F-14 Tomcat's Radome Smashes Into the Pilot's Canopy

so you know those movies where if your channel's surfing and you come across any one of these that you can't look away so i'm talking about of course animal house step brothers 16 candles gladiator point break arguably the greatest movie ever made and of course tommy boy so you remember this scene in tommy boy where the hood flips up and they barely avert disaster on my third deployment when i was in vf-143 our sister squadron vf142 kind of did a tommy boy we had just pulled out of port in dubai and in those days dubai was a mere shadow of what it is today in fact there was only one major hotel back in 1991 it was the hilton and they had a beach club that was a lot of fun so we'd have an admin at the hilton and jump on the bus and go to the beach club and they had a fantastic spread down there where they did shish kabobs and they had a little par three course i remember nuke nectar line got a hole in one and all i would give you was a pitching wedge and a putter so it was pretty good liberty by early 90s mid east port call standards so we pulled back out to sea and the first day we were back out to sea we did a bunch of post maintenance check flights so the first event was only a six plane event and all the planes on that cycle were doing post maintenance check flights so i was airborne in a vf143 puking dogs f14b with spasgeyer we were doing a pmcfa which means the engines were changed during the maintenance and it includes a supersonic dash so we got our flight done and when we came back to the ship and switched up tower frequency we heard that something was amiss so one of the sister squadron airplanes the ghost riders callsign dakota had had a major problem during their post-maintenance check flight the crew was reb edwards and grundy grunmeier both lieutenant commanders on their second and third tours in fighter squadron so relatively senior crew so they were doing a supersonic dash with g on the airplane and the ray dome came unlatched and swiveled at the hinge and hit the canopy completely destroying the plexiglass in the pilot's cockpit but let me let the pilot reb edwards tell the story in his own words we were airborne for a post-maintenance check flight at charlie which was the least complex of the pncs as you and i called them back in the day and we had actually we had a change to our flight control system as a part replaced our flight control system but we had two airplanes up that day is there actually six aircraft airborne on that cycle and it was all opposed maintenance check flights nice sunny day in the northern arabian gulf and i were we had another airplane those air ball flown by a skipper dick gallagher call sign weasel and weasel was on approach charlie under pro bravo actually so he needed to do a supersonic dash so we figured we'd get a little uh tactical time and check some lights in our training matrix after we had completed our primary mission so he started a supersonic dash into the boat at altitude you know about 1.3 1.5 or so and we flew away away from the ship to intercept him to get a supersonic intercept and then do a quick acm engagement and come back to the boat and we'll have as soon as we started our re-attack i put g on the aircraft a nose low and a right-hand turn and at that point everything changed there was an explosion i immediately was unable to see very well out of either eye and as i looked around me i saw that the glass and the canopy was missing and all of the three windscreens in front of the pilot's seat were so crazed and correct that you couldn't see out of the airplane when you're looking to the front so at that point we had no idea what happened to weasel and his airplane in fact he had no idea what happened to us so we were going about 600 miles per hour over the ground at about 28 000 feet and the the canopy imploded as far as i knew but i thought the explosion was explosive decompression because the rest of the airplane seemed to be in pretty decent shape and immediately began to spiral down in a tight spiral dropping down to about 225 knots as quickly as i could to get ourselves to about 10 thousand feet get ourselves some thicker air we got down to 10 000 feet which you'll recall is the the height at which we would generally do controllability checks for an airplane if i was having some sort of problems with the flight control surfaces and i leveled out at about 250 knots leveled at 10 000 feet and took stock of what we had i had a rudder authority light i couldn't see out the front of the airplane because of the damage to the windscreen and i had no canopy around me and i took that another look there was glass all over the cockpit and blood and you know a little bit of guts and and then i noticed that in fact i didn't um even have a oxygen mask hose attached to the plastic hard plastic fitting on my face you know they comprise that part of the oxygen mask the impact of whatever we hit it was actually was the radon but i didn't know at the time because you can't see the rate home from the pilot seat when you're in the air so we had not only undergone explosive decompression we didn't have any oxygen while we were at altitude and spiraling down but we had a lot of adrenaline i looked in the rear view mirror the center rear view mirror on the windscreen had left the airplane that's at the bottom of the persian gulf somewhere and grundy scott grundmeyer one of our naval academy classmates and we had flown my first squadron together in one of the great rios that i had the opportunity to fly with in the navy was slumped down in his seat and wasn't moving so we were about 35 miles from the ship i made a mayday call when this all happened i now realized actually i made two i realized that those mayday calls did not go out because when i lost the when the hose became disconnected from the hard plastic of oxygen mask the communications fittings the wires disconnected as well and i knew i was in pretty poor physical shape i looked in the mirror up on the run screen the right mirror and my face was all cut up bruised and swelling my right eye was glassed over and just white like die of a dead dog you know and i had glass in my left eye and i realized i was blind to my right eye so i was pretty sure at that point i was never going to fly again much less fly navy airplanes again and then i realized that i had some physical damage to my torso my right arm was quite sore and i could feel the swelling uh swelling my right near my right collar bone which set just below where the coke fittings were you know for our parachutes so that was quite comfortable to have you know my body begin to press against that over on that side in fact i had a bruise on a quarter of my chest i was almost at a uh square for six weeks you know it was black anyway so i had some broken bones i was blind one eye and had an airplane that had some damage to it i didn't quite understand i didn't have a good airspeed indicator didn't have a very good altimeter either actually and the angle attack indicator had an off flag so i had no uh easy way to determine the speed at which the aircraft was flying and the airspeed indicator became more erratic as i slowed down so still couldn't talk to grundy obviously couldn't talk to the ship but i flew back to the ship and i realized i needed to land immediately but at first i needed to make sure the airplane was controllable so what i did is i flew a qualitative evaluation if those are in air quotes qualitative evaluation on the airplane as if i was a technique that i learned at test pilot school that everyone learns at tes police school to take an unfamiliar airplane and test it for a mission and determine the suitability to perform that mission and i the mission that i i did a quick test flight for was is this air will this airplane be able to fly well enough to get it on the boat kind of lighting configuration powered approach so i dropped the gear dropped the flaps engaged the dlc put the speed brakes out you know all the things they usually do and i was astonished that all of those systems actually worked and i did some turns i did some climbs i did some descents i flew a practice approach up at altitude you know and then a wave off and then you know went back to 10 000 feet and and i found that uh you know i thought if i could get on the deck pretty quickly because i was pretty sure that i was in shock and going deeper in shock but i thought that a limited amount of time to get the airplane back on the boat safely but i was going to have to do it without the ability to either talk to the ship to tell them that i was coming home nor the ability to have the to hear the lsos or talk to the lsos and talk about the condition of the aircraft well as it turned out when they took one look at the airplane when it flew up the left side flight deck level remember if you needed to land immediately and you were uh nordo you had no communications you flew up the left side of the ship gear down flats down hook down and you move the throttles back and forth well i was i hope they got the message because it was going to be an off-cycle recovery i had no idea that they could just look at the airplane and see the radar missing and have a pretty good idea these guys wanted to land immediately so i started a downwind turn and as i look back over my left shoulder which wasn't easy to do with my right shoulder was swelling against the coast fitting they had already moved the yellow gear out of the uh landing area so i knew that um that they were at least thinking about giving me the opportunity to land bill cross the captain of the ship was giving me up thinking about letting me land the aircraft the ship was headed downwind and as you recall it takes 10 minutes generally for the ship to turn into the wind he immediately started to turn and i had 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes i did two practice approaches and there were straight ends and they were just there were case three approaches like you and i flown you know hundreds of times i turned down when you know i had uh i still had range on my attack end and i turned in you know at three miles like we'd always do i lined up i flew an approach down to 200 feet i looked for the wave off lights i got the wave off lights i cobbed the power climbed back up to 1200 feet you know and came back around for another pass what i found is that i thought i could land the aircraft of course i couldn't see the landing area out of the front of the aircraft but using a combination of the instrument landing system the automatic carrier landing system needles and the guys in air ops chuck bucher ran air ops as you recall he was a real heads up rio and although it was daytime he turned those systems on you know which are generally used for night and that was a great help to me to line myself up when i you know and i couldn't see the ship at a distance and then as i get in close i found that i could close my right eye and hang out the left side of the airplane into the bri in the breeze and i thought i could fly the ball that way and get the aircraft on deck safely so i came around for that third pass and as i rolled out that there was no yellow gear in the wires and as i rolled wings level that centered the stick the lens came on so i knew they were going to give us a shot the brc the base recovery course was three two two and uh bill cross had taught his officer the deck to vary the the speed of the screws on the left and right side of the ship to dampen the dutch roll in a nimitz-class boat and that that aircraft carrier did not veer off of uh three to two degrees you know more than a tenth of a