I think you might be mixing two events. The Stark was hit with an Exocet in 1987. The Cole was attacked by a terrorist bomb while docked in 2000.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Yeah, you're right. I got the name of the ship wrong.

Both the USS Stark and the USS Cole are examples where the crew used their skills in desperate times to save their ships. Excrement happens and it often happens very quickly. That's where the training kicks in. When my sons joined the military (one Army, one Navy), I told them to train as if they were going to war tomorrow because you never know when something is going to break out. When it does, you likely won't have time to get ready for it. The same applies double for sailors training to handle emergencies at sea.

Post number 2000 for me. Damn, I need to get a life or something.

Guys, I was off-lined by router issues. We often have LAN parties at my place and somebody tweaked a setting.

Tailhook, I'm sorry.
Jamestox and Mfumbesi are correct. This thread is for "narrow escapes" and for entertaining people interested in the stories. I do not want this thread locked as I have a lot more stories to tell.


If you start your own thread I promise I will reply. But I won't address your issues anymore here in this thread.

Sorry I probably won't post a long war story tonight guys.

Yesterday I put in a big flower bed for my mother. Planted 62 petunias of mixed colors. 10 more to go. Had to prepare the ground as I went. Stiff as a board today. I got a real good deal on them, as I was a nurseryman for

Double row properly spaced, with gaps for the various centerpiece plants like the climbing jasmine and a crimson rosetree I salvaged and am in the process of retraining.

Tomorrow I'm going to make a lobelia cascade with an old metal bookcase and a couple of 30 inch planterboxs

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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

Knew this was out there, but ran across it again today: probably the ultimate in Luckiest Unlucky Man on the Flight Deck, a catapult tech that was "eaten" by an A-6 ...and lived to tell about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxl9pfj2mU

No sea story in my inventory could ever top this one.

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"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose

I've heard about that. Didn't his helmet get ripped off his head, going through the turbine first (and stopping it) before his body hit it?

And BigDon, I love your stories. I've heard a few stories from my dad (Navigator on the A-6, stationed on the Kitty Hawk), but not the "juicy" ones.

I read somewhere that his cranial and floatcoat FODed the engine, but that it took several seconds before the pilot cut fuel to the engine, shutting it down. In the meantime, the tech was jammed between the duct wall and the (nonrotating) "bullet" fairing on the front of the engine. Fortunately for the tech, the engine/duct design for the A-6 was a LOT different from the one in the A-7E, which used a TF-41 turbofan, so the first thing you came to on that engine was a set of rotating blades (think the visible part of your modern jetliner engines) and there were ZERO projections in the intake duct, just nice, slick fiberglass.

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"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose

Bad choice of words on my part. The barrel was probably around 20 to 24 inches in length, while the gun was between about 36 inches and perhaps as long as 40 inches.

I didn't measure it!

Yes, it was designed for .22 long rifle cartridges, which is what we were shooting.

The final hole might have been slightly larger than the first hole.

Not by much!

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Hi guys,

have to wait for a package today so I thought I'd drop a line.

And to thank Mr. Der Konig for the kind words I thought I'd tell tale of one AT1 Scheppler. My first cruise was his last cruise, as he had a wife and children he wanted to keep. 12 years was plenty long enough he reckoned.

He started out in a A-6 outfit during the Viet Nam War. Told about what a nasty piece of work the SAM-6 was to fly against.

One had detonated above and to the right of one of his birds and made hamberger out of the BN but the pilot was able to bring the bird back to the ship. Schepp was glad he wasn't an AME then. Them and the plane captains were tasked with the preliminary clean up after medical removed the big pieces.

The other story he told was when one of his birds took a SAM-6 in the wing fold and it didn't detonate. Here you have a quandary. Go for the intelligence coup and try to bring the missile back at risk to your own life or get to a safe point and bail out before the missile un*bleeps* itself and remembers it's supposed to go boom.

They did both.

They dumped the BN over a safe place and then the pilot flew the bird, missile and all, back to the ship and made the trap. That was the scarey part. The whole flightdeck was cleared and the bird and missile were safely taken in.

"Cleared" is a relative term though. Just like in my day, when the decks were cleared for different emergency landings, there was always peepers from the deck edge catwalks, like myself. I know, it's a Darwin filter. But I've seen some stuff!

I'll post this one now and probably one or two more today/tonight. Right now though, I have to go do my dishes, as I can't get anyone else to do them and I don't like stink in my kitchen.

