One engine and a prayer

The interior of a working Gooney Bird was Spartan, but the plane, which was the military version of the DC-3 airliner, was a workhorse. (U.S.A.F. undated photo)

TV news coverage this week of the engine troubles on board an Airbus A380 with 440 passengers over the Pacific reminded me of a white-knuckle flight in an Air Force Gooney Bird in the late 1960s.

The Bitburg Air Base football team needed a medic to work its practices and games in 1967. I was working as a surgery tech at the Bitburg hospital. The team had a couple of away games that year, one at a Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, and another in Naples, Italy. Being the team medic was a volunteer job. I took it. For me, the payback was the free plane trips.

The Bitburg Gooney Bird was an adventure in itself. The Gooney Bird -- so nicknamed because of the way the nose sits high up in the air when the plane is on the ground -- was Bitburg's small, general-purpose, work-horse troop and cargo transport. It had been around since World War II. The interior was Spartan -- stripped-down seats and no passenger amenities. Known officially as the C-47 Skytrain, the Gooney Bird was the military version of the commercial DC-3 airliner, but with a cargo door and a reinforced floor.

The two-engine, propeller-driven C-47 had been a mainstay during World War II. Gooney Birds dropped supplies to American forces who were surrounded by the Germans at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. They also famously flew over "The Hump" from India into China. They played a major role in the early stages of the post-war Berlin Airlift.

By the late 1960s, the Gooney Bird was far from being state-of-the-art, but it was such a reliable and sturdy plane that many were still in service then. A few are still flying today.

The football team's flight to Naples was noisier, longer and rougher than the trip would have been on a commercial airliner, but it was uneventful -- until we were about 30 minutes away from landing. We heard a boom. We looked out the window and saw flames and smoke pouring from the back of the right engine. Lots of flames. And lots of smoke.

Heck yes, we were scared. One of our two engines was on fire in a plane that was older than we were. But we were Air Force troops, and coming in on one engine and a prayer was something we had to be cool about. So we stayed calm. The pilot sent back word that all was under control and we'd be on the ground shortly.

Yeah. Right.

The flames coming from the engine grew larger and smoke continued to billow. Eventually the propeller stopped turning, the engine fire-suppression system kicked in, and the heavy black smoke tapered off.

We did land safely on our one good engine, although touchdown was rough. Keeping the plane flying level and straight wasn't easy under the circumstances.

On the ground, firemen in flame-retardant suits and headgear raced to meet us and sprayed foam on the dead engine. We all watched through the windows and applauded. When the pilot walked back to tell us that it was safe to disembark, we applauded him, too.

The engine was still smoking as we filed down the steps to terra firma.

At least one football team member kissed the Naples runway.

And the pilot told us that it was a good landing: "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing."