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Aw ****s and Bravo Zulus
Everyone knows that one wipes out a career full of attaboys. What is your
favorite non-fatal "aw ****" story? I thought we could also make a thread and tell about the best flying each of us encountered. On Ike in 1980, we had Whales. Either one or two of the massive things, but they were infrequent visitors and our flight deck crew adapted to their periodic arrivals and departures. On one of the evolutions where the A-3 was aboard, the poderous thing trundled over to the port bow cat and got ready to go, but went down for a black box. The "board guy" (never knew what they called the man that held up the board telling both the pilot and the catapault crew how much that particular aircraft weighed) did his thing but the launch didn't happen. The director taxiied the giant clear of the cat, allowing the A-7 waiting behind the JBD to slide up and take its place. The A-3 cleared the area with some difficulty (manuevering a bull in a china shop is a good mental picture of the situation), and all I can think of is that this unfamiliar sight temporarily distracted the cat crew. At any rate, the A-7, weighing probably about 1/3rd of that flying brontosaurus, was now sitting on a cat set to launch something two thirds larger than himself. The mistake was not caught and in a flash, literally, the A-7 was flung skyward with quite a bit more oomph than was necessary - in fact, it looked like it was shot out of a cannon! The force was enough to detach the extremely large belly pan underneath the Corsair and several panels came off in the slipstream. The pilot, pinned backwards in his seat, must have wondered what hit him, but he kept the flailing A-7 out of the water and made one of the quickest patterns I've seen, bringing it straight back around to land, approximately three to five minutes after launch. Hitting the deck loosened up other panels and left a trail of zeus fittings and other hardware bouncing down the deck. The pilot, glaring, stomped off the deck to find a Cat&Arresting Gear officer to have for lunch... Now, for Bravo Zulus, I have to mention HSL-33's LCDR Steele - flying off the coast of San Diego, he had a rotor blade come apart, slinging parts in all directions and creating such massive vibrations that the crewman was nearly knocked out by his own helmet. The copilot was thrown up and down so heavily that he could not maintain grasp on the controls. As the crippled H-2 fell out of the sky, two out of the three man crew knew they were about to die. But LCDR John Steele, Man of Action, grabbed the 'snake by the balls and guided it down safely to a "Look Mom!" landing in the middle of hundreds of scantily clad beach-goers on Silver Strand beach. No injuries, helo intact. Try that, only using four out of five rotor blades! (I don't know about the other pilots, but Steele never had to beg for a crewman to ride with him again!) Later, this same magnificent aviator guided an H-46 down onto the deck of a passing ship (I think USS Reid?) thousands of feet below him after his Seaknight nearly broke in half in flight. Again, no deaths. On the pilot scale (1 being Lt. "Iiiiii've g-g-g-got c-c-control" McDonald and 10 being Bill Dana), Commander Steele was up there with CDR John Gana at about an 8.5. Steele wasn't lucky - just very well equipped mentally for just about any emergency. My kind of pilot! v/r Gordon |
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