Monday, May 16 2005 @ 02:15 PM PDT
Contributed by: matt
Views: 4,146
Photos and text of a carrier landing mishap. Credit to Ripper Swede Hedberg
for the original material.
USN photos & blow-by-blow commentary courtesy of Ripper Swede Hedberg.
Swede observed the incident from PriFly.
..... the aircraft hit hard on the stbd main mount and broke off the wheel.
The wheel bounced up into the wheel well and ruptured the main fuel line; that's
the cloud of fuel you see in the first picture.
The scraping of the bare main strut pulled the nose to the right, imposing
an asymmetrical load on the tailhook, ripping it out (movies from the starboard
quarter showed this). The fuel caught fire, and the rest is as you see
it.
The movies showed a 5-foot diameter vapor donut for an instant just in front
of the intake at the moment the engine flamed out. Terry cobbed the throttle
and felt nothing so he "read the instructions" as the nose passed
over the end of the angle. ("Reading the instructions" is an euphemism
for pulling the face curtain to fire the ejection seat. There are no instructions
printed there, but if there were, one could read them.... if you read really
fast.)
He got a small abrasion on his neck from his harness, but that was all.