ST. PETERSBURG TIMES – 6-7-1943. A piece of string kept an Army bomber from crashing into the city of Sarasota yesterday. Lieutenant Richard C. Hefner bailed out of his distressed bomber but before jumping he tied one end of a long piece of string to his parachute and the other end to the planes ignition switch. As he fell the string jerked the switch, cutting off the motors. The plane - which had been headed for the city - nosed downward and crashed in a wooded area. FOLLOW UP: It wasnt a piece of string. It was a coil of wire ripped from the planes radio and twisted around the ignition switch which was tripped when Lt. Hefner bailed out. The plane was a new B-26B with fewer than twenty-five hours on it. Flying from MacDill Field in Tampa, a skeleton crew consisting of Lt. Hefner, a co-pilot and a flight engineer took it up for a check flight. On returning to base a hydraulic failure left one wheel up and the other down and neither could be moved. The plane was an early model Martin Marauder built before the wing area was increased to improve stability. The possibility of landing without cartwheeling was too risky and the Commanding Officer in the control tower at MacDill authorized abandoning the plane. The three men parachuted safely. Then Lieutenant, later Colonel Hefner, went on to pilot a B-24 Liberator on forty-nine and one-half missions over Europe. On his fiftieth mission his B-24 was shot down over the oil fields of Ploesti, Rumania. and he spent the last year of the war as a POW. He is retired and lives in Hickory, NC.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:09:21 +0000
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