When Greg Fletcher checks his watch, he sees the time. What he also sees is a time gone by. Because the watch he now wears is inspired by something that happened to him more than 50 years ago.

On November 21, 1973, the then-lieutenant in the United States Navy and a pilot assigned to the US base in Iceland, crash-landed a C-117 on Sólheimasandur beach on the nation’s southern coast.  The plane was carrying mail, supplies and 4 passengers.

Everyone aboard the flight survived. It would be a memorable day for the seven to be sure. But when you consider the tens of thousands of military airplanes that have crashed, many without the same happy outcome, it would hardly be a history-making event. Except as it turned out, it was.

In keeping with military policy at the time, the wreckage was left on the beach where, for decades, it attracted occasional passersby and locals interested in using the aluminum hulk for target practice. Everything changed in the mid-2010s. Musicians Justin Bieber, Sigur Rós, and the Korean band Loona, featured the wreck in videos and the TV show Top Gear Viking Trucks filmed at Sólheimasandur also.

A decrepit airplane interrupting a wide expanse of wind-raked black sand was captivating and soon people were trekking to the site at Sólheimasandur from around the world. Today it is one of Iceland’s most popular tourist destinations, giving this old crash site an outsized impact in a place where visitors outnumber locals 4 to one.

Tourists from Puerto Rico tour the C-117

Even today, no signage greets the curious visitors, who, if they do not sign up for a guided tour on all-terrain vehicles, must drive 2 hours from Reykjavik and then hike 40 minutes to gaze at the plane.

With or without guides, and even half a century later, the wreckage is an untold story. I wanted very much to include it in my next book; Don’t Wear Leggings on an Airplane, a memoir of my 30 years investigating and writing about air disasters. So I invited Fletcher to travel with me to Iceland, to see what had happened to the plane and finally put the disaster in context.

Icelanders, including Icelandic watchmakers, tourists and Fletcher’s family, can finally learn the full story. And so can you.

This post provides an account from takeoff to the post-crash party that long-ago day. For more, check out the special watch created by Reykjavik’s JS Watch Company to commemorate this piece of Icelandic aviation history. It is the watch Fletcher now wears. (More about that in this story I wrote for The New York Times.)

A day’s work becomes a very unusual day

November in Iceland is typically cold. Temperatures hover around freezing and precipitation is practically guaranteed. Days are short. The sun rises around 10 and sets at 4.  On the 21st, Fletcher, his commanding officer James Wicke and crew chief Edward Hall, took off from Keflavik in time to make the round-trip supply run to Hofn and back before sundown.

They were flying a C-117, a tail-dragger, twin-engine propeller airplane that was the military version of the widely used commercial airplane, the DC-3 Dakota. By the late 1940s, however, most airlines had moved to more modern aircraft, including the first jets arriving in the 1950s. But the military versions produced after the Second World War would fly much longer. Well into the seventies, they were ferrying supplies and people between an Air Force radio intercept station in the southeastern city of Hofn and the US Naval Air Station at Keflavik. To Fletcher, these trips were “a days work,” though November 21st turned out to be a very unusual day.

An old plane, a young pilot and a pineapple cake

The flight to Hofn was uneventful. Before departing on the return leg, the crew had lunch in the mess hall before boarding four passengers and some bags of mail. In the spirit of Thanksgiving which was the following day, the Air Force mess sergeant tucked into the cockpit a pineapple upside-down cake and a thermos of coffee. The crews’ plans to enjoy the snack on the way back would very shortly derail.

Navy Lt. Greg Fletcher in the 1970s

Before reaching 10-thousand feet westbound, they were fully in instrument conditions. “Visibility was virtually zero in every direction,” Fletcher recalled in a memo he wrote about that day. “I could barely make out the port wingtip light mounted about forty-five feet from my cockpit seat; the light was nothing more than a red smudge in the murk.” Still, this was not alarming. Cossetted in the blanket of white, the men focused on the plane’s instruments and sipped their coffee.

“There is a sense of coziness when flying in smooth IMC and all systems are operating as they should,” Fletcher recalled. Then, ice started hitting the plane, followed by a jolt of turbulence that Fletcher said, “knocked the autopilot offline.”

Too stunned to curse

The cascade of trouble had begun. The wings were picking up ice, but not enough for the de-icing boots to break. The left engine began to backfire. Looking through a break in the clouds, the crew could see they were above a glacier.

Attempts to address the left engine were successful, but up ahead, more clouds loomed, extending in all directions. “Descending or turning aside was not an option,” Fletcher recalled. The crew was back in the dark.

A torrent of ice and snow belted the windscreen. Fletcher said it was like ice was being shot from a firehose. “Freezing precipitation was accompanied by moderate turbulence; the airplane began to buck and yaw like a barroom bull ride.”

Only a few minutes after entering the ice storm, both engines lost power, this time for good. “Within the space of a minute, our C117-D had transformed itself from powered transport to overweight glider, and there was no option but to descend.”

Fletcher calculated the plane was about ninety miles west of Hofn and flying over Myrdalsjokull, (the Mire Valley Glacier) a 5000-foot high glacier. If his math was correct and they stayed on their present course, they would hit the top of the glacier in five minutes.

