Somewhere under the undulating
Pacific Ocean, two to three miles off the coast of Point Reyes, is the airplane
Army Pvt. Clint Eastwood was aboard when the pilot ditched it in 1951. Now more
than 66 years later, the search is on for the aircraft that was part of a
real-life drama for Eastwood, long before he would become a Hollywood star.
“What was going through my mind
was just a stark fear, a stark terror, because (in the) first place, I didn’t
know anything about aviation at that particular time — I was just hopping a
ride,” the actor said in 2015, recalling the incident in which the pilot also
survived.
The future actor and director (21
at the time) was on route back to Fort Ord after visiting his parents in
Seattle when the Navy bomber he was on crashed into rough seas.
“In those days, you could wear
your uniform and get a free flight,” he said in a talk at Loyola Marymount
University’s School of Film & TV. “On the way back, they had one plane, a
Douglas AD, sort of a torpedo bomber of the World War II vintage, and I thought
I’d hitch on that. Everything went wrong. Radios went out. Oxygen ran out. And
finally we ran out of fuel up around Point Reyes, California, and went in the
ocean. So we went swimming. It was late October, November. It was very cold
water. I found out many years later that it was a white shark breeding ground,
but I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time or I’d have just died.”
The incident, which was reported
in a front-page story by the Independent Journal, occurred on Sept. 30, 1951,
and has caught the interest of Walt Holm, who works with Berkley-based OpenROV,
which builds and operates underwater drones. He wants to find the wreck and has
started posting archaeological information on National Geographic’s Open
Explorer site, which promotes expeditions.
“I’m a bit of an amateur
archaeologist and when I heard about this incident I thought it would be an
interesting thing to post on Open Explorer,” Holm said. “It’s not significant
in terms of archaeology, it won’t re-write the history books, but it’s of
public interest because of his public persona and it’s a chapter of his life
that not too many people are aware of.”
According to an account posted by
Holm, two Navy AD-1 Skyraiders left Naval Air Station Seattle for a routine
flight to Mather Field in Sacramento. But one of the planes had radio problems,
got separated from the other in bad weather and then got lost. While the pilot
eventually managed to get into clear weather, he ran out of fuel while flying
down the California coast and had to ditch at about 6:25 p.m., putting Eastwood
in a life or death situation off Point Reyes.
“It makes you wonder how if he
had drowned, how would have that changed history,” said Holm, who started the
project dubbed “The Hunt for Clint Eastwood’s AD-1 Skyraider” last year. “It’s
a human interest story.” Part of the reason for posting the project on Open
Explorer is educational, Holm said. “We will walk people through the process of
doing a historic investigation in a marine environment,” he said. “It’s a
project that is close to home for us.”
There were several accounts of
the incident, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the crash site, Holm noted.
“We will just have to jump in and
go. We do have to wait for the right seas, which is likely in the fall,” said
Holm, who gives his effort 50/50 odds of success. “The seas are rough off of
Point Reyes and we will be in small boats. We could have a weather window this
summer.”
Holm will utilize a side scan
sonar device, which is adept at picking up obstructions on the ocean floor and
often used in the shipping industry. The airplane could be as deep as 200 feet
below the water’s surface, he said.
“It works best if the aircraft is
on a flat, smooth area,” Holm said of side scan sonar. “But if you look at the
underwater terrain off Point Reyes there are boulder canyons and if it’s in
there it will be hard to see. No matter what, it’s going to be fun.” James
Delgado, the retired director of maritime heritage for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, looked for
the Eastwood plane as part of larger search of aircraft and shipwrecks between
2013 and 2016. “Eastwood’s Skyraider was one of the targets, but nothing turned
up,” Delgado said. “But I think there is a real chance it could be found.”
While not historically significant, the Eastwood airplane search draws
attention to the larger effort of finding craft that have been lost at sea,
incidents which also had a human toll in many cases.
“It highlights the importance of
finding everything out there, and in many cases, it helps bring closure for
families,” Delgado said.
Here is the Independent Journal’s
Oct. 1, 1951 account of Clint Eastwood’s plane crash off Point Reyes:
Two servicemen, who battled a
thick grey fog and a strong surf for almost an hour last night following a
plane landing in the ocean near the Marin shore, are returning to their service
units today uninjured. Army Pvt. Clinton Eastwood, who wandered into the RCA
radio station at Point Reyes after struggling in the ocean, told radio
operators he and the pilot were forced to land their AD-2 bomber in the ocean
and left on life rafts.
Eastwood said he was returning to
Ford Ord from his house in Seattle when the mishap occurred. The pilot, Naval
Lt. F.C. Anderson, landed his life raft on the shore at Kehoe Ranch near Pierce
Point. He is stationed at Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento. Men at the
station said Eastwood walked into the building cold, wet and in a state of
shock and spoke incoherently of the plane running out of fuel and how the pilot
made a dramatic landing on the rough ocean. Earl Foster of Inverness, a radio
operator on duty at the station last night at 6 p.m. when the 21-year-old
serviceman pounded in the station door said:
“The boy was dazed and in a state
of shock. He could hardly speak.” Foster added he was able to piece together
certain parts of the private’s story. From his disjointed speech the operator
learned that the plane was landed upright on the water by the pilot. After the
landing the two servicemen jumped into the rough sea and inflated two rubber
life rafts only to manoeuvre the crafts away from the plane in time to see it
engulfed by the water.
Eastwood explained that he and
Anderson kept their life rafts together until they hit the breakers near the
rocky Marin coast. At this point, he stated, they were separated. Eastwood said
he continued to paddle through the strong surf until he was thrown from the raft.
The serviceman told Foster each time he advanced toward the shore; the strong
breakers would carry him out to sea again. At one spot, he said, he was almost
drawn down by the undertow. Eastwood said he could not say how long he was in
the water. When he reached shore though, he recalled, he fell to the ground and
crawled to the station house.
After a brief rest in the house
where he was warmed, Eastwood was taken to the Coast Guard Life Boat Station at
Point Reyes where he met Anderson. At the station the men received medical
attention and started on their way back to their units. An officer of the Coast
Guard station said security restrictions prevented any report concerning the
plane which was no longer visible in the ocean. He refused to comment on the
possibility of recovering the aircraft.
*There seems to be a conflict above as Clint’s plane is
referred to as both an AD-1 and an AD-2. Naturally, it must have been a 2
seater design, and whilst I’m no plane expert, the earliest two seater design I
could find was the AD-1Q. The picture I have used in the header is the A1
Skyraider.
1 comment:
The type of Skyraider involved had a crew position within the fuselage behind the cockpit. It was not a position used to fly the aircraft, but rather to operate a search radar for locating submarines on the surface. Externally the aircraft would be identical to any single seat Skyraider, except for a small door on the lower right side of the fuselage to access the operator's position.
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