Navy Pilot Ejects After Jet Runs Off Runway Near San Diego

It's really true that fewer planes are crashing now. Looking at the mishap stats and accounting for flight hours (look at the mishap rates per 100,000 flying hours), planes really are crashing at a lower rate.

For the AF jets that I work now, they were falling out of the sky in early 1980s. The 1990s still had some really bad spikes. In the early 2000s, I was going out to crash sites pretty often as a technical assistant to Safety Investigation Boards. Now I do about one per year. The Class A's have dropped to nearly nothing, most of what I do now is assist Class B and Class C mishaps, which typically involves looking at pictures e-mailed to me, analyzing parts/assemblies that they send me, and giving my $0.02 on what the cause appears to be.

I worked in AC&R so I had several places to go cool down. V.A.S.T. and several other places were my biggest headache on temps. Yes they were the priority them and the IC equipment rooms. We even kept two guys T.A.D. full time to OE division in the Operations Dept. We could isolate the loops to three I think forward, mid, and aft, loops but used a one loop configuration for simplicity and to get help from areas where heat load was lower.

The Kitty Hawks were built with 6-200 Ton York Chillers. They were the ones that had the big speed increaser between the motor and compressor. As time and Electronics upgrades went on 150 Ton units got added we had three of them and then got a 300 Ton unit in 1980 that they put below the machine shop at mid ship.

The Chillers used water cooled condensers meaning sea water. We could cross connect into fire main if our pump for that A/C went down or to get a little extra boost. The older R-11 units liked seawater injection temps below the upper 70's. Above that the head pressure climbed and they starting surging so you had to back off on them which lowered their cooling capacity. That's why the PG causes issues. High sea water injection temps.

We had thermometers mounted in the CW loop lines in the shop. The shop was #2 A/C right below fwd Mess Deck. We could watch the thermostats and could pretty much tell when a unit shut down and by the temperatures which one it likely was. By the thermometer on the sea water line in the shop we could tell when we were in the channel coming in or going out and when we hit open sea. Huge difference in temps.

The extra 300 Ton unit made a huge difference. I was down to single digits left before getting out when we came out of the 1979-80 overhaul for our first shakedown. We got out of the river and into the open sea then went to GQ. I sat in the shop and watched the loop temps drop like a rock. It was so fast and big that I figured someone in the Repair Parties was closing our valves on the loop as we had almost an entire new crew. I went up on the second deck for a look see and the Aux Officer saw me. He wasn't aware what was happening & asked me what was going on? I said somebodies messing with the loop. Evidently setting Zebra on the hatches made it happen.

I don't know how she faired in 1981 IO deployment I got out in Oct 80 before the yards released the ship.

BTW the best duct cleaning tool of a carrier was a F-14. Just send one on a fly-by at flight deck level at full speed and it will clean them out. LOL. We had a dependents cruise and they put on an airshow. Included was a full speed flyby a few hundred yards off to port side. We had to clean all the air filters afterward LOL.

One funny incident happened that got a lot of unwanted and unintended attention. We had a bad phantom problem of suddenly loosing several hundred gallons of Chill Water with no explanation. It's a closed system and shouldn't have tap offs for any other use. So out MM1 comes up with an idea. We got several cans of sea marker and put it into the loop. We had ran the idea by CHENG and he OK'd it. We figured we'd get a call from possibly the cooks saying green water was coming out of a faucet. Instead we got a call to report to the Pier as we were in the yards in 78 I think. The shipyard CO wanted to see us. We went down and green water was pouring from most of the discharges LOL. They had installed the CHT sewage system also so tracking it down ended up being impossible.

I spent in my spare time weeks looking at the pipe charts and tracing out pipes. It got resolved in the overhaul. Those charts were also the likely source of the America was supposed to be a nuke rumor that's gone around for years. A few of the charts had CVN 66 with a line through it and CVA 66 added. I assume a typo happened in printing was most probable reason. She was never intended to be a nuke and McNamara was not in office during the award and keel laying process.

I'm guessing a considerable number of coils had leaks and got replaced in the 79-80 overhaul. But the phantom for no reason sudden loss of chill water we never figured out the cause. It happened frequent enough to not be some fluke. When it happened our expansion tank went dry and put air in the loop which was another royal PITA to deal with.

For the AF jets that I work now, they were falling out of the sky in early 1980s. The 1990s still had some really bad spikes. In the early 2000s, I was going out to crash sites pretty often as a technical assistant to Safety Investigation Boards. Now I do about one per year. The Class A's have dropped to nearly nothing, most of what I do now is assist Class B and Class C mishaps, which typically involves looking at pictures e-mailed to me, analyzing parts/assemblies that they send me, and giving my $0.02 on what the cause appears to be.

The early 1980's mishaps can likely be traced back to on hand available inventories for parts etc of the late 1970's. It takes time to get things back to where they should be when things are let go and put off to save money. I fear we will soon see that cycle happening again. We'd likely see more of it now if they weren't shutting down programs right and left.

Apparently both the B-36 and the B-47 needed the longer runways. That was before the B-52’s came around.

A few years ago I landed in a former SAC base. The runway was more than 2 miles long. Impressive.

I have no idea how long the runways are at Eglin but they sure are a lot of them.

I have landed there several times as there is a commercial terminal on base. The plane lands then taxis all over the place before getting to the terminal.