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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

Now I want to tell of a wonderful human I knew named Chuck Fritz. (God forgive me, that may not be the correct spelling of his last name.) A NAESU tech rep. He was a WW II combat veteran. A tail gunner on dive bombers in the Pacific theatre. Was credited with two and a half kills. Then he told us all the credits were half credits.

That's a lot of shooting at folks trying to kill you with automatic cannons while inverted in weird postions thousands of feet over the bright clear Pacific, going hundreds of miles an hour. Open air whirling past you! A stressful job to say the least.

He went technical after that. Until we move forward in time to 1980 and he is a singular expert in the radar and weapons systems of the F-14. But some of the things he did on the way.

He was part of the group that developed anti-radiation missiles during the Viet Nam conflict. In theatre I might add, and several times on the "test bed" aircraft itself. You see, the pilot is often very, very busy during such times and you need a trained observer to analyse the results as they happen.

and of course the North Vietamese are aren't lying there like lumps on a log, but were pro-active in not getting the crap blown out of themselves while at the same time still be able to defend their country.

I do recall I was the one who mentioned at the late night story telling session (which were usually in-port, overseas, during duty section days as that's the only time you have a "night" in the down time sense of the word) as to how being on the target plane yourself must have altered the learning curve a bit and he replied dryly, "It kept the slide rules clicking."

END OF PART ONE.

Have to go do things and don't want to leave my computer on. It does things without me sometimes.

BD.

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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

SAM-6? As in an SA-6 Gainful, also known a 2K12 Kub, or, as it's commonly referred to by fliers, as "the three fingers of death?"

With a top velocity of Mach 2.8 and the A-6's sub-Mach top airspeed, I'm surprised it didn't punch clean through the aircraft's relatively thin sheet metal covering the wings. Must have hit either the wing root, a spar, or other heavy-duty structural component of the wing.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Small time out in the Chuck Fritz story, as memory is a fragile thing and I wanted to get this down while I remembered. This man deserves mention too, and even Tailhook can't find fault here.


The most serious faced man I ever saw in my whole life was a picture on the cover of one of the Navy magazines at the time and it showed this black personnelman in a harness with a rope attached to the back, standing on the side of his ship (a destroyer) facing downward in 20 foot seas, along side an overcrowded Vietnamese boat people vessel that was actively in the process of coming apart.

One end of the boat was already a mass of timbers with people in the water and people on the boat were handing him babies!

Babies, for God's sake! In swaddling!

Man, go down to the beach on a rainy, wind swept heavy surf day and really think about how much you wouldn't want babies in that and how far you'ld go to prevent that from happening. I always felt sorry for that guy. He woke up that morning thinking the worst thing he had to deal with was a bit of seasickness and a cranky division officer. Then God throws babies and heavy seas at him. Talk about your karmic "think fast!"

He had two babies tucked into the crook of his right arm and was reaching for a third with his left and there was still four or five more being held up. He was about six feet down the side of his own ship. For all the world this kid's face looked just like that of Bill Cosby's I saw in a picture of Mr. Cosby punching out Tommy Smothers at a party back in the late sixties, early seventies. To this day I don't know why he did that. Maybe Larry Jacks knows.


The personnelman's picture was taken by a photographer on a second destroyer coming in to assist.

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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

AFAIK, long-range missiles usually "coast" for much of their flight, i.e. rocket burnout occurs long before most of them hit their targets. And of course, it's bleeding velocity every second that it's blundering through the atmosphere without propulsion. And any maneuvering would bleed even more. So it's theoretically possible that the missile was travelling a lot less than its top speed when it struck.

For all the world this kid's face looked just like that of Bill Cosby's I saw in a picture of Mr. Cosby punching out Tommy Smothers at a party back in the late sixties, early seventies. To this day I don't know why he did that. Maybe Larry Jacks knows.

No, I never heard that story so I don't know why he did it. I get the impression that while Bill Cosby is a very funny man, he doesn't suffer fools gladly.

AFAIK, long-range missiles usually "coast" for much of their flight, i.e. rocket burnout occurs long before most of them hit their targets. And of course, it's bleeding velocity every second that it's blundering through the atmosphere without propulsion. And any maneuvering would bleed even more. So it's theoretically possible that the missile was travelling a lot less than its top speed when it struck.

It's quite likely that the top speed of an SA-6 is at high altitude and it can't go that fast down low in A-6 territory. I'm not certain about whether the missiles coast most of their range or not. On the one hand, that would make them harder to see and avoid. However, it would greatly reduce their maneuverability. It's possible the missiles' solid rocket motors have high thrust to accelerate quickly then a lower, longer duration thrust for the "cruise" portion of their flight.

