On a Wing and a Prayer: A True Story by A Survivor of a Tragic Crash in the Pacific Ocean

By Bruce Briley

A trip back from Molokai, an idyllic place were it not for the specter of its notorious leper colony. Departure by plane, a single-engine aircraft, when the engine suddenly explodes, forcing an open-ocean ditching, a maneuver that is seldom successful. A crash into shark-infested Pacific waters. My wife and me, grievously injured (5 ribs, a split sternum and a massive hematoma for her, 3 ribs, a herniation, punctured eardrums and a forehead lesion for me). Scrambling for safety, for life vests that were not there, water rising in the cabin, exiting into the water with miraculously last-second finds of life vest packages that were almost impossible to open with wet hands and which could not be properly donned. Abandoning the doomed plane, soon separated by capricious currents. Floating for hours alone, awaiting shark visits ala The Indianapolis, slipping into painfully violent shivering shock with incipient hypothermia, exhaustion, involuntarily inhaling and ingesting salt water. Ultimate, crushing despair as darkness and death loomed. And that wasn’t the worst of it ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Briley
• Release date: Oct 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781942899600

Bruce Briley

Dr. Briley has a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D from the University of Illinois. He has 4 children and 10 grandchildren, has been employed for many years at Bell Labs, Lucent and Motorola, and is now with the Illinois Institute of Technology where he was awarded the first Alva C. Todd Professorship. He holds 21 US patents and has authored 2 textbooks as well as numerous technical papers (not unlike the "monographs" Sherlock Holmes often mentions).He has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he was first able to read his Adventures. Of late, however, he became unhappy over the films and TV series of a "modern" Sherlock epitomized by the "Elementary" series which savages the concept: Holmes and Watson are transported forward more than a hundred years, Watson is transmographied into an Asian female, and Holmes, while still a brilliant detective, is portrayed as a social buffoon similar to Monk.Though he has found such series very entertaining, he longed for some new tales of the traditional Sherlock in the Elizebethan era, resonating with the original image while fresh in scope.And so he penned 5 novels (and is planning a 6th) that strive to accomplish that:The first, "The Lost Folio", chases Holmes and Watson all over England, involves Moriarty and Lastrade, etc., responding to a kidnapping and murders in pursuit of Shakespeare's Lost Work, while encumbered by an impenetrable cipher.The second, "The Sow's Ear", takes them on a dangerous sea voyage to rescue a young lady lost in the labyrinth of China, and stumble upon a plot to destroy the Silk trade, involving murderous rogues, and multiple assassination attempts upon them.The third, "The Vatican Murder", finds Watson jailed on the Vatican grounds, indicted for the murder of an old school chum and subject to the strict laws of the soverign Vatican State. Holmes is helpful, but a tangled web endangers Watson when he is mistaken for Holmes on two occasions. Watson, when separated from his boon companion exhibits his ability to improvise, but is convicted of murder.The fourth, "The Royal Leper", finds Holmes and Watson charged by royal warrant to convey a member of the Royal Family diagnosed with Leprosy to secretly convey him half-way around the world to what would effectively be banishment to a Leper Colony on Molokai island in the Pacific Ocean. An abundance of adventures ensue, taking them to places they would not have dreamed of visiting. No other Sherlock Holmes mystery/adventure has ever been so extensive.The fifth, "Something Rotten in Denmark", engages Holmes and Watson in an investigation of a series of murders that have taken place in Kronborg Castle, near Copenhagen. (Krongborg was selected by Shakespeare as the model for the setting of Hamlet, and has played a vital role in the history of Denmark.) The baffling nature of the murders is that they follow the order of events in Shakespeare's Hamlet. A tangled set of clues and witness narratives compel the pair to perform extraordinarily."The Fifteen Hundred Word Curse", involves a modern-day man who discovers that he is the victim of a huge (and genuine) curse levied upon the Reivers of the Walk (a large and dangerous group peopling the Scottish-English border whose descendents include Custer, President Nixon and Neil Armstrong) by the Archbishop of Glasgow. He enlists the aid of an ecclesiastical lawyer/priest, an aged, experienced expert on exocism, and a youthful priest fresh from a seminary. He learns that a large collection of evil influences have been subtly causing inbreeding amongst the descendents to strengthen the power of the curse upon his unborn child. Terrible events transpire as the result of attempts to apply logic to lifting the curse. A surprise awaits at the story's end.

