[Wright is right!]

"My cousin is married to a former REO on a F-14 Tomcat. On one takeoff, the pilot forgot to put down the flaps, and they went down before they went up after launch. Supposedly my cousin's husband was mad at the pilot for forgetting and it was an apparently a "close one"."

That's extremely difficult to do in today's Navy. There are officers on the deck whose job it is to spot anything amiss about the aircraft before it is cleared to go. Any aircraft on the cat with zero degrees flaps is going to get noticed, big time. Perhaps the incident in question involved not ENOUGH flaps, but I seriously doubt that they would launch an F-14 with no flaps deployed and someone didn't catch it. That's just one of the really obvious things.

Michael

[krb]

That's extremely difficult to do in today's Navy.

Well, these new rules and procedures that "today's navy" operates under had to come from somewhere. I know a comittee in DC didn't come up with them. I don't doubt the story for a second.

Life is a work in progress. Life in a free country is a study in progress.