We have a mystery! Does Stuart remember correctly, or did some facts get mixed up in that ramshackle brain of his? (No sarcasm here, it happens to him more often than he'd like to admit. )

Fortunately, we have Big Don on hand! I'm sure he knows much, much more than I re: missiles (having actually worked with them) and suddenly I have a burning (pardon the pun) desire to know more from the horse's mouth, as it were.

So speak up, Big Guy! Enquiring (some would say darned inquistive) minds want to know! :-)

Yeah, I could always Googlpedia it for myself, but as you can tell from this post, I'm feeling a little loopy atm. Can't concentrate long enough to take anything in. And I'm lazy.

Alright guys, I tried to find a close up picture of an A-6 wingfold to show you guys how heavily engineered they are. After an hour of looking I didn't see a good one, just the two below.

Just one half of one hinge, if dropped fron waist height, would break your foot. In the picture below, the A-6 on the catapult shows us that there are approx. five of these heavy hinges keeping the wing together.

Remember, the A-6 can carry its own weight in fuel and ordinance. Most of it on its wings. The wings aren't sheet metal gas tanks like in civilian aircraft. Try that with your car.

And one can make assumptions based on the tactics of the time. (Anybody here besides myself ever take aviation electronic warfare classes in the Seventies? Cool, then I can tell whoppers without getting caught. )

One, if you are not the intended target, it's not a good idea to attack an A-6 while you are still in front of it. And even back in the coal burning missile days of the Vietnam War, SAM-6's had opticle target aquisition capabilities. Though the Russian abacus based computer systems would overheat and the wooden beads catch fire. (Sorry, I was talking to a bunch of 20 year olds about technology last night. They think they invented it. My generation came up with fire and the wheel and that's about it) So the crew of the SAM would wait until the A-6 passed overhead and then shoot them in the butt. Hey, I would!

So the missile would have been in a tail chase. This would allow for the SAM to strike more than one hinge, which were almost two inchs inch thick. SAM's aren't designed to punch through heavy armor with their bodies. The decelerometer on the missile should have detonated the missile as soon as it detected a 2 gee deceleration. That's how missiles know they've made physical contact with the target. The proximity fuse failed as well. Though if there were a lot of Wild Weasel activity, the SAM crew may not have had their radars on.

So the first picture shows a folded wing and the five or so hinges are little dots. The second is a close up showing everthing BUT the hinges (The label was "Hydralics hell") and the third shows an A-6 with a partial load out of thousand pounders. (Yes, I know a thousand pounder by sight.)

One time I asked why thousand pounders were the weapon of choice just as the CAG was walking by. (Okay, acronym class. CAG, Carrier Air Group. It's a thing, all the squadrons of a particular carrier AND a title. The skipper of all the aircraft squadrons on a carrier is called the CAG. So the skipper of MY squardron answers to the CAG, who answers to the skipper of the carrier, who answers to the fleet admiral, if he's not the same person as the skipper of the carrier.) He was a short intense man who gave lie to the impression that type "A" personalities are unpleasant to be around.

After the inspection that occurs when a senior officer who doesn't deal with you on a daily basis always gives an enlisted man before addressing him directly*, he smiled and said, "That's because you can't tell the difference between a 2000 and a thousand pound bomb in a blind taste test and you get twice as many shots by using thousand pounders."

Basically he was saying that any target that would succumb to a 2000 pound bomb hit would also fail under a thousand pound bomb hit. And you can hit it twice as many times. The only diff is if you are targeting enemy personnel and if it was scheduled, you use CBU's anyway.



*Just as a woman can tell you are "reading her T-shirt" instead of looking her in the face, an enlisted man worth his pay can tell when he is being inspected, especially by pilots. A combat pilot examines his cockpit instruments every ten seconds of every combat sortee in a precise manner.

A senior pilot will inspect you the same way as he looks at his instruments, by starting with your left eye, he will look at your left ear, (to see if your haircut is within regs.) left breast, (Name and stencil) left foot, (shoe shine) right foot and then back up the body for an overall appearance. This, as they walk up to you. I was hardly ever deficient in this regard so I didn't mind.

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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

I hear ya. I'm only 29, but I know better. Project Sunfire, Pykrete carriers, ect. World War 2 in itself was one of the greatest technological leaps of all time. Look at the Norden Bombsight! As ancient as they are, they're still a technological marvel to me.

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This signature has been compressed due to rising photon costs.

I remember my Dad, who served on a submarine in the Pacific during WWII, talking about the Torpedo Data Computer they used.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis