Posted on 10/30/2007 2:08:35 PM PDT by RDTF
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - The Navy said a small, inert training bomb fell Tuesday from an F/A-18C Hornet fighter jet that was heading to Oceana Naval Air Station. No one was hurt.
The Navy said in a statement that the bomb hit a wall adjacent to a warehouse in the resort city of Virginia Beach. Minimal damage was reported.
The aircraft was returning to Oceana following a training mission at the Navy's bombing range in Dare County, N.C., when it dropped the bomb. The jet landed safely at Oceana.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at newsobserver.com ...
ping
Maybe we could accidentally drop a practice MOAB on Tehran? Not an inert one, though.
If that was one of the little blue Mk-? practice bombs with the smoke cartridge, it would cause some serious damage to anything it hit. Big chunk of iron makes up the nose.
It hit a wall with minimal damage unless you count the hole through the cinderblocks.
I heard Buzz Aldrin on C2CAM about a year ago. He was asked about the broken circuit breaker when on the Moon...and he brought up that when flying combat aircraft over the US, you flip the breakers on the gun and other ordnance, just in case, until you get to the target range.
"A 10-pound, inert practice bomb fell from an F/A-18C Hornet fighter jet and hit a wall outside a warehouse in this resort city as the aircraft was approaching Oceana Naval Air Station on Tuesday"
"The bomb was a BDU-48, which carries an explosive charge that emits smoke upon impact"
I'd rather not get my car or noggin whacked by 10 lbs of iron flying at me at speed! Ouch..........
Ping
Well, that would explain the loud thud I heard yesterday.
Seeing what my ten pound sledge hammer can do to cinderblock, I can imagine the same weight moving ten times faster leaving a cloud of cinderblock dust. Anybody in the vicinity could get significant damage to his hide from flying fragments. Somebody is in trouble, either the pilot or the ground crew unless the release mechanism is shown to be faulty.
Bush’s fault.
I'm a navy ordnanceman and my money says that everything worked perfectly as advertised. I'd bet my next paycheck it was pilot error.
"The Mk 76 Mod 5 is a 25-pound, solid, metal-cast, practice bomb. Its body is teardrop shaped and centrally bored to permit the insertion of a practice bomb signal cartridge."
It is a low drag design, the BDU-48 is a lighter high drag design. The old Mk-76 would make a decent kinetic kill weapon if flying fast enough when dropped..................
Returning to base? I wonder if he tried to release it during the exercise? We brought an A-6 aboard carrying a couple of 250's he couldn't get rid of.
Of course they released when he caught the wire. They didn't arm before they hit the water.
Thank God for angle decks!
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I looked in my back yard and there are 7 bamboos down, but no bomb, inert or ert.
You’re most probably right: pilot probably made an error. Nevertheless, it’s possible it was some type of mechanical failure.
In any case, the reason we use dummy bombs during non-combat missions is that errors can and occasionally do occur, and it is my opinion that this is a simple situation that points out why we bother to expend time and money on training and test equipment rather than just go dumb and happy with little training and no special training ordinance.
I’d bet the same way, but see my #16.
at least it wasn’t the B-52 carrying nuclear armed ALCM’s :)
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