The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tiger in the Sea: The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival by Eric Lindner

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Tiger in the Sea: The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival by Eric Lindner September 1962: On a moonless night over the raging Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles from land, the engines of Flying Tiger flight 923 to Germany burst into flames, one by one. Pilot John Murray didn’t have long before the plane crashed headlong into the 20-foot waves at 120 mph. As the four flight attendants donned life vests, collected sharp objects, and explained how to brace for the ferocious impact, 68 passengers clung to their seats: elementary schoolchildren from Hawaii, a teenage newlywed from Germany, a disabled Normandy vet from Cape Cod, an immigrant from Mexico, and 30 recent graduates of the 82nd Airborne’s Jump School. They all expected to die. Murray radioed out “Mayday” as he attempted to fly down through gale-force winds into the rough water, hoping the plane didn’t break apart when it hit the sea. Only a handful of ships could pick up the distress call so far from land. The closest was a Swiss freighter 13 hours away. Dozens of other ships and planes from nine countries abruptly changed course or scrambled from Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall, all racing to the rescue—but they would take hours, or days, to arrive. From the cockpit, the blackness of the Atlantic grew ever closer. Could Murray do what no pilot had ever done—“land” a commercial airliner at night in a violent sea without everyone dying? And if he did, would rescuers find any survivors before they drowned or died from hypothermia in the icy water? The fate of Flying Tiger 923 riveted the world. Bulletins interrupted radio and TV programs. Headlines shouted off newspapers from London to LA. Frantic family members overwhelmed telephone switchboards. President Kennedy took a break from the brewing crises in Cuba and Mississippi to ask for hourly updates. Tiger in the Sea is a gripping tale of triumph, tragedy, unparalleled airmanship, and incredibly brave people from all walks of life. The author has pieced together the story—long hidden because of murky Cold War politics—through exhaustive research and reconstructed a true and inspiring tribute to the virtues of outside-the-box-thinking, teamwork, and hope.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here with us we got another brilliant author with an adventurous story i think that's going to blow your mind.

This is going to be a lot of fun, actually. Normally, we do politics and news and all this sort of good stuff. This is going to be an interesting book. Author we're going to be talking to about his latest book that's come out May 14th, 2021. The title of the book is called Tiger in the Sea, the Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival. The author's name is Eric Lindner, and we're going to be talking to him about his book. In the meantime, go see us on YouTube. You can see the whole video version of this.

And you can also see us at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the groups you have over there. Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit the bell notification on YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and follow us over there and everything that we're doing. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com and their micro IDSD signature. It's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far.

It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. So we've got a chance to pull him into the show. It's Eric Lindner.

He is a hospice volunteer helping patients cope with the reality of dying. His book, Hospice Voices, Lessons for Living at the End of Life, was critically acclaimed by leading doctors and caregivers. NPR, BBC, Washington Independent Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, and bookless Rebecca Vinuk. I'm not sure if I pronounced it correctly, so my apologies. Who named it one of 2013's five best memoirs? Since 2015, the attorney, businessman, and DC native has been teaching ethics in action at Georgetown University, a course that dissects the NASA Challenger disaster. He's married to Captain Murray's daughter. They live on California's Central Coast. Welcome to the show, Eric. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having

me. Awesome sauce. Wow. There's a whole pack load of stuff just in that bio lawn I need to ask you about. But give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Thank you. The plugs are, we are on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and website, tigerinthesea.com. We have all the buy buttons, all the retailers, all the vendors. Thank you for that. And it just came out May 14th, so you guys can pick it up here, fine retailers. So what motivated you to write this book, Eric? What motivated me to write it was a sense of curiosity, intrigue, and then it kind of morphed into injustice. The how I got to it was

my relationship with the family, but the why was really that sense of intrigue and injustice. As I've said before, my mother was hired by the CIA in 48. I haven't written a book about her, but I've written a book about my wife's father because it was a really remarkable story. Yeah. Do you want to plug that book? The name of it? Tiger in the Sea. Oh, yeah. That's Tiger in the Sea. Okay. I got confused. I was thinking maybe your prior book. So this is a story close to your heart, basically. It's very close to my heart. And is that how you discovered the story?

