Monday, January 22, 2018
4 comments:
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Anonymous said...
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I'm going to take a wild guess here......this Pilot didn't graduate
from the John McLame school for Navy Pilots. Juss a guess
Geo -
1/23/18, 9:21 AM
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Anonymous said...
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With enough engine power, a brick will fly. Now landing, that's another story.
I remember reading the pilot's interview in some magazine years ago. Good stuff.
In the 80's I took courses at Langley AFB, and there were many Navy and AF officers in the classes. Two of them were safety officers, one at Langley, the other at Oceana.
They told me of a mock dog fight between F-14's and F-15's over the ocean on a gray day, where the sky and ocean melded. Seems one F-15 guy lost his horizon and found himself at .9 Mach going straight down through the "hard deck" at 10,000 feet.
That's about 8-9 seconds to impact. The book said "eject" in that situation, because you supposedly could not pull out before impact. The AF had the whole dogfight on audio tape - the safety officer told me there was a huge gasp when the pilot realized his situation, then grunting, then silence. The pilot regained consciousness at about 600 ft, upside down, the inversion bringing blood back to his brain. His wingman joined up, told him he was damaged, and they went back to Langley where they landed safely. After telling me the story, before the next class the safety officer took me to a hangar where the aircraft was. By the time I saw it, it was stripped of everything salvageable - engines, avionics, etc. Both wings were bent up and the fuselage was bent along the spine behind the cockpit, with badly wrinkled skin.
He said it had pulled 12.6 g's and McDonnell Douglas engineers said the wings should come off at 12.9 g's. The AF in their infinite wisdom grounded the pilot for his mistake. The safety officer thought that was a shame, since the guy was a Vietnam combat veteran still flying in the AF, and the AF could have had a man to talk about what went wrong to younger, less experienced pilots. He ruefully commented that in such incidents, all investigators usually had to investigate was a "hole in the water" instead of someone to talk about lessons learned. My lesson learned was that the F-15 was one tough airplane and so were the guys who fly them.
Lt. Col. Gen. Tailgunner dick -
1/23/18, 10:28 AM
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Eskyman said...
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Now that's what they mean, when they say "coming in on a wing and a prayer."
It's not usually so literal! -
1/23/18, 12:37 PM
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Regnad Kcin said...
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"Takeoffs are optional, but landings are mandatory." -Old pilots factoid-
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1/23/18, 6:17 PM
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