[Rhodes22-list] Oops page

[Hank]

I read the story of the photos of the bad ejection in the A-6 on
www.darwinawards.com.  I've pasted it below.

Hank

A-6 Emergency: Two Views 
1. Lieutenant Keith Gallagher
Murphy's Law says, "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and when you
least expect it." And we all know that Murphy was an aviator. Murphy
was correct beyond his wildest dreams in my case. On my 26th birthday
I was blindsided by a piece of bad luck the size of Texas that should
have killed me. Luckily it was followed immediately by a whole slew of
miracles that allowed me to be around for my 27th birthday. Not even
Murphy could have conceived of such a curious accident, and the fact
that I am here to write about it makes it that much more bizarre.

We were the overhead tanker, one third of the way through cruise,
making circles in the sky. Although the tanker pattern can be boring,
midway through the cycle, we were alert and maintaining a good lookout
doctrine because our air wing had a midair collision less than a week
before, and we did not want to repeat. We felt we were ready for any
emergency: fire, hydraulic failures, fuel transfer problems. Bring 'em
on! We were ready. After all, how much trouble can two JO's get in
overhead the ship?

After my third fuel update call, we decided that the left outboard
fuel valve was going to require a little help to open. NATOPS
recommends applying positive and negative G to force the valve. As the
pilot pulled the stick back I wondered how many times we would have to
porpoise the nose of the plane before the valve opened. As he moved
the stick forward, I felt the familiar sensation of negative "G", and
then something strange happened… my head touched the canopy.

For a brief moment I thought that I had failed to tighten my lap
belts, but I knew that wasn't true. Before I could complete that
thought, there was a loud bang, followed by wind, noise,
disorientation and more wind, wind, wind. Confusion reigned in my mind
as I was forced back against my seat, head against the headrest, arms
out behind me, the wind roaring in my head, pounding against my body.
"Did the canopy blow off? Did I eject? Did my windscreen implode?"

All of these questions occurred to me amidst the pandemonium in my
mind and body. These questions were quickly answered as I looked down
and saw a sight that I will never forget: the top of the canopy, close
enough to touch, and through the canopy I could see the top of my
pilot's helmet. It took a few moments for this image to sink into my
suddenly overloaded brain. This was worse than I ever could have
imagined -- I was sitting right on top of a flying A-6!

Pain, confusion, panic, fear and denial surged through my brain as a
new development manifested itself: I couldn't breathe. My helmet and
mask had been ripped off my head, and without them, the full force of
the wind was hitting me square in the face. It was like trying to
drink through a fire hose. I couldn't seem to get a breath of air
amidst the wind.

My arms dragged behind me until I managed to pull both of them into my
chest and hold them there. I tried to think for a second as I
continued trying to breathe. For some reason it never occurred to me
that my pilot would be trying to land. I finally decided that the only
thing that I could do to survive was eject myself. What else could I
do?

I grabbed the lower handle with both hands and pulled -- it wouldn't
budge. With panic-induced strength I tried again, but to no avail. The
handle was not budging.

I attempted to reach the upper eject handle but the wind prevented me
from getting a hand on it. As a matter of fact, all that I could do
was hold my arms into my chest. If either slid out into the wind
stream, it immediately flailed out uncontrolled behind me, and that
was definitely not good.

The wind had become physically and emotionally overwhelming. It
pounded against my face and body like a huge wall of water that
wouldn't stop. The roaring in my ears confused me, the pressure in my
mouth prevented me from breathing, and the pounding on my eyes kept me
from seeing. Time had lost all meaning.

For all I knew, I could have been sitting there for seconds or for
hours suffocating in the wind. I wish I could say that my last
thoughts were of my wife, but as I felt myself blacking out, all I
thought was, "I don't want to die."

Suddenly someone turned on the lights and I had a funny view of the
front end of an A-6, with jagged plexiglas where my half of the canopy
was supposed to be. Looking down from the top of the jet, I was
surprised to find the plane safe on the flight deck with 100 people
looking up at me. I had expected to see the pearly gates and some dead
relatives.

My first thought was that we had never taken off -- that something had
happened before the catapult. Then everything came flooding back into
my brain: the wind, the noise, the confusion. As my pilot spoke and
medical personnel swarmed over me, I realized that I had survived.

It didn't take long to realize that I was a lucky man to be alive. As
I heard more details, I found out how fortunate I was. My parachute
became entangled in the horizontal stabilizer tight enough to act as a
shoulder harness, but not tight enough to bind the flight controls. If
this had not happened, I would have been thrown into the jagged
plexiglas, as my shoulder harness had been disconnected from the seat
when the parachute deployed.

