When I was a student at Spartan back in the 70's, one of my
class mates had been on a carrier off the VN coast. They
had a problem with a cat shot of an F8. The catapult did
not fire when the button was pushed. They had the pilot go
to idle and fold the wings. Then the catapult fired. With
the wings folded above the cockpit the pilot couldn't eject,
but the plane flew. They cleared the deck and the F8 landed
safely. I'm sure that the movie footage would be
interesting.



"Casey" wrote in message
news:tcJOg.105$uj3.42@trnddc08...
|
| "Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
|
ups.com...
| The special about it on History channel (about 2 years
ago) said that
| at first Boeing didn't believe it really happened until
they sent their
| engineers out. They explaination is that the body itself
generates so
| much lift it could still fly. If you think about the
amount of G's
| those planes can pull and the amount of load (bombs ,
etc) they can
| carry they must have an enormous amount of excess lift.
|
| One such Navy/Marine Corps airplane was the AD-1 Skyraider
which, if memory
| serves me, weighed less than the 3 tons of ordnance you
could hang under its
| wings.
| Somewhere in the Naval Aviation archives resides a set
of photos of an
| AD-1 Skyraider on base and short final to the USS Bon
Homme Richard ("Bonnie
| Dick") with one wing folded over the cockpit. Contrary to
engineering specs,
| both locking pins inthe left wing sheared when the pilot
pulled the airplane
| off the deck during takeoff.
| The airplane was THE airplane of VMA-212 for the 1st
Provisional Marine
| Air/Ground Task Force (later the 1st Marine Brigade) in
early 1955.
| Oh yeah, the plane caught the #3 wire and landed
without any further
| damage. Gung Ho!
|
|