Then, my Fleet Squadron I went to (VA-46) was flying the A-4 Skyhawks that ended up being the fuel that ignited the explosions that followed the Zuni missile streaking across the deck.
Remember, the Forrestal fire took place in 1967, and I was in that squadron less than nine years later. Be the equivalent today of a 2014 event to our present day. So there was still a lot of institutional memory of that fire in my squadron, and the lessons from it taught to the fleet were still being taught.
Glad to help.
It was complicated for me for many years on this forum.
As I said, I was in McCain's old squadron (VA-46) some years after he served in it, and when I entered the USN, McCain was my commanding officer for several months. I served as a plane captain trainee and was his plane captain as a trainee on several occasions. I grew up in a military family, and I held the torch for all of our POWs, including McCain, and gave him default respect for years due to all the factors above. I wore POW wrist bracelets (I had one for Denton that eventually corroded and fell off my wrist) and was at Andrews AFB to welcome them home when the first flight of them ended up there, so I have early roots in the POW awareness as a kid. When I joined the USN and was a trainee in his training squadron (VA-174 Hellrazors) some of the other guys didn't know much about him, but I sure did...and about his father and grandfather.
I refused to criticize him for years, and am grateful to a Freeper who gently discussed it with me via Freepmail (not in a thread) and helped me see that McCain was not worthy of any kind of respect or support from me as a conservative. He could have flamed me to pieces in many threads about this, but not only did he not do so...he was reasonable and persuasive without being caustic and abusive. v I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. I am stubborn about tradition, respect, chain of command, etc., and if that person had fired a few broadsides into me as others had, I would never have seen the light of day.
I still will not criticize his performance as a POW (even though I have reviewed and believe the evidence from other POW's that confirms some of those negative accounts) because...I just wasn't there. I don't know what it was to go through that. We all know everyone (nearly everyone) talks under torture as Admiral Stockdale said (one of my signature heroes in life) I have an extremely negative view of McCain as a politician and husband.
I am fine with the most vitriolic characterizations of his actions in those aspects, but condemn in the strongest terms attempts to pin the USS Forrestal disaster on him. It makes us look foolish, and waters down the things he should have been condemned for. And it disrespects the men who were injured and died that day in 1967 because it sacrifices the truth in an attempt to use the event as a political pawn to bring him down. I really dislike that. v The truth is, McCain did not start that fire no matter what anyone says, even if I myself would like to pin it on him. People say he was clowning around and doing intentional "hot starts" which caused the fire. Simply not true, not even close.
Here is the truth.
Planes were spotted for a launch back near the ramp. This is a common setup. You can see from the image below the relative positions of the planes, I highlighted where McCain's was, the Phantom that fired the Zuni, and the path across the flight deck.
As the planes were getting ready to launch, stray electricity on the MER/TER rack holding Zuni rockets on the wing pylon of an F-4 Phantom caused one to ignite.
It streaked across the flight deck, severed the arm at the shoulder of a sailor who was in its way, and it plowed into the drop tank of the A-4 next to McCain's A-4, passing through it and continued on into the ocean without exploding.
Fuel poured out of the punctured tank onto the flight deck and was ignited by flaming pieces of solid rocket propellant from the Zuni that had fragmented on impact, and the place became an instant conflagration. The
rest is history. The root of the problem was those safety pins I talked about in my account that were removed from the TER/MER racks before we launched. Those safety pins physically broke a circuit, so no electricity at all could be conducted to the ordinance mounted on them. But due to the high tempo of flight operations supporting shore combat in Vietnam, they found that they could decrease the time by removing those pins early on, before the plane started up. This shortcut seemed reasonable and safe, and was approved by leadership on the Forrestal.
NOTE: THIS REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING I FORGOT OR GOT WRONG IN MY ACCOUNT: we had to hook external electrical power up to the plane, and that was what we pulled out of the wells in the flight deck to plug into the side of the plane. That was hooked up before the pilot arrived. Once the plane was started, I believe one of the first things the pilot would do is flip a switch in the cockpit to switch from shipboard power to the plane's own electrical power system. It is part of this root cause.
The F-4 Phantom across the flight deck had the power cable in the plane and its TER/MER safety pin out of the rack.
When the Phantom started up and the pilot flipped the switch to transfer power to the plane, and there was a stray electrical current surge when he flipped that switch that entered the firing system of the TER/MER, and since the electrical switch had been opened by the removal of the safety pin, the current flowed right in and set off the missile, which ignited and fired.
The other root cause of this was the defective ordinance they had loaded on the planes. The Forrestal had been on station conducting heavy flight operations and was running low on ordinance. When an ammunition ship performed and underway replenishment to give them more bombs, the only ones they had left were old Korean War era iron bombs. They were aged and due to that age had more unstable explosives that became that even more unstable with age. Worse, the coating on the bombs, (even thinner coating than the modern bombs at the time) designed to insulate them if they were caught in a fire, had decayed as well, and its performance as an insulator was drastically impaired. The bombs were cracked, had material leaking out of them, and were covered with rust and dirt. The ordinance crews were afraid to even handle them and were concerned that a the shock of launching the plane might set one off. The Captain of the Forrestal was aware of this and attempted to send them back to the ammunition ship (USS Diamond Head), but was told there were no replacements, and it was those old bombs or nothing. So, wanting to fulfill his mission, he reluctantly agreed to accept them.
These old, uninsulated, thin skinned, cracked, leaking, rusting, and chemically unstable bombs were mounted under the wings of the A-4 Skyhawks. When the fire started, it is said that one or two of those bombs came off the racks (possibly inadvertently ejected by McCain) and they rolled around in the flames until they prematurely cooked off and killed dozens of men.
That is it in a nutshell.