A picture of its flight deck after some Hotshot “Wet Started” his A4 Skyhawk and set off a zuni missle on the plane behind him which launched and exploded causing all sorts of fuel to go everywhere and ignite as well as knocking off some stale dated 1935 1000 lb bombs on an A-4. LtCmndr. McCain was present during this piece of history.
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One of my high school classmates died in the explosion.
I was still in High School when this happened but it was fresh in the memory of AV School Trainers.
The pilot was probably not a trained firefighter, maybe just as well that he was out of the way rather than impeding the enlisted men who had to fight the fire.
After this incident they made some changes to the A4Skyhawk which prevented pilots from doing wet starts.
I suspect that during the fire fighting efforts all the circa 1935 1000 lb iron was pushed overboard to wait the judgement day.
Bad enough that MuckCain helped screw up the Forrestol. He transferred to the Enterprise and the same damm thing happened again——just after he left for the Oriskany. The Big E came into Pearl to get patched up and I still have a piece of steel left over from the repair. Everything Mcdoodle touched went bad-———semper fi