I did discover it. I first discovered it over Thanksgiving or something at a family reunion. And then, but I didn't think about doing anything with it for 20 years or something probably until I was sitting down with my publisher and he told me, you got to write this. You got to write the story. Yeah.

There you go. So give us the breakdown, give us the overarching breakdown of what this book is about and what I think the overarching breakdown is. Like say it's like a four-act play there's a problems in the air there's problems in the water there's problems with the bureaucrats if you will and an investigation and then there's all the after effects there's the psychological issues there's the ptsd issues and there's the revisionist

histories and storms so it's a four-act plane. It follows a bunch of people, responders, crew members, passengers, and follows a representative sample of them. Now, was this an airline? It was. It was a commercial airline. It was formed based on the military Flying Tigers that were formed in 1941 to fight against imperial japan and so this was an airline that was just doing normal commercial service in the act of when this episode happened i i think the flying tigers probably didn't do a whole lot of normal of anything i think the pilots would say that they this they were flying this was a an army this was an air force contract mostly army on, paratroopers fresh out of jump school, but it had some civilians and dependents on board. So it was a contract with the Military Air Transport Service, which is a one of the complications because then you had the military and civilian and the Coast Guard and everybody and their brother was claiming jurisdiction on

this flight. Oh, wow. Wow. Give us a rundown. I'm looking at the thing here in September. This is September 62 is when this took place. Right. September 23rd, 1962, took off from McGuire Air Force Base, which is right next to Fort Dixon, New Jersey. Flew up to Gander. Pilot Captain Murray deadheaded up from Newark because FAA wouldn't allow a continuous flight after a certain period of time. He climbed on board in Gander, Newfoundland, and was headed to Frankfurt and just past the point of no return to find as you're too far to go before you can go back. Problems developed in the air and all sorts of problems, one after the other. So they end up basically bailing or dishing right into the Atlantic Ocean then? They did. They encountered engine problems and icing before that and hail.

And they ended up having to make an emergency, what's called a, quote, controlled water landing. That's the term of art or the technical term. Yeah, controlled water landing. That sounds like something that's the term of art or the technical term yeah controlled water landing that sounds like something that's supposed to give me comfort but thinking about what the reality of that is it gives me no comfort whatsoever it gives me nightmares right controlled water landing i know i talk about euphemism don't worry don't worry this isn't gonna hurt this isn't gonna hurt so this is pretty interesting so you talk about the adventure they go on, this whole adventure from beginning to end. But I imagine what happens when they, you can't tell us everything about the book, but

what can we tease out that happens that's an interesting look into how people react as they hit the water? I guess I've said, I've put it in this perspective once, this context that people thought the ditching was, if they survived the ditching, it was going to be a miracle. Everyone expected to die. And I've said it's a little bit like the Wizard of Oz. Once the witch was killed, they said, oh, great, the witch is gone. They said, no, she's got a sister, and the sister's worse.

And that was hitting the water. Oh, wow. That was hitting the water. Yeah. Wow. And so there's 68 passengers on board and then four flight attendants and four crew members, flight engineer, navigator, pilot Murray, and co-pilot Jim Parker. Wow. Wow. And what happens next? Or do you want to tease what happens next? I'll leave it up to

you. I don't want to give away the whole book. I think what happens next is there's a great quote, Zulu quote that Nelson Mandela cited in his book. It is, let your courage rise to the level of danger. And there was such danger that everyone on board from nine-year-old children to 54-year-old women retired to high school, the courage rose up. And sometimes it was not the special forces guys, the young, tough jump school guys. It was the retired 54-year-old school teacher who was the confident, the really inspiring morale. So people from all walks of life really rose to the level of danger. It was a remarkable display of courage. Now, other than the family that you married into, were you able to interview any of the other survivors of this? Yeah, yeah. Interviewed, I think, a total of 131 separate people over 1,700 separate interviews.

