主题：和simplyred兄之“美空军中最知名的中国飞行员”〕 -- 十八子

AFA Magazine

May 1998, Vol. 81, No. 5

By John L. Frisbee, Contributing Editor

When Push Came to Shove

...The Air Force had a rescue detachment atCho Do Island, about 60 miles to the south-and with plenty of flak en route.

Risner decided to try something that, to his knowledge, had never been done

successfully before. He would push the damaged F-86 to Cho Do, where Logan

could bail out safely.

Risner told Logan to shut down his engine, now almost out of fuel. Then he

gently inserted the upper lip of his air intake into the tailpipe of Logan's

F-86. "It stayed sort of locked there as long as we both maintained stable

flight, but the turbulence created by Joe's aircraft made stable flight for

me very difficult. There was a point at which I was between the updraft and

the downdraft. A change of a few inches ejected me either up or down,"

Risner, now retired and living in Austin, Texas, recalls.

Each time Risner re-established contact between the battered nose of

his F-86 and Logan's aircraft was a potential disaster that was made even

more likely by the film of hydraulic fluid and jet fuel that covered his

windscreen and obscured his vision. It was, one imagines, something like

pushing a car at 80 miles an hour down a corduroy road in a heavy fog.

Miraculously, Risner nudged Joe Logan's F-86 all the way to Cho Do,

maintaining an airspeed of 190 knots and enough altitude to stay out of

range of automatic weapons. Near the island, Logan bailed out, landing in

the water near shore. Ironically, Risner's heroic effort ended in

tragedy. Although Logan was a strong swimmer, he became tangled in his chute

lines and drowned before rescuers could reach him. But the measure of a

heroic act lies not in success. It lies in the doing....