Honor for Beale pilot who wrestled U-2 to ground

At 5 feet 10 inches tall and 160 pounds, Lt. Col. Joe Santucci seems an unlikely match against gravity and a malfunctioning U-2 spy plane.

But during a flight over the Sierras on Feb. 12, 2009, the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron commander found himself engaged in an all-out struggle against the aircraft he was piloting.

The plane's nose had taken an unexpected and seemingly immovable downward trajectory, and it would take all of the pilot's wits and every bit of adrenaline-fueled strength he could muster to land the plane and emerge unharmed.

On June 1, in the Pentagon's Air Force conference room, Santucci will be presented with the Koren Kolligian Jr. Trophy, which recognizes one airman each year for "outstanding feats of skill, alertness, ingenuity or proficiency that avert an accident or minimize the severity of the mishap."

The award is named in honor of 1st Lt. Koren Kolligian Jr., declared missing in the line of duty when his T-33 jet trainer disappeared off the California coast Sept. 14, 1955. The trophy is the service's only individual safety award personally presented by the Air Force chief of staff.

"Everything had been going as planned until I started to descend," Santucci recalled earlier this week as he leaned back in one of several stuffed office chairs in his Beale Air Force Base office.

Santucci, 38, had chalked up 1,000 hours of flight time during his career. But a recent series of staff jobs kept him out of a U-2 cockpits and necessitated re-training, including one night flight. "We had snow storms over the Sierras, and there was no moon," he said.

The plane appeared to be handling fine on his return trip over the mountains. But inside the fuselage, contact between electrical wires had created a small fire, unbeknownst to the pilot. The fire caused a mechanism — designed to set the angle of the nose by manipulating rear tail flaps — to short out.

At 52,000 feet, he readied to descend.

"I clicked off the autopilot, and the nose hunted down. I'm like, 'whoa, that's not right,'" he said. "It should stabilize, like a bicycle with your hands off the handlebars."

He instinctively pulled on the yoke to try and keep the nose up.

"Now, I'm just wrestling with the airplane," he said of a seemingly endless series of minutes he spent attempting to hold up 25,000 pounds of plane and fuel against a constant downward pull.

The impossibility of pulling an ejection handle while applying maximum force to the control column eventually weighed on him. The reality that he may be struck by the corkscrew motion of the falling plane after ejection kept him plugging away at the controls.

With help from his mobile driver on the ground, and a flight supervisor in the control tower who was in the middle of his very first shift in that role, Santucci made the decision to slow the plane until it could avoid the extreme downward forces that had nearly taxed his strength.

Santucci allowed the plane to alternate between a partially controlled flight and a "falling leaf" descension.

He shifted his gaze and attention quickly and frequently, back and forth between various switches in the dark cockpit, and the artificial horizon over the yoke he struggled to hold.

"I was fighting disorientation," he said.

At 8,000 feet, the aircraft finally pierced through the cloud cover, and Santucci could see the lights of Beale Air Force Base.

"It was not the best landing in my life," he said of what seemed like a miraculous ending. "It's all a blur now."

A few hours later, he said, fell asleep in his flight suit while telling his wife the story.

CONTACT Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com.