And that included a number of survivors, crew members, rescuers, all of them in Germany, in Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom, all across the U.S. Did the plane start to sink? The plane sank at different estimates of the time. It was probably seven to eight U.S. pretty much. Did the plane start to sink? The plane sank at different estimates of the time. It was probably seven to eight minutes. So everyone got off. It was badly damaged, which is natural hit in the water, 20-foot waves, serrated waves, 120 miles an hour. It's like the physics of hitting concrete. But it stayed up long enough for Murray, which was his duty as the captain, to make sure everyone got off to search that plane, even though it was flooding and freezing. And he was knocked out on impact to make sure that everyone got off before he tried to get off.

Wow, that's crazy. And the title here, Tiger in the Sea, is a gripping tale of triumph, tragedy, unparalleled airmanship, and incredibly brave people from all walks of life. Wow. This sounds like a gripping tale that they can listen to. And there's some murky Cold War politics throughout this that you would discover. If you want to tell us a little bit about that. Sure. I tried to make this all about, this is the story of the people who were on board.

This is their real, I just tried to be a scribe. But when I searched for the records, the National Archives is a gigantic complex outside Maryland, NA2 National Archives. They have bunkers. And I pulled the actual files and they were all gone. And I went to the, physically. So I was there. I was there. I went there to the head of their archival guy who was formerly head of the archives at the White House.

And he knew what he's. And I said, hey, there's a big empty spot here. And he said, oh, that's strange. That sounds like the CIA. That was his first reaction. And so I called my mom. I called my mom. My mom is 95.

Hi, mom. She was 93, 92 at that time. And I said, mom, I just came to the National Archives and you're former employers. Something happened to the files. I said, Eric, I want to tell you two things. First of all, I wasn't responsible for stealing them. And two, if the agency took them, you'll never find them. I've never found them. No one's ever found them. Why would the CIA be interested in this? I don't know the CIA, but this is the experts. Flying Tigers flew a lot of CIA planes.

In fact, John Murray, Captain Murray flew CIA Black Ops. There's stuff going on at the time. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Lockheed U-2s were there at the same time. But it's hard to know why. And I don't know if it was the CIA because there are a lot of questionable loopholes regarding safety procedures and procurement and things of that nature. There are a lot of people with motives to take it. And Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor for President Clinton, had no problem removing files not too long ago. So in 1960s, the files were pretty much you could walk in, remove them,

show a card, and you didn't have digital checks. And so no one is sure that was his opinion that the CIA took him. But they did fly the Flying Tigers Black Ops. You may know this Black Ops. The term Black Ops came from they used to paint flat black under the fuselage of the Flying Tigers plane, so it didn't reflect moonlight. That's where the Black Ops term comes.

Wow. I did not know that. I didn't know it either. There was a former Marine, Dick Rodriguez, who flew Super Connie's in Vietnam. It flew a military version. And yeah, he said that's where it comes from, Black Ops, the painted flak blap so that it wouldn't reflect the moonlight. I learn something new every day on the show.

I love it. I love more than one thing for this show. So it was most of the research you had to rely on. Was that just by interviews and your family story, or was there any other documentation you found elsewhere? There were probably three, three-legged stool. One was all the 1700 or so interviews. Two was there were smatterings of official reports. And there was, there is, believe it or not, even though Switzerland's landlocked, there's a Swiss, Swiss rescuers had an official report, there was a Canadian report in the museum in Toronto, there were RAF reports. So piecing together these reports,

Coast Guard had a report that was not in the National Archives. But I lucked out with some, my wife and her family and some of the other survivors had squirreled away reports, literally hid them away. And they were found after the survivors died as if if I'm if I'm gone, you can find these. And so one of them, the biggest trove of that was the actual hearings, three days hearings in New York trying to determine the cause of 32 hours. That's longer than the typical Supreme Court justice. These were found in a cupboard in a dentist's office in Santa Monica, California, three or four years after one of the survivors died.

