Pilot Of Crippled Tanker Earns Heroism Award

The sun was just sinking behind the mountains. Daylight was failing fast. And Air Force Capt. Bart Klein was lining up his crippled tanker for his last shot at getting safely on the ground.

It had been hours since the jet’s double-wheeled left-hand landing gear had dropped off - like a caster from a table - during landing drills at an air base in Oklahoma.

Now, Klein was steering the four-engine behemoth peg-legged over the desert floor of the isolated White Sands, N.M., proving ground. As the jet banked in, its running lights flashing and with emergency crews standing by, Klein wondered if his next-of-kin papers were in order.

He needn’t have worried.

Over the next breathtaking seconds, Klein stood the 120,000-pound airplane on one landing gear as it hurtled across the packed gypsum desert at more than 100 miles an hour. He kept the left wing aloft as long as possible and then let it slowly drop to the ground, dragging the jet to a gentle, dust-filled stop.

For his able flying on March 16, in which Klein and eight others aboard the jet escaped without a scratch, he is being awarded the Air Force’s Kolligian Trophy for excellence in handling an in-flight emergency, the Air Force announced Thursday. The trophy is named for an aviator who disappeared in 1955.

In a telephone hookup piped to Pentagon reporters, Klein explained what had happened. Air Force officials showed a videotape of the landing.

An instructor pilot with the 55th Air Refueling Squadron, Klein had been aloft with a group of student pilots practicing “touch-and-go” landings at Altus Air Force Base.

During one of the landings, with a student in control, the left-hand landing gear simply dropped off. Klein said there was horrendous noise. “I thought I was having an anxiety dream,” he said. He grabbed the steering and pulled the jet off the runway.

As the Air Force rushed other tankers to the area to refuel Klein’s jet, experts on the ground brainstormed. “The only problem was that this situation had never occurred in a KC-135. So we had to write the book as we were airborne,” the pilot said.