This is going to be a long one my friends. Get your drinks, go use the facilities and then buckle up.

Now several things in this story are going to require multi-paragragh explainations before we get to the main jist. The first being:

Why I Hated F-8 Crusaders

Now the F-8 was a fine bird in its day. But at the time I was in, it was at the end of its operational career. Relegated to photo recon work. My first cruise was it's last.

My main problem with the F-8 isn't obvious to people who don't work on flight decks. That was the aircraft's "stance" as it sat on the runway/flightdeck. The similarly designed A-7 had some of the same issues with me, but to a lesser extent as its engine wasn't as powerful. The problem with the stance was that the aircraft sat nose up/exhaust low compared to other aircraft who sit so their intakes and exhausts fairly horizontal to the deck.

This meant that the exhaust blowing on you from one would hit you at the knees and not the chest and shoulders like the exhaust from other aircraft. This is a substantial blast of wind, some 80 to 100+ miles an hour and several hundred degrees F. We flightdeck denizens called the F-8s "Weinie Roasters" from the fact that going commando on the flightdeck, while nessesary in the tropics to keep important anatomical features from rotting off, had unseen consequences not obvious to the casual observer. Like hot jet exhaust heating your zipper, or even worse, just blowing through your zipper like wind through a screen door. Almost all other aircraft's exhausts hit you higher up the body and left your privates out of it. You only have to get your who-haws scorched a dozen or so times before you REALLY start to dislike the thing that is doing it..

The OTHER bad thing about the low exhaust plume was the much greater likelyhood of your feet getting swept out from under you. That's always bad on a flightdeck as you now are basically ballistic and can end up in an intake and having all your insides sucked out your various openings, or going over the side, which is an eight story fall into the ocean. That's a "scare" I mentioned in the Airforce thread.

In a given day at sea you will have 5 to 7 launch and recovery cycles and if you worked Tomcats, which are always parked on the back of the flightdeck for weight reasons, you will get blown-on hard at least three or four times in any one launch cycle. Not nessesarly blown down, but sometimes you have to grab a hold of a tie-down chain or a pad eye. And if its real bad, like when a pilot messes up and misreads a cue and has to stop halfway through a turn you try to get into a wheelwell, which has its own perils. Hence my amazement at the Airforce's attitude to people getting blown down.

What's lost in the videos is the heat and the smell, plus the "at an ACDC concert" level of visceral vibration. A-6 Intruders are so goddam loud they are painful even with two levels of hearing protection, earplugs plus the mouse ears built into the helmit, which are good by themselves in most cases. Especially if one is "loitering" overhead using deflected thrust. They don't stop like vstol aircraft, just go real slow. If they pass close overhead ~500 to 1000 feet up doing that, the vibration is painful clear through to your shoulders and makes you want to scream bad words at them.

And as a teen I used to think diesel bus exhaust was evil and horrid smelling. What it wasn't was oven hot and blasting you in the face at high speed. AND you had to troubleshoot computer equipment while this crap was blowing on you. Troubleshoot it correctly, I might add. Computers that spend all day flying around doing high gee turns and then crash landing on deck at 120 knots every landing. If you couldn't perform they didn't want you on the flightdeck troubleshooting. You can't waffle it along.

Now dispite the chaos of a flightdeck in operations, most everybody has a job as it's not a place to loiter. Some suckier than others, by a huge margin. I had a cushy job relative to everybody else. One of the most daring jobs was "Final Checker". The Final Checker is the last man in the chain of people who makes sure all the pins are pulled and the flags removed. All the doors shut and panels secured. This is while the aircraft is crouched on the catapult, engines at full, blasting in the Jet Blast Deflector, or JBD for short. That's a broad section of flightdeck that raises behind the catapult to deflect the exhaust upwards. It's still real nasty being behind them. He's the guy you see running like hell with his thumb in the air moments before they launch. And even they felt sorry for:

And The Award For The Worst Job On The Flightdeck Goes To...

The men who attached the rear connections of the "bridle" to the F-8 prior to it being launched. A bridle in this case is a special harness designed to spread the stresses of launch across more of the airframe and provided more attachment points for the catapult besides just the nosewheel. The aircraft's backside is too long to clear the flightdeck otherwise. Analogous to when a model glider hobbiest uses two hands, front and back, to launch his aircraft over a cliff.

Allow me to discribe what this involves.

You are at the catapults. All hot and loud and noisy and bad smelling. The aircraft you are responsible for is taxiing up to launch, so you take a great big tow hook looking thing in each hand attached to an elaborate gizmo of straps and harnesses. Now, while trying to not get too close to the front intake at the nose, which will suck you in and kill you, you have to lay down on your back and let the aircraft taxi over you. You are flat on your back on a hot flightdeck with a big hook in each hand, arms outstretched and the bottom of the aircraft inchs away from your nose. You then elbow back far enough to attach said hooks in there proper spots.

This is a big thundering aircraft engine covering you while you are very vulnerable and oh so mortal. Often with a second aircraft beside you on the other catapult doing its own launch sequence. (There are four catapults on the flightdeck. Two in the front, called the "bow cats" and two in the middle, called the "waist cats")

There is potential here for mishap.