A decision to ditch

Fletcher was yelling over the din in the cockpit, the sound of the ice flailing at the airplane and the attempts by Hall and Wicke to restart the engines. He announced that based on their position, they needed to turn south toward the Atlantic. As frightening as it seemed, attempting a landing in the frigid ocean was the best option. “The glacier sloped toward the sea and, in my view, ditching in the North Atlantic was preferable to smacking into a cloud-shrouded mountain.”

Myrdalsjokull as seen via satellite in 1986 Atlantic Ocean is at left lower corner

Hall left the cockpit to brief the passengers. They would need to don survival suits and get out the life rafts.  Wicke continued trying to restart the engines while making Mayday calls on the radio. Fletcher concentrated on the plane’s airspeed and the chosen southerly heading while searching intently for a clearing in the clouds. He was hoping for even a glimpse of a clue as to where they were and what was ahead.

Talking about it today, Fletcher sounds glib, recalling how as the plane descended, he mentally ticked off, “4-thousand feet, didn’t hit anything, 3-thousand feet didn’t hit anything…” and when pressed, he admitted he was entirely focused on landing the plane, rather than thinking about the alternative.

At 25-hundred feet, the plane broke out of clouds and like a dimly realized vision, Fletcher did see something. A surf line. A miraculously flat expanse of beach on a coastline better known for its high terrain. Wicke agreed they should try to land on the beach, but as they approached, he countermanded Fletcher’s call to lower the landing gear. The sand would not be firm enough, Wicke warned and the plane could nose over.

Fletcher shows the creek crossed by the airplane on landing. Sometime after the accident the wreckage was moved a considerable distance away from the shore.

Fletcher confirms it was the right call. He turned the airplane into the wind at 500 feet and put the airplane down. It hit the sand and the plane bulldozed on its belly through a stream emptying into the Atlantic. As it plowed across the narrow creek, the incline of the bank on the other side brought the ride to an abrupt stop. There may have been a momentary breath of relief, but it did not last long. The smell of aviation gas entered the cockpit from a rupture in the left wing fuel tank. The new threat was fire. Wicke and Fletcher shut off the electrical power and everyone jumped out of the cargo door to get away from the plane.

Shortly after the celebratory hugging and backslapping, plans for surviving the night began. Surveying what was on hand for a stay on the frigid beach, Fletcher noted the uneaten pineapple cake. It might have to do for a dinner for seven.

No way to communicate

The hand-cranked, World War 2-era survival radio was essentially useless. They were left with no means of communicating their situation or location. Wicke didn’t know if any of his Mayday calls had been received. And yet, around 3 pm, a Sikorsky S-61 Air Force transport helicopter set down on the beach.

As Fletcher recalled, the helicopter was based in Greenland and on its way to Iceland when the crew heard Wicke’s Mayday.  The “pilot had broken off his approach to Keflavik and diverted east to look for us.”

Fletcher stopped by the former Officer’s Club scene of the celebration

On their return to Keflavik, the usual post-accident briefings, physicals, blood and urine samples and the like ensued. But the following day was Thanksgiving, Fletcher’s fiancée, Carol, was visiting and suffice to say the big drama was over. It was time for the celebration.

A welcoming party then and now

At the Keflavik Officers’ Club, Fletcher bought many rounds of drinks for the Air Force helicopter crew. And, during our visit in September, Fletcher and I stopped by the now-defunct bar so he could reminisce about that night. The tour was part of a reception for Fletcher at the headquarters of Kadeco, the company converting the former US base into a mixed-use civilian community. Iceland’s President, Halla Tomasdottir, was on hand and had lots of questions for Fletcher.

Pálmi Freyr Randversson of Kadeco, and President Halla Tómasdóttir with Fletcher during his visit.

When the 1973 celebration for the crew came to an end, Fletcher returned to flying the Hofn to Keflavik route. While passing over the crash site on those trips, he came to appreciate the rare open space where he brought the engineless to rest. “Iceland’s shoreline between Keflavik and Hofn has no beach to speak of,” he wrote in his memo of the event.  “The landmass abruptly crumbles into the sea, leaving a coastal topography comprised mostly of high cliffs and tumbled-down boulders.” When he talks about lessons learned that day, he always references the role of luck.

Fletcher left Iceland in 1974, married Carol and had three children. He went to law school and worked as a lawyer in Memphis. When Carol died, he married Laura Hine, who accompanied us on the visit to the crash site at Sólheimasandur. Now retired, he remains involved in aviation as a commissioner on the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority.

A medal, a yoke and a watch 

Fletcher, Wicke and Hall were all awarded Air Medals for extraordinary airmanship.

When Fletcher and I first met face-to-face in Iceland, he had with him the pilot’s yoke, salvaged from the wreck after the crash and given to him by the base maintenance officer. When we arrived at the site, he held it proudly for photographer Arni Saeberg, who took this stunning front-page photo for Iceland’s national newspaper, Morgunbladid.

I’d like to tell you that if you look closely, you can see Fletcher’s new watch on his wrist, but it is not visible. It is there, though, a silent, elegant and long-past-time reminder of a feat of airmanship and the gift of luck.