Posted on 05/23/2015 9:53:32 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
A military plane has gone off the runway at Naval Air Station North Island into the San Diego Bay, officials confirmed Friday.
A Navy pilot, flying in a T-45C aircraft, overshot the runway while landing during a training exercise at 2 p.m. (5 p.m. ET) a Navy spokesman said.
The pilot was able to eject from the aircraft before it ran into the water. According to Harbor Police, a civilian boater pulled the crew member out of the water.
After being evaluated at UC San Diego Medical Center, the pilot was released and is in stable condition, Navy officials said. When a pilot ejects from a plane, Lt. Reagan Lauritzen told NBC 7 that he or she must have more thorough medical evaluations than a standard checkup.
According to Naval Air Forces, the pilot was training to undergo aircraft carrier landing qualifications before the crash.
The T-45C plane, assigned to Training Squadron 9 in Mississippi, is a two-seat jet used specifically for Navy training. The $17 million aircraft is made by Boeing and BAE Systems, according to a Naval technology website.
The incident happened off the Coronado base's runway 29, near downtown San Diego. For hours, the aircraft sat floating in shallow water against a sea wall.
By Friday evening, crews stationed a crane on the shore and hooked lines underneath the submerged aircraft. They were able to hoist it onto land as night started to fall.
While most of the plane appears intact, the canopy did fly off.
The crash grabbed witness Sean Brady's attention when he heard a large boom.
"So we came around the corner and looked outside and I saw a parachute landing in the water," he said.
His first thoughts went to the pilot. "It was good to see the parachute, and you're just hoping he's OK," said Brady.
The Naval Air Forces said a safety investigation has been launched to find out why the pilot went off the runway.
In 2004, the base experienced a similar crash when an F-18 pilot was unable to stop the jet and rolled it past the airfield, into the bay. According to the U-T San Diego, the pilot was pulled from the water unhurt.
For one. His crash into Corpus Christi Bay was adjudged pilot error. He went on to be promoted, though his piloting abilities were questioned by those who were in a position to judge fairly.
Oldplayer
Then there was the fire aboard the carrier.....
LOL!
I'd like to see how this ends up but the Navy is bad about generating a publicly-releasable report even though they're supposed to.
By the way, the title of the book I referenced above really isn't right. A "high speed" ejection is an ejection >450 knots. An ejection during landing clearly isn't high speed. The book talks about all kinds of ejections that are not high-speed, including an A-7 ejection in 1969 that was done underwater! The pilot was headed for Davy Jones' locker and wasn't expecting to survive. Somebody was looking out for him that day.
I’ve investigated a good number of runway overruns by military jets. It’s downright maddening that their community has this weird taboo against adding power and going around. A significant number of them die because they don’t want to be made fun of back at squadron ops. It’s downright assinine and I’ve pissed them off when I’ve briefed it in Safety forums. Especially when I’ve shown up with an anti-skid data download.
And that was back in a day where fatal mishaps were so common that his was considered nothing. Today, stubbing your toe is a career-killer.
The F-18 is a lot more plane to stop than the T-45. I am trying to remember the F-18 mishap, and I think he may have also forgotten to turn the Anti-skid on. For shipboard ops anti-skid is turned off. No Anti-skid and carrierized tires (inflated to extremely high pressure) and a 7500’ runway starts feeling really short.
I guess if there is a difference, I was a multi-engine aviator, and so there is no stigma against the Go Around in fact I went around quite often in training and in reality. Happily the taxpayers were billed for the fuel, but then I have always been grateful vocally for the participation of taxpayers in my flying career.
Today I use the same technique driving. Instead of screwing everyone behind you in traffic, should you find yourself out of position for a turn, or a lane change or whatever, Go Around, it doesn’t take much time and you save yourself and others a lot of heartburn.
With the mishaps that I’ve investigated, they were fighters and jet trainers.