Allow me to relate how this could go badly.

The day started normally enough as such days go. I was discussing a troubleshooting issue with some of my petty officers, [Translation: two E-5s were telling my E-3 butt to get below to the hanger bay and rob two components, one weighing 30 pounds and the other 45 pounds from the hanger queen and run them back up to the flightdeck, NOW!]

When I heard the Funny Noise.

When you work the flightdeck you get sensitive to the normal vibration of things, loud as they are. Sort of like "meta-hearing". When there is discord in the thrum of the flightdeck, trouble soon follows. As did here. For clarity this will include information I didn't have at the time. Not so much an eyewitness account as it is a narration.

The bridle rigger's bad day actually started the night before. His fellow squadron mates had done repairs to the throttle mechanism of the aircraft the previous night and in thier haste to close up and go back to the shop they neglected to account for a simple allen wrench. This is such a basic failure as to be near unforgivable. Your tool box is inventoried four times minimum each job. When you accept the tool box to do the job, when you arrive at the aircraft, when you leave the aircraft and when you get back to the shop. Yet this still happens.

This time the pilot taxied up to the catapult shuttle but stopped about a foot and a half short. The bridle man, dutifully laying down under this beast, indicated he couldn't reach the hook ups. The pilot was signaled to taxi forward a smidgeon, which he did, and that's when things went south.

The errant allen wrench fell into the inner workings of the throttle and jammed it open. As the pilot tried to fiddle with it the throttle opened wider and wider until he was locked in at full afterburner. Since he was lined up properly, just short a bit, he made contact with the shuttle and the nose wheel locked in place. The aircraft also rocked hard forward and back, and "squatted" on the bridle man, breaking his collarbone and several ribs.

More importantly for the bridle man, the aircraft also pushed forward several more feet. He was now in the full downward blasting exhaust. Wiki says this is the exhaust of an engine that puts out 18,000 pounds of thrust or 80.1 kilonewtons, whatever the heck that means. Not something that you should put your face into from inchs away. Though you never stay there for very long.

I've seen other people do near the same thing with other aircraft and noone is ever happy afterwards. It's a lot like getting hit by a car when you walk right behind a jet engine you thought wasn't running. You do that two, maybe three times and you get tired of it real fast. You learn to look for wavey lines in the air. I stopped several newbies and J.O.'s from doing that. Even if you didn't like someone you don't want that to happen to them.

What I Saw

I was troubleshooting like I discribed earlier when I heard the Funny Noise. I was at an aircraft parked on the back of the flightdeck, I was facing port, which would put forward to my right. If you looked down on the scene from above I was at the second aircraft parked from the left.

This vantage let me look straight up the flightdeck and between both JBD's and I could see the F-8 in full afterburner twisting its landing gear in the shuttle and turning sideways on the catapult so that its exhaust was now playing over the inboard catapult and one of my Tomcats, causing its port engine to flame out. This had my full attention as I am directly downwind and down range of anything going boom.

That's when I noticed the Incredible Flying Man.

I had actually seen him moments earlier, but then my mind interperted the image as a wisp of smoke. When the "wisp of smoke" slowed at the apex of his flight a saw it to be a man. I was aghast at how high he was, without a net and nothing but an unforgiving steel flightdeck to land on. He cleared the verticle stabilzers of the adjacent Tomcat by at least half again. But as he came down, he came down in the exhaust plume of the Crusader, now being baffled by the Tomcat so that his vertical descent was translated horizontally before he piledrived into the steel deck, thereby avoiding further injury.

He slid to a stop on his back and did the fastest scuttle crab walk I've ever seen. He came to rest feet to the forward, on his back and just lifted up and scuttled sideways off the flight deck. To the starboard. He didn't seem to notice the broken bones. The E-2 Hawkeye people were the first to get to him.

This was his last day on the flightdeck. He never wanted to come back up to the roof after that. The August Body of Peers had no problem with this.

Other aspects of this near tragedy I didn't learn til later that evening. One of my friends is a Final Checker who was getting into his locker when I noticed the "Close Encounters" tan AKA the nuclear suntan you get from getting singed on one side. He was standing on the starboard side of the aircraft that was next to the malfunctioning F-8. Out of reflex he grabbed the nose wheel door and the plume swept his feet up so he was flapping in the breeze. When he looked between his feet all he could see was the still running starboard engine.

If he let go he would be injested. But where he was at was just too hot, so he couldn't hold on. He told me that he started to cry when he realized he couldn't hold on anymore. Just as he let go the F-8 pilot cut the fuel to the engine and killed it that way. The Final Checker just dropped flat to the deck. This was also a "cartoon" ending to a near tragedy. Sometimes the Foolkiller is just looking the wrong way when opportunity comes.

There was trouble in the F-8 community that night. People got in trouble. Ranks were adjusted to better reflect the needs of the Navy.

The End.

The other stories will come later. My arms are sore from shoveling gravel Saturday.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah