Posted on 06/28/2014 4:09:54 PM PDT by mandaladon
This pilot brings a whole new meaning to “stick the landing.”
Just after taking off from the carrier in early June, U.S. Marine Corps Capt. William Mahoney, attached to Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, had to get creative with an emergency landing. “It was a normal flight day, we were going out to re-punch currency for landing on the ship in the evening,” Mahoney said in a video posted on YouTube. But as soon as he left the deck, the jet indicated a problem.
“As I was climbing away from the deck and put the gear up and realized that I had a gear malfunction, so I immediately pulled the power back and slowed the aircraft down so I wouldn’t overspeed the landing gear,” he said.
Mahoney didn’t know whether his gear was up or down. He had to rely on his shipmates to tell him what was happening, and to figure out the solution. Eventually, they brought out a make-shift stool.
“Eventually, Major Murphy came over the radio and told me that the ship had this amazing invention, basically a stool, that was built specifically for this reason” he said.
But Mahoney never even saw the stool before he managed to land the roughly $35 million jet right on point. “That pilot did a fantastic job flying the jet under an incredible amount of pressure, and frankly other pilots have died in similar situations,” retired Marine Corps. Lt. Col. Art Nalls, who has flown the AV-8 A and B variants for more than 20 years, told TheBlaze.
(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
Despite some incredible things I saw Harriers do back in the day, we always knew landing gear was a problem with this aircraft. Several Marine pilots were killed due to this. I saw this firsthand.
As a Aviation Boatswain Mate Handle this is exactly what we trained for all the time granted that this is a assault ship (harrier carrier) we did have the stool on both GW and Indy, it is indeed an amazing device as we were rated to carry harriers.
Mahoney has cajones of titanium!
WOW!
Awesome landing. I was a Huey mechanic in Alaska. Had a helicopter rip off part of a skid doing running landings. We pulled the whole skid tube assembly off of one helicopter and pulled off the wrecked assembly off of the helicopter while it was hovering. After we took the assembly off, the pilot did a quick fly off to break tension, seeing it fly off with no landing gear was bizarre, he came back and we put the other skid assembly on at a hover, and then he landed it. The 20 minute fuel light came on before we got the landing gear on. We refueled on the pad, we put in 190 gallons in a 208 gallon tank. We got everything done in less than an hour. The pilot took us all out for dinner and beer after work.
Great story...thanks for sharing
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