Cold War mystery: The homesick mechanic

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The evening of the 22 May 1969 had not been a good night for 23-year-old US Air Force mechanic Sgt Paul Meyer. Homesick for his wife and stepchildren, he'd asked a few days earlier to be returned from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, where he'd been posted, to the USAF base at Langley, Virginia. But his request for leave had been refused.

Bitterly disappointed, the young Vietnam veteran took himself off to a military colleague's house party, where he began drinking heavily and then, according to colleagues, to behave erratically and combatively. His friends persuaded him to go to bed, but Meyer escaped through a window.

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Breaking into the room of a Capt Upton, Meyer stole the key to his truck. Using the name "Capt Epstein", Meyer then called an aircraft dispatcher and demanded that aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130, be fuelled for a flight to the USA.

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Completely alone in the cockpit of the stolen 60-tonne, four-engine military transporter plane, an aircraft he was not qualified to fly, the 23-year-old serviceman steeled himself and thrust his throttles forward. Shortly before 05:10 on the dawn of the drizzly, overcast morning of 23 May, he was airborne. It would have been just after midnight in Virginia, USA when Mary Ann "Jane" Meyer was woken by the telephone ringing. "Hi honey!" chirped the excited voice of her young husband Paul after she picked up the receiver. "Guess what? I'm coming home!"

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When she understood that Meyer had gone Awol and that he had stolen the Hercules, she begged him repeatedly to turn back, warning him he'd be severely punished by the military. She cannot remember the last words she said to her husband but she does remember his last words to her very clearly. "Babe," said Meyer across the radio he'd patched through from the cockpit to the phone network. "I'll call you back in five. I got some trouble." The line went dead. After an hour and forty-five minutes in flight, Meyer crashed into the English Channel.

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