Book preview

Here I float with the Pacific Ocean all around me, nine-tenths of my body beneath the pleasingly warm, salty water, which laps around my ears, occasionally higher. Why should I feel concerned?

Perhaps because I have no idea where my dear wife is floating, or what her condition might be.

Because there’s not a soul in sight.

Because these waters are known to be extraordinarily heavily infested with sharks.

Because there is no ship nor boat nor airplane in sight, and the nearest island has no apparent means for offering rescue.

Because I am becoming progressively physically exhausted, but dare not lose my grip upon a flotation device that I was unable to complete proper attachment to. (Mental note: pay careful if not rapt attention to that boring description of emergency procedures on a plane.)

Because waves are becoming successful in finding my mouth open and triggering a swallow reflex so that my stomach is filling with salt water. (People in life boats are advised to avoid consuming salt water because such consumption is inevitably lethal.)

Because the pleasantly warm water is cooler than 98.6 degrees F, so that it is beginning to bring on hypothermia as it gently but relentlessly cools me.

Because I have evidence that I am rather rapidly being propelled Northward, away from Molokai, the only land in sight.

Because of the fact that night is on the verge of coming on so that hope of sea or air rescue is dimming.

Because imminent ignominious death is staring me in the face.

(Little did I anticipate the gut-wrenching tragedy and pathos that awaited me as I came into close contact with a Nationally Prominent woman whose death was branded by other prominent people as an assassination, worthy of precipitating a plea for an emergency restraining order to prevent the cremation or even embalming of this unfortunate lady.)

But let me return to these concerns later.

CHAPTER 2

Us

Me (Bruce)

It may be useful to acquaint the reader a little with the writer and his wife’s backgrounds before delving into the events associated with the ditching. Such information may serve to help the reader place him-or-herself in our shoes as the series of events unfolds.

My wife Marilyn and I live in a small suburb near a large Midwestern city. I am a retired engineer who still teaches graduate and advanced undergraduate students on an Adjunct basis at a local university, and authors a new series of mystery books in the Sherlock Holmes genre with the approval of the Conan-Doyle estate.

As a child, I lived in Kansas City, Missouri until after WWII, when my family moved to a farm in Barton County, Missouri. The Rural Electrification Program begun before the war, had stalled out during the war, and it took some time to get rolling again. Consequently, we spent our first year on the farm without electricity, waiting for the arrival of a transformer. This was a considerable burden upon my mother, who was city born and bred. I learned to expertly trim the wick on a kerosene lamp, and otherwise accommodate the unusual circumstances (e.g., studying before a flickering light source in a manner similar to Lincoln in his youth).

We had no means of entertainment (e.g., no radio) during this period, so my sister and I became inveterate readers, borrowing books from school in abundance.

I was obliged to walk a mile and a quarter each way to grammar school in a little town called Milford with a population of about a hundred souls, and attended a two-room school house (grades 1-4 in one room and 5-8 in the other. Unless you have experienced it, you might think of such an arrangement as a real impediment to learning, but it really was not that bad.)

The curriculum was somewhat new to me, including an emphasis on agricultural science and practice.

I had heard of rural schools employing corporal punishment, (ala Tom Sawyer and School Days’ refrain, taught to the tune of a hickory stick) so I regarded with trepidation a set of wooden sticks apparently for that purpose lined up horizontally on one wall, and was very careful not to step out of line. Then one day, the teacher casually reached over and pulled on one of the sticks, and a map appeared! I was immensely relieved, and my behavior became less exemplary.

Then the unthinkable occurred: the school house burned down—to the ground. All teaching materials, books, maps and desks went up in smoke. (The schoolhouse had been heated by a wood-burning stove.)

