I found a more complete version of the C.O.'s comment:
"For some unknown reason, a plane parked near the carrier’s island, midway up the 1,045-foot flight deck, experienced an “extreme wet start.” This malfunction, comparable to what happens when a cigarette lighter is ignited after having been filled too full, occurs about once a week on attack carriers, but almost never so severely as it did yesterday.
A thick tongue of flame lashed backward from the parked jet, igniting a missile on one of the dozen or so planes parked near the fantail, their engines turning over in readiness for a strike launching scheduled for 11 A.M.
The rocket “shot across the deck,” Captain Beling said, “and by a quirk of fate smashed into a fuel tank under a plane on the port side.”
Something is very wrong with that statement. The plane carrying the Zuni missile was about as far aft as it could be. They also confirmed that it fired due to an electrical malfunction they didn’t think possible. Safeties had been disconnected and electricity traveled the circuit in a way they didn’t think could happen IIRC.
NOTE: I hope people don’t take this personally, because I don’t mean it as such. I understand there are a lot of aspects of this people simply don’t have knowledge about. I do, I worked on the Flight Deck as a Plane Captain, Jet Mechanic, and Troubleshooter. I spent many hours on the fantail with planes parked all around the edges exactly as they were on July 29, 1967. I trained in a squadron where McCain was the Commanding Officer, and when I went to the fleet, I was assigned to the VA-46 Clansmen, the same squadron McCain was in when the fire occurred, so we all knew of the fire and were reminded of it constantly, often in good natured ribbing from other squadrons. So my perspective on this is meant to help educate people who may not have first hand experience with carrier flight operations. If I say something is “idiotic” or “stupid”, I am attacking the notion, not the person who may not know any better.
That said, If that NYT article was published on July 31st, my issue would be that it was only day or two after the event, and fresh stories differ widely between many people who see the same thing. Capt. John K. Beling wasn’t even on the bridge when this happened, I believe he was in his stateroom, so he likely was alerted by either an emergency call or the sound of General Quarters or some other alarms or announcements.
Not a good thing.
It isn’t hard to imagine that with all the confusion, on his asking for a situation report hearing someone say “There was a flame like a wet start near the island, and then everything went up”.
They had no idea at the time how the fire started, none. It was likely complete pandemonium, which in a situation like that, even in a well trained crew, would have been the mostly likely result.
Fire around planes and ordinance would certainly do that.
But the whole idea of a “wet start” is just idiotic. (Even if McCain’s plane had a “hot start” with his tailpipe pointing out towards the water, how could that ignite a missile on the other side of the flight deck. It can’t.)
The person who blames it on a wet start doesn’t even have an idea of what a wet start is. Wet starts are not uncommon. You trained for it, and it happened often enough that you simply abort the start. It isn’t rocket science and there is nothing scary or threatening about a wet start (except having it progress to a hot start). The Plane Captain sees the plume of aerosolized fuel coming out the tailpipe, the Pilot sees his EGT isn’t rising as is should, and the engine start is aborted. This is all standard.
It has been many years, but I recall that we would simply wait a few minutes, then have the Huffer blow air through the engine without any fuel being dumped in, and when the mist stopped coming out the back, we would attempt another start.
Every once in a great while (and I only saw it once while doing maintenance) it happens quite by accident where you have wet start and during the time interval where the Plane Captain and Pilot are both preparing to terminate the engine start, it catches, and a plume of flame shoots out the back. IIRC, the EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature) which on the engine I worked on was right behind the turbine, also spikes up and can be a real problem. That was dangerous on the plane I worked on, because the engine had problems with turbine blade cracks at high temperature. The engine (Rolls Royce-Detroit Diesel Allison TF-41) had a thermal governor on the engine to try to keep those cracks from developing by limiting the EGT electronically.
Point is, people want to pin this on McCain, and it simply was not his fault. It wasn’t.
I leave it up to his fellow POW’s to pass judgment on him for his conduct in Hanoi. They know what happened. He knows what happened, so if McCain was indeed an enemy collaborator as some think, his cellmates knew it, he knew it, and he knew that his cellmates knew it. If McCain wanted to rationalize or conceal his conduct, if he had any honor, it would torture him. If he had no honor, well, it wouldn’t have tortured him any more than Mary Jo Kopechne’s death tortured Ted Kennedy.
From a personal, patriotic, and political standpoint, I tend to think of him in much the same light as I do Ted Kennedy. And that is not a compliment.
But as other posters have opined, blaming anything that happened on the USS Forrestal in 1967 on John S. McCain III is blind hatred and/or ignorance. Doing so makes us look ignorant and allows us to be easily dismissed, it takes away from the real issues that Senator McCain had that he should be pilloried for, but worst of all, it trivializes the men who fought that fire and saved that ship, both living and dead.
We should focus on his conduct in the Senate and allow his cellmates and other veterans of that conflict to criticize him as they see fit. That is their prerogative, in my opinion.