I agree with the Go Around mentality in your car. If you’re in the fast lane and see your exit coming up fast, don’t careen across 4 lanes of traffic to make the exit. People are terrible for that on the interstate. Go to the next exit, turn around, and hit it coming the other way. That’s your little penance for not paying attention, and it sure beats dying! I’d rather add the 4 minutes to the trip.
He had ANTI-SKID on and should've turned it off when he realized he had no braking. (That's his words.)
The book introduces pilots with the highest rank that they attained over their career (Rear Admiral Gilchrist didn't eject from his jet as an admiral.) So the highest rank that this guy attained was LT, which is a shame. Dude learned some good lessons and could've spread those lessons to the fleet in a way that a safety briefer can't. He wasn't out hot-dogging it, he wasn't breaking the rules for ego's sake. Raw deal, but that's life, I guess. I hope he's doing well these days.
Other than his plane being ordered spotted in the impact area of the rocket, McCain had nothing to do with the cause of the carrier fire or the outcome. That said I have no use for him due to his actions in elected office. The Forestall fire was a tragedy and shouldn’t be used to incorrectly smear McCain. Look at the spotting chart about half way down on the right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire
I don’t have any hornet time, but aircrew in general didn’t like the anti skid in the Tomcat. The hornet antiskid was supposed to be way better. I did have an antiskid failure in another aircraft coming out of depot. It failed to a no brake condition. I was able to deselect antiskid quickly, despite it being a new configuration. Fortunately, that was the solution. There but for the grace........
At the time this 2004 mishap, the anti-skid transducer was failing at a pretty significant rate.
Crashes were handled a lot different back then. The worst year for F-100 crashes was 1958, with 116 jets destroyed and 47 pilots killed.
I do remember in the late 70's we lost a lot of planes it seemed like. One issue I think was with A-6 {can't remember variant} dropping like a brick right after launch. I remember at least one F-14 FD crash where the landing gear hit the round down. It snapped and the pilot hit hard starboard engine and rode it off the angle before jettison. That one was seen by VIP's on the bridge. We lost a S-3 and crew that caught the wrong wire. The public may not believe it but even allowing for the reduction in planes and pilots fewer planes are crashing. My cousin was on the GW in the Gulf War and they didn't loose a plane.
Right after that I had an interesting exchange of emails with the engineers regarding what to do with antiskid with a blown tire. The flight manual didn’t address it at all. Looking at the way it worked we thought it might be good to turn it off. The engineers said we should leave it on. Four month later I got a series of frantic emails and calls advising us to turn the antiskid off with a blown tire. Fortunately, no blown tires during that timeframe.
Dude, I was on the GW (CVN-73) in the Gulf War! We didn’t lose any planes, but we lost a helicopter in the Persian Gulf. It lost engine power, crashed about 5 miles from the carrier, and the crew was all picked up OK. There’s a bit of irony that the copter was photographed a couple days before it crashed and has a prominent photo in the cruise book.
We were on alert in 1979 for Iran. We were lucky and JFK got the short straw and had to make the trip down and around to the PG. Following the Six Day War no carriers used the Suez until 1981. Carriers back then going to the PG wasn't ideal because the air conditioning plants {chillers} couldn't keep up with the heat load. That in turn messed up the electronics. They had to eventually upgrade the east coast carriers cooling capacity to handle it. We got our upgrade in 1980.
One trick I learned from the old guys is to put on your jacket for awhile when you come back to berthing from the engine room. Guys look at you like you're nuts because you're putting on your jacket in a space that's 90 degrees. But that temperature is 40-45 F cooler than the engineroom, that's why so many guys were getting sick. It's a temperature shock to your body and you need to do something to slow that down. Doing that really worked for me. (Maybe it was psychological, it works if you think it works.)
It's also amazing that you get used to those kind of temperatures. We were in the gulf for 68 days straight, no port visits, which sucked (this is where the submarine guys pipe up to call me a whiner, I opened myself up, fire away). When we went back through the Suez, it was winter in the eastern med (early November). The temperature in berthing was a perfect 72 F and I was freezing my butt off! I was sleeping in sweatpants & sweatshirt and had to go dig out my blanket again. Freakin' weird.
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