the homesick mechanic who stole a plane
Homesick for his wife and stepchildren, he'd asked a few days earlier to be returned from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, where he'd been posted, to the USAF base at Langley, Virginia. But his request for leave had been refused.
Bitterly disappointed, the young Vietnam veteran took himself off to a military colleague's house party, where he began drinking heavily and then, according to colleagues, to behave erratically and combatively. His friends persuaded him to go to bed, but Meyer escaped through a window.
Soon after, Suffolk police found him wandering the A11 road and arrested him for being drunk and disorderly. He was escorted back to his barracks and told to sleep it off. But Meyer had other ideas. Big ideas.
Breaking into the room of a Capt Upton, Meyer stole the key to his truck. Using the name "Capt Epstein", Meyer then called an aircraft dispatcher and demanded that aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130, be fuelled for a flight to the USA.
The ground crew obediently followed their superior's orders and the bogus captain climbed aboard, released the brakes and taxied hurriedly from the hardstand towards runway 29. His engines roared.
Completely alone in the cockpit of the stolen 60-tonne, four-engine military transporter plane, an aircraft he was not qualified to fly, the 23-year-old serviceman steeled himself and thrust his throttles forward. Shortly before 05:10 on the dawn of the drizzly, overcast morning of 23 May, he was airborne.
After an hour and forty-five minutes in flight, Meyer crashed into the English Channel.
A few days later, small pieces of wreckage of the Hercules, including a life raft washed up near the shores of the Channel Island of Alderney. The mechanic's body was never found.
http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43800089
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