degree all the way down and all i did at that point was you know with my new modified procedures flying the aircraft as i flew through the the airplane all the way down just like we've been trained to do until i was sure that i was over the deck and at that point you remember the term spidey in the deck you know what you're not supposed to do at that point i spotted the deck but ended up trapping relatively on speed but on glide slope and catching the three wire spazz and i watched reb and grundy come aboard from a thousand feet overhead the ship in low holding and from that vantage point i don't want to say it look like a normal pass but it didn't look that hairy those guys were in the landing area for a little while as they hooked up a tractor and pulled him out sidelined him and finally we were able to come out of low holding on the airbus said okay everybody else charlie spaz and i come into the break go through our landing checks hook down wheels down flaps down dlc engaged harness locked spanish supplies a beautiful pass we roll out after catching the wire we look over and we saw this and we both went oh my god how did reb land this airplane amazing airmanship and professionalism by rep you could hear his thought pattern in his relating of the incident he's a very calm guy very matter of fact very analytical test pilot which helped him a lot also what you heard him tee up there was a lot of coordination so what he didn't say in great detail was grundy he says he slumped over but grundy was actually trying to stay out of the wind blast and hunkering down so he could communicate his intercom and radio was working so he was talking to various agencies but only when they were within three miles from the ship he couldn't communicate for some reason when they were outside of three miles from the ship reb mentioned captain cross tomcat guy later admiral cross who was the battle group commander during my department head tour aboard america um fantastic tomcat pilot also a test pilot school graduate so he met he mentioned how he had his officers the deck vary the screw so the ike wouldn't dutch roll and would really keep a nice brc the air ops officer turning on the needles great heads up so fantastic crew coordination fantastic coordination with the agencies on the ship led to a great outcome so the other thing you don't see is and i was able to watch this once i got aboard when they replayed the plot presentation so what you see is reb is on and on because he's flying needles like he mentioned once he started spotting the deck the airplane comes pretty dramatically to the left so in this picture ways over the wires you can see he's lined up pretty far left but again miraculous approach post mortem what they discovered in terms of why the radome came unhinged was the latching mechanism so basically it's a handle that translates like this and lines up with the cut out under the radome and you push it flush and when you close it it pushes these two feet one in the fuselage one in the radome it wasn't closing and so the maintainers forced it shut and in the process they broke it to the degree that under a lot of g it came unhinged reb and grundy received distinguished flying crosses for their performance highly deserved and reb went on to be a nasa astronaut who flew one shuttle mission an eight-day mission to dock with mirror so that'll do it for this episode before i go let me mention a couple of things bio sent me his latest effort tomcat rio i'm very much enjoying this book a lot of detail that bio goes into so if you read top gun days this is sort of the second half of bio's career including his time as ceo of vf24 so check it out speaking of books punk's war is still on sale and it will be for the entire month of may as long as the inventory holds out so i just heard from the press this morning they said they're down to about 60 some books because of the way you guys have been buying it so thanks for that but if you haven't got your copy yet at the deep discount of 90 percent get it before too long do not wait because once they're out they'll do a reprinting but it's going to take a few weeks and that may extend beyond the month of may and then it'll go back to the regular price of 19.99 so get your copy today also i need your help getting this channel to the next level so please become a patron at my patreon page patreon.com wardcarroll there are benefits of being a patron the mooch newsletter the mooch report special podcasts we'll do zoom town halls very intimate with just the patrons and other things but more than anything else your support will ensure that we're able to bring more episodes and the highest quality production values so for those who've already become patrons thank you very much and for everybody else i would very much appreciate it if you would become a patron again it's patreon.com wardcarroll all right that'll do it for this episode as always please subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell and give me a like likes matter a lot in terms of visibility of each episode comments the comments are awesome you guys are fantastic i am loving this community it really does my heart good to hear from each and every one of you and as you've seen i try to answer everyone and share the episodes on the other social channels that you are part of i look forward to talking to you again soon

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 318,679

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, DCS, DCS World, aircraft carrier, nuclear powered aircraft carrier, USS Eisenhower, VF-143, Pukin' Dogs, VF-142, Ghostriders, LCDR Joe Reb Edwards, NASA, space shuttle, test pilot, aircraft mishap, fighter pilot, U.S. Navy, arrested landing, airborne emergency, aviation safety

Id: upvIDEzzV_4

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021