Posted on 04/03/2021 8:33:33 AM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
When Marine Corps Capt. William Mahoney took off for a routine training flight on June 7, 2014, he was probably just expecting to fly a few hundred miles and use some missiles to shoot down alien spacecraft (…because we get our entire understanding of Marine Corps aviation from Independence Day).
But what Mahoney didn’t know was that his AV-8 Harrier had a landing gear problem that wouldn’t become apparent until the jet alerted him to it in the air.
VIDEO
He flew past the control tower on the USS Bataan and asked the people there to take a look. They let him know that his front landing gear wasn’t down.
For those who aren’t aware, the front landing gear is very important on all aircraft. Jump jets are less susceptible to problems from landing without gear than other aircraft are, but it’s still a very dangerous gamble.
Luckily, the other pilots on the Bataan had a bold idea.
Wait, “crazy” isn’t spelled B-O-L-D.
The crew ran a very nice, custom stool out to the deck and chained it down. Mahoney then flew his jet very slowly toward the stool and bounced the nose of it.
Yeah, he bounces the nose of his multi-million dollar jet on a what is basically a well-dressed stool.
But it worked. Mahoney took a second to breathe and remember how to turn his jet off, and then climbed out to the general praise of his shipmates. You can see the whole landing and an interview with Mahoney in the video at the top.
There’s a Marine down the street, one of a few living ex-Harrier pilots. He said the damn thing had him scared sh!tless on every flight.
My roommate at embassy guard school was a Harrier ejection seat technician at Cherry Point. They called the Harriers “Dead Bugs” because when hovering, if one of the two Rolls-Royce engines malfunctions, the plane flips over like a dead bug.
That bounce was a bit scary with a near full load of fuel. Another design might be a “Stool” which telescopes up about 15 or 20 feet and lowers hydraulically/automatically as it senses the weight of the aircraft. Or even a series of simple springs which would compress as the aircraft lowers onto the deck.
1)If the aircraft has enough fuel we will send it to the closet(allied) airfield possible. 2)If the pilot is within reach of a tanker bridge they would go up to the tanker top off and head to an airfield with their Wingmen. 3) If we are in blue water ops, we would use the stools with the front wheel and nose down on the deck end and almost no fuel in the tanks (When I was in were trained for both. 4)Ditch the aircraft in the drink, but that requires an ejection and allot pilots hate that because it could limit their career options, ticks off the CO of the Airwing and Ship as the NAVY tends to send out a bunch of angry Officers to ask a bunch of stupid questions and a whole of paper work as well.
The Harrier is a single engine aircraft with 4 nozzles that rotate. In earlier Harriers the nozzles individual controlled by the pilot which resulted in many dead bug incidents. This resulted in the AV-8B+ Model were a computer helped the pilot control the input of the nozzles and accident rates dropped.
Pretty cool.
I'm sorry, when I read that, I immediately thought of:
“...even a series of simple springs which would compress as the aircraft lowers onto the deck.”
Kind of like the landing gear system does, but attached to the deck rather than the aircraft.
Yep!
1)If the aircraft has enough fuel we will send it to the closet(allied) airfield possible. 2)If the pilot is within reach of a tanker bridge they would go up to the tanker top off and head to an airfield with their Wingmen. 3) If we are in blue water ops, we would use the stools with the front wheel and nose down on the deck end and almost no fuel in the tanks (When I was in were trained for both. 4)Ditch the aircraft in the drink, but that requires an ejection and allot pilots hate that because it could limit their career options, ticks off the CO of the Airwing and Ship as the NAVY tends to send out a bunch of angry Officers to ask a bunch of stupid questions and a whole of paper work as well.
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