The students then attended school in a one-room schoolhouse, in the home of a recently graduated teacher named Mr. Wooten. One might expect disaster, but remarkably, he was an excellent teacher, and when we left the farm and moved to Chicago the year that the ’49 Ford with the bullet nose came out, I found that I was somewhat ahead of my fellow students in Chicago.

My life has been relatively quiet and austere, though my wife and I have traveled quite a bit internationally (most countries you’ve heard of), usually while I was on business (when I was so employed).

We’d been to Hawaii before, using a relative’s time-share condo, and, in fact were caught there by the 9/11 tragedy (with Marilyn’s sister and brother-in-law), when all air traffic in the Continental and non-Continental US was grounded for a week or so. Being held captive in Paradise was a contradiction in terms: hating the confinement but loving the location. (To its credit, our hotel (the Marriott) cut our hotel charges significantly in a situation where they could have gouged people who were stuck there.)

I attended college at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, obtaining a few degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, working at the Digital Computer Lab facility there which was involved in designing and constructing the Illiac II computer, one of the first Super Computers using semiconductor logic (albeit in discrete form). (The research activity that produced that machine, which was physically enormous by today’s standards, was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission, both of which had insatiable appetites for computing power.) My wife was also employed at the Lab.

Though you’d never believe it looking at me now, I was somewhat of an athlete in High School and College: Gymnastics. I was by no means Olympic material, but I specialized in the High Bar, though it was necessary to do reasonably well on Side Horse, Long Horse, Parallel bars and Free Exercise. Our coach in High School (Lindblom HS in Chicago) was a former Olympian, though he was relatively elderly, so he could not demonstrate actions for us effectively, but was quite effective nonetheless. He had been a distinct asset to the school over time, because it had won the State Championship repeatedly.

One of my teammates was actually potential Olympic material. He was the one who could watch a move once and mimic it flawlessly. One day, however, while practicing on the long horse, he landed in a strange way and fell. When he arose, his torso was distorted into an S shape and he could not right it, yet mysteriously there was little pain. The physician diagnosed a physiological splint, where the body recognizes that correcting the position would bring agony, and does not permit one to straighten one’s stance. He had to essentially give up gymnastics for close to a year, when at last his body relented and he was whole again. We lost touch over time, but he went on to become the Head Gymnastics Coach at UCLA. I mention this not just because it might be of interest, but also because it reflects something I am experiencing: Since the Ditching, I find myself bending forward with the upper part of my body in a way that I can correct only with discomfort. I am hoping that it will correct itself, but it may prove chronic.

I married Marilyn, whom I’d dated for 5 years, after receiving my MS degree. We were incredibly fortunate in finding an apartment in walking distance of campus, which had just been redecorated and refurnished.

As an undergrad and graduate student, before work on my thesis began, I worked summers as a Junior Engineer (often called an Internship these days) at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant on 22nd and Cicero in Chicago, a stone’s throw from one of Al Capone’s haunts, where I wrote my first patent disclosure and was paid in cash like a factory worker; at International Harvester’s Manufacturing Research Plant on South Ashland in Chicago, where I was sent to learn how to program the IBM 650 computer, then to teach what I had learned to the Harvester engineers, none of whom had ever written a computer program; at Automatic Electric Research, working on the design of ferrite core memories destined to be employed in electronic telephone switching machines, replacing antiquated electromechanical counterparts; and at Zenith Radio Corporation, working on the first generation of Citizens’ Band Radios.

When I finished school, I took a job at Automatic Electric, discovered a new transistor effect, developed a magnetics-based computer control technique, became a Supervisor of a small research group, then Head of a department that was developing the software for a new telephone switching machine. This occupied some three years.

Then Bell Labs (AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories) began activities in Naperville, Illinois, and I took a job there that lasted some 30 years. (I worked on everything from software development to high speed logic circuits to high temperature superconductor applications, to switching network blocking probability analyses, etc.) Bell Labs became Lucent for the latter few years.

Then I moved to Motorola, where I supervised a competitive intelligence group, functioned as a Director’s Chief Advisor on reliability, as well as a few other activities.

During virtually the entire period that I was employed full-time up to the present, I also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), on