His children didn't know about it. It's like another record which was not in the file was found in a hangar in Alaska. It was found in a hangar in Alaska. It's really X-Files stuff. Maybe it was like a CIA flight flight was this owned by the cia or it wasn't owned by the cia but they really did do a lot

of cia some of the people i couldn't find a direct causal link but clearly the flying tires did a lot of contract work for the pentagon a lot of work for the, there was a CNN reported May 15th, 1962, there were four Supercani crashes. One of them was a secret flight. And they just acknowledge it in May 93, Army Rangers went down, they never found anything, one of the largest searches in history. So a lot of as one of the survivors said, who was the 82nd Airborne, who worked for Stars and Stripes afterwards, he said, I work in the office of Stars and Stripes, and the Soviets would come into our office, and we would go in the Soviets' office. And the Soviets were always watching the Air Force planes, but they wouldn't pay any attention to the civilian planes. And he

said, that's why I think we were on a civilian flight. Looked in 30 paratroopers. Who knows why the records aren't available to come over. So maybe I had 10 access to 15% of the total forensics. I didn't have every single survivor, every single rescuer. There were 61 planes and ships involved. They took affidavits from every one of them. None of them are still surviving. They're all gone.

Wow. It sounds like this is a, it sounds like this is a, back then, when they ditched planes in the ocean, they didn't have a high survival rate, I think, historically, right? No, no one ever, no one ever. This was called the first, the first successful, meaning everyone got off the plane. That's all a captain can really do. Get them off the plane. That's all a captain can really do, get them off the plane and alive. And he did. There had never been a successful ditching in the Atlantic in violent seas ever.

Wow. And then it was phase two, which was the safety, rafts, life preservers, life vests, all that stuff. And the problem started 1,000 miles from land. They landed, again, crazy. They hit the water 580 miles from shore. So no one was around. No ships could see, no ships knew where they were. No planes knew where they were. There were no lights. It was a dark night. The water was 48 degrees. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. Yeah. And they had to survive until the ships and everything came to save them.

Crazy, man. What have we covered in the story that you think we can tease out to listeners? Oh, golly. I think I know, again, one of the interesting things to me is the history. We're now a saber rattling or whatever you want to call it. The US and China are in a call of a diplomatic pre-Klaus Witzian argument over certain things, whether it's COVID or whatever. But back then, the US, these aviators, 112 aviators, the Pentagon said, Oh, you guys don't know what you're doing. They all small planes are forced for escorting bombers. So they took it to China, and they helped the nationalist China's Chinese fight Japan. And then when Japan law surrendered, then it became a Maoist versus the Nationalist China.

And they're in Taiwan now. So there's this interesting arc, historical geopolitical arc, I think, where a lot of these pilots, Flying Tiger pilots, began to patrol, help patrol Taiwan against an invasion from PRC. So interesting who your enemies are. One day they could be your friends and allies the next day. It seems to be the history of our country. Do you see more Flying Tiger stories coming out of this? Other stories that you might maybe uncover from people who used to fly these airlines and some of the other adventures? They started in 1941 and the airline or the squadron, which has been called the most

successful fighter squadron in history of aviation, no bar none. And yeah, Black Sheep Squadron was a spinoff of that. And then they were acquired by FedEx by Fred Smith, acquired them in 1989. So you have that 48 year sweep. And even today, FedEx is still the embodiment of that ethos. Get it there on time. Fred Smith, he was a hero. He was Navy.

He was a platoon, Marine platoon leader. And then he re-enlisted in Vietnam and became a Navy Marine aviator. There is 70 years, really, 80 years of history of this ethos of bravery and service above self. And they were leaders. They were early female pilots

before a lot of the other airlines, female. So there is a rich body of, I could only really touch upon some of the headers, almost some of the bullet points. But it was all centered around this one incident, which was, it was the number one story in the world for 72 hours. And then it disappeared. It just disappeared. The Cuban Missile Crisis hit. The files were stolen. And if it was the CIA, they didn't want it in the news either.

Who the heck knows? It was all – Flying Tigers headquarters was in a place. It was called the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank. So the Lockheed plane, four crashes in 1962. Flying Tigers was headquartered in the Lockheed Air Terminal. The Skunk Works just up the street where they were working on trying to get funding for the sr71 blackbird so there was a lot of murky stuff going on not casting aspersions on anybody or making any defamatory claims who knows what was going on

who knows the government's always up to something them and the cia never trust those people i'm just kidding anyway i know what black going to pick me up tomorrow. We heard you said something about the CIA, Chris, on the podcast. Come with us. We have a place in Poland for you in the basement somewhere. I'm just kidding. This is awesome. This sounds like a fun, great read

and a suspenseful read and a story about adventure. This is like Captain Sully Part 1. I don't know. That's an interesting way of putting it. story about adventure this is like uh this is like uh captain sully part one i don't know that's an interesting way of putting it that is yeah yeah definitely i'm just surprised they had all the good stuff to survive back in those days i guess they did think of everything back then but you just think how technologically advanced and we still lose planes in the sea that disappear i think there's uh one plane we never have found.

