Captain Blown, flying at 9,000 feet, instantly went into a dive. He turned sharply left and right as he descended, trying to shake the pursuing fighters, and headed for the sea at 300 miles an hour. He was fighting to get out of the line of fire long enough to dump his gas and check the flames that were eating away a broad section of the skin on his right wing.
The guns of the LA-9s kept up their clatter on his tail and bullets tore through the plane cabin, splintering the interior and killing several passengers. Bullets whizzed past the two pilots and smashed the boost pressure and fuel-flow gauges. At 5,000 feet, the rudder controls snapped; at 3,000, the right aileron control was shot off. The No. 4 engine was feathered, but its extinguisher failed to stifle the raging flames.
The Skymaster began to stall groggily toward the right, but Captain Blown checked it by throttling back his two left-wing engines and pouring full power on No. 3, the only operative engine on the right side. The ship’s speed dropped to 160 miles an hour, and the right wing began to dip.
With the small degree of control remaining, Captain Blown plunged the Skymaster through the shoulder of a 15-foot wave as the right wing and No. 4 engine snapped off, then slammed into the middle of the next wave. The solid impact of the water caved in the cockpit windows. The tail broke off, up-ended in unison with the fuselage and headed for the sea bottom. Less than two minutes elapsed between the attack and the ditching.
Thirty seconds after hitting the water, the fuselage sank out of sight. Two of the Red fighters executed a U-turn around the wreckage before heading back to their base at Sanya, on the southern end of Hainan Island. Few of the victims had time to put on life jackets. When the cabin went down, only those washed clear of it had a chance to survive.
The eight survivors clambered or were dragged aboard the twenty-man inflated rubber raft. Captain Blown spread a weather awning over the raft and warned all passengers to keep out of sight under it in case of another attack.
Steve Wong, the Chinese radio operator, had died in the wreck. Captain Blown remembered seeing him talk into the mike all during the dive toward the sea and sending a final message, “Losing altitude, engine on fire.” The message was heard at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong and rescue operations started immediately.