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LOSS OF
Oil
Quantity
U.S. Navy E-6B Mercury aircraft - U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jacob Skovo
A Break in the Routine Thursday, March 4, 2021, was as routine as can be. The weather at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, was beautiful, the aircraft clean and the crew was highly motivated to fly their four-engine beast, the E-6B Mercury, in support of the Navy’s “Take Charge and Move Out” (TACAMO) nuclear deterrence mission. After takeoff, the crew proceeded to an Atlantic operating area for a training exercise that began with the extension of over 5 miles of training wire from the aft section of the aircraft. The wire extended normally, and the crew waited anxiously for the exercise message traffic
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By Lt. Zach Hester, VQ-4
to arrive and direct them to use their very low frequency (VLF) array to communicate with ballistic missile submarines operating in the vast Atlantic Ocean. By all accounts, the day was shaping up to be a very successful one for the crew and the nuclear deterrence enterprise. With the wire “out and parked,” the pilots and flight engineers (FEs) had very little to do but remain within the confines of the operating area. Suddenly, an FE trainee (FE-T), who had more than 500 hours in the now sun-downed P-3C, noticed a subtle decrease of oil quantity in Engine Number 4.