Right. There are a number of planes that have. The Tiger Flying Tiger 739 was never found. Oh, really? It was never found. It crashed the same year off either Guam or I think off Guam and left Travis Air Force Base. Two planes left the same day within hours of each other. Both of them, one was damaged, one was lost forever. So you're right, but no flight data recorder, no voice data recorder, no data recorder, none of that stuff. They had no GPS.

People on board were smoking, puffing nonstop, Paul Moss, Winston. Can you imagine the quote unquote stewardesses they were called? They had to retire. If they got married, they had to retire at age 32. And they were some of the bravest people on board. Absolutely. These stewardesses were just, they saved a lot of lives. Remarkable heroism by everyone on board, men, women, every nationality, just about from Syria, African-American, Syrian-American, you name it, German-American,

remarkable heroism across the board. This sounds like it might be a great movie too. You can have Tom Hanks do it too. He did Sully. I'll let you run with that one. There you go well yeah see if we can get spielberg love him he's a great actor love him there you go yeah i he's this sounds it might be up his movie plus it'd be a beautiful movie if they did a period piece uh this time it was stuff they did back there was so elegant beautiful especially in flight travel it it was. All the beautiful designs, the beautiful design of JFK Airport, which was Idlewild at the time.

The whole Mad Men, the whole muscle cars, the beautiful T-Birds and Mustangs. You're right. The design and that. It was a whole different aesthetic back then, very interesting aesthetic. Did they ever recover the plane, or is the plane still at the bottom of the Atlantic somewhere? They've never recovered the plane or is the plane still at the bottom of the Atlantic somewhere? They've never recovered the plane. All they had in terms of physical forensics were some life vests, some life rafts, torn clothing, stuff like that.

It was really, they had very little to go on. It'd be interesting to have one of those guys that go out and they find the Titanic and stuff. Be able to see if they can find the plane. That'd be great. Book two or something. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows?

Yeah. There you go. Anything further you want to tease out in the book to our listeners? I just, it's just been a real privilege to try and bring this story forward because there was so much genuine, you know, authentic, humble heroism on this flight with just these people men women and children and so much of what is trotted out these days about heroism and courage it's just it's the celluloid variety and this is the real stuff and for no one to have known about it except their families and especially so much the high incidence of PTSD and stuff. It fed into it.

Why haven't they wouldn't get known? They didn't get paid. They didn't get workers comp. They did. It was all the, all those things that developed afterwards. We think about today, none of that stuff. So the survivors guilt, some of them, why did I survive? Why did my husband die? Why don't my, it's a remarkable, really privileged to be a part of it.

Wow. It's amazing, man. And you're married to the story. So that's pretty awesome, man. This is great. So give us your plugs, Eric, as we go out so that people can look you up on the internet and find out more about you and order the book. I appreciate that. I'm on followers, please, on Twitter and Facebook. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and our psychtigerintheseed.com. All the buy buttons, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, they're all available there. And there's also additional information not in the book, but in everything about rescuers, survivors, crew members, if you're interested there as well. There you guys go pick up the book.

You can get it wherever fine booksellers are sold. Eric, thank you very much for spending time with us we're definitely honored congratulations on your new book thank you so much for having me i really appreciate it thank you sir tiger in the sea the ditching of flying tiger 923 and the desperate struggle for survival pick that baby up is coming off the presses now so you can enjoy it be the first on your block to say you read it also see the video version this at youtube.com for us that's chris fawns hit the bell notification button also you can go to all of our groups on goodreads facebook linkedin twitter all those different places as well refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives we certainly appreciate it

stay safe and we'll see you guys next time