Tiger in the Sea: The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival

by Eric Lindner

September 1962: On a moonless night over the raging Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles from land, the engines of Flying Tiger flight 923 to Germany burst into flames, one by one. Pilot John Murray didn’t have long before the plane crashed headlong into the 20-foot waves at 120 mph. As the four flight attendants donned life vests, collected sharp objects, and explained how to brace for the ferocious impact, 68 passengers clung to their elementary schoolchildren from Hawaii, a teenage newlywed from Germany, a disabled Normandy vet from Cape Cod, an immigrant from Mexico, and 30 recent graduates of the 82nd Airborne’s Jump School. They all expected to die. Murray radioed out “Mayday” as he attempted to fly down through gale-force winds into the rough water, hoping the plane didn’t break apart when it hit the sea. Only a handful of ships could pick up the distress call so far from land. The closest was a Swiss freighter 13 hours away. Dozens of other ships and planes from 9 countries abruptly changed course or scrambled from Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall, all racing to the rescue—but they would take hours, or days, to arrive. From the cockpit, the blackness of the Atlantic grew ever closer. Could Murray do what no pilot had ever done—“land” a commercial airliner at night in a violent sea without everyone dying? And if he did, would rescuers find any survivors before they drowned or died from hypothermia in the icy water? The fate of Flying Tiger 923 riveted the world. Bulletins interrupted radio and TV programs. Headlines shouted off newspapers from London to LA. Frantic family members overwhelmed telephone switchboards. President Kennedy took a break from the brewing crises in Cuba and Mississippi to ask for hourly updates. Tiger in the Sea is a gripping tale of triumph, tragedy, unparalleled airmanship, and incredibly brave people from all walks of life. The author has pieced together the story—long hidden because of murky Cold War politics—through exhaustive research and reconstructed a true and inspiring tribute to the virtues of outside-the-box-thinking, teamwork, and hope.

Genres: Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

Published May 14, 2021

About the author

In 2009 Eric Lindner became a hospice volunteer, helping patients cope with the reality of dying. His book Hospice Voices: Lessons for Living at the End of Life was critically acclaimed by leading doctors and caregivers, NPR, BBC, Washington Independent Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist’s Rebecca Vnuk, who named it one of 2013’s ve best memoirs. Since 2015 the attorney, businessman, and DC native has been teaching Ethics in Action at Georgetown University, a course that dissects the NASA Challenger disaster. He’s married to Captain Murray’s daughter; they live on California’s Central Coast.

Reviews

[Art Gilbreth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading Eric’s book and as a person who was on that flight Eric came as close as you could without being there yourself. Through many years of research, interviews and fact checking ( documents had to be difficult to come by because they were hidden) Eric did a great job bring recognition to those people on the plane. I have not heard of anyone that has heard about this crash other then those who were there. Fantastic job Eric!

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. I have been hearing about this story from my friend Carol Hanson for years. She was the sole flight attendant that survived. Such an amazing and terrifying story of heroism and loss.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was book wound up on one of my reading lists is a commentary on how I'm always ready to pick up a good disaster at sea story; even better if it also involves aviation.

Be that as it may, having previously written a memoir about working in an end-of-life hostel, Lindner has a main interest in examining how people cope during and in the wake of life-threatening events, particularly in the case of Flying Tiger 923's captain, John Murray; it just so happens that Murray was Lindner's father-in-law.

Lindner finds a lot to admire in how all involved in the event comported themselves, particularly in pulling together their shattered emotional and psychological states going forward.

This is all well and good, but I would have liked to have known more about the root causes of this crash, and what that said about how Flying Tiger operated, since this was one of a number of fatal incidents the airline suffered. Lindner might say the same thing, since a lot of documentation of the last flight of Flying Tiger 923 seems to have disappeared into thin air.

Since I spent 30-plus years working for the U.S. National Archives, I was amused by Lindner's account of doing research at the facility in College Park (MD), getting dinged for a number of security gaffs, and then talking about the paucity of the files with one Joe Schwartz, who I was well-aware of as a fellow employee. Schwartz's conclusion was that the files were probably yanked by the CIA, and if Schwartz believed this, I believe he was sincere. Frankly, this sounds like someone suspected that there was a sabotage campaign going on against an organization that was treated as a para-military associate of the U.S. government at the time.

As for myself, and a running theme through Lindner's account, it's hard to overestimate how much work it took to keep these machines running, and one has to wonder if Flying Tiger was running too lean of an operation and was just not keeping on top of the necessary maintenance schedules.

Anyway, all in all, quite worth reading.

Actual rating: 3.5. A good book, but not quite what I hoped for.

[Scott Nickels · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Tiger in the Sea” is the type of book that I seldom read but, when I do, I enjoy the drama. Author Eric Linder chronicles the crash landing of a Flying Tiger aircraft into a quite-freezing Atlantic Ocean. Without giving much away ( although many other reviewers have already done so!) a whole lotta people when into the sea and did not survive the crash…while some others did, in fact, survive. The accident was attributed to a combination of human error and also a measure of bad luck. The book had all of the elements of a quite dramatic adventure: however, the great amount of details provided in the narrative also tended to bog down a very exciting story.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the first part of the book better; that dealt with the actual events of the ditching. The second half of the book dealt with the lives of the survivors after they got back to their homes or eventual homes.

It is a wonder that anybody was able to survive the conditions they found themselves in the north Atlantic.

[Paul Gaglio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and informative history of the crash. Well researched but the plight of some individuals that perished is not touched on at all.