What a harrowing experience.
In 1975, with Saigon about to fall to the North Vietnamese, a huge Air Force Galaxy is tasked with bringing a load of Vietnamese orphans, mostly babies, from Saigon to Clark Field in the Philippines. It's a monster of an airplane, designed to carry a cargo of tanks or large equipment in the cargo hold and a number of passengers on the upper deck.
After take off, the Galaxy reaches 22,000 feet when the cargo door in the rear blows off, causing instant decompression and damaging the hydraulic systems. Losing control of the hydraulic systems means losing control of the surfaces that allow the pilot to control the airplane.
The pilot puts the nose down to lose altitude because there aren't enough oxygen masks for all the passengers. They're higher than Mount Everest. But with the nose down the speed increases and the pilot can't use the controls to pull out of the dive. They're headed for the South China Sea.
The pilot uses the throttle to reduce power to the engines and the nose lifts -- but having lifted can't be controlled in the usual way. So the pilot learns that by changing his speed he can regain at least minimal control over the airplane.
The pilot should get a medal or an honorary membership in MENSA because it's impossible to be trained to handle such an emergency, and there are only a few minutes to find out how to do it. It's a steep learning curve.
The huge airplane lands in a field and breaks apart. Almost everyone in the lower cargo area was killed. When the airplane smacked down, the compartment was crushed. The next morning the pilot returned to the wreckage expecting find guards around the sealed-off crash site. Instead there were a few Vietnamese soldiers, one of them going through the luggage, including the pilot's suitcase. The soldier was wearing the pilot's flight jacket. He was armed with an M-16 and the pilot was not, and only grudgingly did the soldier yield the flight jacket before returning to the pilot's suitcase. Looters were picking the rest of the airplane clean. The air force was able to buy back some important parts of the wreckage.
The cause of the accident was traced to the faulty installment of the locks that hold the cargo door in place. They were installed in California. There was no bomb aboard and no missile strike. What happened is that at altitude, the pressure inside the airplane exceeded the low pressure outside, and the locks failed.
The flight was part of "Operation Baby Lift" designed to bring babies and small children to safety in the states. More than 3,000 orphans were evacuated by the Air Force.
