Mahoney could no longer see the stool. "I'm at 20 feet, stabilized, and I can't see the stool - I don't even know it's there. I couldn't see it coming over the ship, I remember thinking, 'Oh boy, this is going to get interesting.'" To all intents and purposes, then, Mahoney had to make the difficult maneuver blind.

While he didn't realize it at the time, the flight crew who would usually be stationed on the deck during a landing had been evacuated. That was in case Mahoney didn't manage to pull off the difficult landing successfully. With great care, he started to lower the multi-million-dollar aircraft down to the unseen stool below.

Mahoney's own description of the incident doesn't quite seem to capture the incredible nature of the feat that he'd achieved. "I remember idling the aircraft, my main gear hitting and all of a sudden my nose dropping. It dropped more than I expected," he said. "But at that point, I was along for the ride."

The nose hit the stool almost perfectly, in fact. It bounced for a moment before coming to a stop. Mahoney had managed to pull off something truly remarkable, landing a damaged plane onto a small, cushioned space. But once the tension of the experience had faded, the shock of what he'd just done finally began to sit in.

"I remember feeling it just hit and that's it. But then I had to sit there for a minute and remember how to turn the jet off and shut everything off," Mahoney recalled. "It was just a pretty big relief, and I didn't realize how much I was shaking until I actually got out of the aircraft." And he didn't go unrewarded for his heroic actions.

Mahoney hadn't just saved the aircraft. Thanks to his actions, in fact, it was back in the air before too long. A few months later, Capt. Mahoney was awarded with the Air Medal. This is given to service personnel who manage to set themselves apart while flying their planes. And Mahoney had certainly done that.

According to Colonel William Dunn, who presented Mahoney with the medal, his actions stand out in the modern era. "In the world of ejection seat aircraft, it is not always the first choice to bring the airplane back after something like this and risk the pilot. But this was incredible," said Dunn in a press release quoted by The Marine Corps Times .