Excerpts from the War diary of William E. Jordan (1913-1996)
Note:  This is an eye witness account of an aircraft accident in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1942, in which Vultee test pilot Elwyn Herbert Gibbon was killed.  The diary entry for this date is of course a little shorter.  Bill Jordan told this story to his family many times over the years.  Ten years before his death he put his entire war experience, including this story, on fifteen audio tapes.  This version of the accident was written from those tapes.
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Karachi Air Base
25th Fighter Squadron
1942


    Today, August 19th, I was witness to the very tragic end of a man's life, and the total destruction of an airplane.  The aircraft was a Vultee Vanguard P-66, and the pilot was a test pilot for that company by the name of Elwyn H.Gibbon.  The P-66's were being shipped to Karachi in crates by ship.  They were intended for the Chinese Air Force. We were assembling them and then teaching the Chinese pilots to fly them.  But the Chinese pilots were having too much trouble handling the tail-wheel-equipped fighter.  There were also many problems with the P-66 itself that could not be fixed in Karachi.  Many planes crashed during the test flights and several pilots were killed.  Our pilots hated the P-66, and did not want fly them.

    This particular airplane had been flown earlier in the day, and was hooked up to the battery charger to bring the batteries back up to full strength.  Gibbon had been sent to Karachi by Vultee to try and convince the Army pilots that the P-66 was a good airplane if handled properly.  I was told later that Gibbon and some of the other officers were having dinner, during which many drinks were served.  Apparently, Gibbon had consumed his fair share of alcohol.  Gibbon became irate when the Army officers would not commit to flying the airplane.

    I saw him come out of the mess tent and run over to the parked P-66 on the line.  The crew chief tried to stop him by telling him that the batteries were not yet fully charged.  Gibbon disconnected the battery cable from the airplane and just threw them on the ground.  As he got into the cockpit the crew chief heard him say:  “I’ll show those bastards what this airplane can do.”  That was told to me later.  He then started the engine and took off.  He didn’t even line the airplane up on the proper runway, he just gunned the engine, and off he went.  Once in the air he really put that airplane through its paces.  It was a beautiful air show to watch.

    After a while he came back in to land, but changed his mind and took off again.  He did this several times.  The whole squadron was watching the air show he was putting on.  On the last take off he pulled the P-66 up into a loop.  But when he came back down out of the loop he didn’t have enough height to recover.  As he tried to pull out his wing hit a big light pole near our tent city.  Also in the area was our open-air theater with wooden benches out in front of the screen.  The pole ripped off nearly half of his wing.  After that he was not able to control the airplane any longer.  It continued on toward our theater screen with its propeller hitting and chewing up the wooden benches.  The closer it got to the screen the more damage was done to the benches.  Directly in front of the screen the benches were nothing but splintered wood.  After hitting the ground at the end of the benches, it slid through the movie screen itself and continued on toward the officer's tents.

    The wing took out three tents in all before the airplane finally crashed hard into the dry ditch just beyond our living area.  It took out the first tent without disturbing the contents inside.  The most amazing thing was that there was a phonograph player still playing a record in that first tent.  The record that was playing was titled “Where Was I?”

    After the plane crashed into the ditch it burst into flames killing Gibbon.  I can still hear him screaming as the fire progressed.  There just wasn’t any way to get him out before he burned to death.  But he sure did put on an air show before he died.

William E. Jordan

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