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.