Fergie

In a recent post on the start to my aviation interests ( The Start of it All ), I mentioned an old friend who had recently passed away - a year and a half ago is not very recent I suppose. I feel badly because I had not stayed in touch with him for many, many years, and have not acknowledged his passing until now. It was only a few short weeks before his death that I had invited him to join me at a Sawbones meeting to share his story with the guys, and to see him again. It never came to be.

Frankly, it was a surprise that he lived as long as he did. He suffered all kinds of respiratory ailments bought on by contamination from vinyl's and other toxic materials he breathed while trying to escape from the fire. That and the third degree burns to his face, hands, and back kept him in and out of hospitals since that fateful event New Years Eve, 33 years ago.

Ferg was in the right seat as first officer, aka co-pilot, as the 1944 Douglas DC3 descended from the sky over De Kalb, Texas. Flames were licking at him from under the controls and under his seat while thick, black smoke filled the cockpit. He and the pilot had their heads out the side windows, trying to see through the night sky to determine what kind of terrain they might be landing in. It turned out to be a cow pasture. They evacuated out of those small windows after successfully putting the plane on the ground, taking out power lines and losing wings along the way. Fire engulfed the old Douglas aircraft quickly before they could make it back for a rescue attempt. Only he and the pilot were to survive. Television and rock star Ricky Nelson, his fiancee, and five members of the Stone Canyon Band died in the blaze.

I arrived at St. Michaels hospital in Texarkana, Arkansas the following day for a front row seat to the personal aftermath. After a day or two in waiting rooms, accompanying his sister and niece, we alternated sitting in the room with him, listening to a ventilator click and woosh with its nauseatingly constant rhythm. Nurses and doctors would come and go, applying salves and changing bandages as Ferg groaned in pain, unable to speak. His eyes were covered in gauze, with his hands and long fingers covered in skin grafts coming from his legs. We were left to interpret his grunts, most of which were asking for ice chips to be hand fed into his mouth, since he couldn't drink liquids with the ventilator tube installed. I don't recall how long I was there. It seemed an eternity that his sister and I stood watch, but Ferg didn't have a lot of family left, and the list of close friends that were available wasn't long.

We didn't get together often after that. We got him on an air ambulance to a better hospital in Minnesota as soon as we could. Arkansas was well behind the curve in burn care and infection control at the time. He spent a few weeks in that hospital recovering, with his sister managing the details. I had a family and job to keep me busy, and he ended up living across town. The few times we  did get together we would spend a fair bit of time talking about his health, or his intentions of getting back into flying or traveling, once he got back to full health. Every few months, sometimes more frequently. he would contract pneumonia or any of a variety of infections, postponing the timeline for action on these intentions by months and more often years. With each visit we had less in common, with me less motivated for the next visit.

Fergy was a pilot. His interest in flying was passed down from his father, a former Northwest Airlines senior executive responsible for acquiring and operationalizing new aircraft. You can still see some references to the senior Ferguson in the testimony recorded in old aircraft accident lawsuits. A couple of those accidents involved the Martin 202, a troubled airliner with a very high accident rate.  K.R. Ferguson was the chief advocate of the purchase of the 202. All airlines except Northwest cancelled their orders for the airliner after a spat of production delays. In the end, Northwest Air was the only major customer for the plane, bearing the brunt of financial risk, operational problems, and associated bad publicity. To hear Ferg tell it, his father became the scapegoat for the failure of the program, losing his job in the process. The regret and embarrassment that went with it was burned into Ferg’s psyche. He spent a fair bit of time trying to rationalize his fathers perceived failure and downfall in subsequent years.

It reflected itself in his avoidance of responsibility for others. In his commercial flying career, he was never a captain - the left seat, as we call it. He was always in the right seat, as first officer, or co-pilot. He never married, and lived a spartan lifestyle. But he was always well spoken, always ready to offer an opinion or carry on an intellectual conversation about aviation or politics. On the flight deck, he was a consummate professional, whether as a flight instructor or in that right seat. During the investigation of the crash, Ferg provided only facts as seen through his eyes. His testimony contradicted that of his pilot in very material ways. He never worried about the personal consequences of that testimony, only that the Nelson family knew the truth about the circumstances of that disaster. 

It disappointed me greatly that he never realized his intentions to return to flying, or to expand beyond his local hobbies. He was concerned about being too far from adequate health care when his body succumbed to another bacteria or virus. While he increased his activity in politics, his passion for sport shooting, and his passion for debate, he never again left the surly bonds of earth, with the exception of February 3, 2017. I can't help but think that if I had been a better friend in those many later years, we might have been able to reconnect him to that which used to make him so happy.