There are many other things that happened (or didn't happen) that
allowed me to survive this mishap a hair's breadth from disaster. And
a level-headed pilot who reacted quickly and correctly is the reason
that I am alive and flying today, along with a generous helping of
good old-fashioned Irish luck.

2. Lieutenant Mark Baden, Pilot
As we finished the briefing, my bombardier navigator Keith Gallagher
told me that it was his birthday and that our recovery would be his
100th trap on the boat. To top it off, we were assigned the plane with
my name on the side. As we taxied out of the chocks, I was feeling a
little uneasy about all the recent mishaps. To make myself feel
better, I went through the "soft shot/engine failure on takeoff"
emergency procedures, touching each switch or lever as I went through
the steps. "At least if something happens right off the bat, I'll be
ready."

The first few minutes of the hop were busy. Concentrating on the
package-check and consolidation and trying to keep track of my
customers dispelled my uneasiness. As we approached mid-cycle, the
most boring time in a tanker hop, we kept ourselves occupied with fuel
checks. We kept a close eye on one drop tank that had stopped with
1000 pounds of fuel still inside.

I tried going to override on the tank pressurization, but that didn't
work. Keith and I discussed the problem. We decided it was probably a
stuck float valve. Perhaps some positive and negative G force would
fix it.

We were at 8000 feet, seven miles abeam the ship, heading aft. I
clicked the altitude hold off and added some power to give us more G.
At 230 knots I pulled the stick back and nosed the plane up five
degrees. Then I pushed the stick forward and got about half a negative
G -- just enough to float me in the seat.

I heard a sharp bang and felt the cockpit depressurize. The roar of
the wind followed. I ducked instinctively and looked up at the canopy.
Something was wrong. Instead of seeing a two or three inch gap, the
canopy bow was flush with the windscreen. My eyes tracked down to the
canopy switch. It was up.

As my scan continued to the right, I failed to meet Keith's
questioning glance. Instead I saw a pair of legs at eye-level. The
right side of the canopy was shattered. I followed the legs up and saw
the rest of my bomaardier navigator's body out in the windblast.

I watched as his head snapped down and up. 

His helmet and oxygen mask disappeared. They didn't fly off; they just
disappeared. My mind went into ovedrive. "What the hell happened? I
hope he ejects. What am I going to do now? I need to slow down."

I jerked the throttles to idle and eased speed brakes out. In one
motion I reached up, de-isolated, and threw the flap lever to the down
position. I reached over and twisted the IFF selector switch to EMER.
I screamed, "Slow down!" to myself as I focused on the airspeed
indicator and gave another pull back on the throttles and speed
brakes. The airspeed was over 200 knots.

I felt a combination of helplessness and revulsion as I watched my
bombardier's body slam around in the windblast. After his helmet flew
off, his face looked like someone sucked out into zero atmosphere in a
graphic movie. His eyes were blasted open, his cheeks and lips were
puffed out to an impossible size and the tendons in his neck looked
like they were about to bust.

At 200 knots I saw hiim pull his arms in front of his face and claw
behind his head. For a moment, I thought he was going to manage to
pull the handle and get clear. I was mentally cheering for him. But
his arms were yanked down by the blast and I cursed as I turned my
radio selector to Radio 1. "Mayday. Mayday, this is 515. My BN has
partially ejected. I need an emergency pull-forward!"

The reply was immediate. "Roger! Switch button six." I slapped the
gear handle down and turned all my dumps on in an effort slow down.
Max trap never crossed my mind. The Boss came back in his calm voice
and said, "Bring it on in."

He and asked if the bombardier navigator was still with the aircraft.
I caused a few cases of nausea when I answered, "Only his legs are
still inside the cockpit." It made sense to me, but more than a few
listening people had visions of two legs and lots of blood but no
body. Fortunately the Boss understood what I meant.

The front windscreen started to fog up four miles behind the boat. I
cranked the defog and was getting ready to unstrap my shoulder harness
to wipe off the glass when it finally started clearing. The boat made
a hard left turn and I made some disparaging remarks about the guys on
the bridge as I rolled right to chase centerline.

I touched down short of the 1-wire and sucked the throttles to idle.
The canopy shards in front of Keith's chest looked like a collection
of butcher's knives.

As soon as I was free of my seat, I checked Keith and held his left
arm and hand as we waited for the medical people to arrive. I realized
he still was alive when he said, "Am I on the flight deck?" A wave of
indescribable relief washed over me.

Later, I found that ignorance can be bliss. I didn't know two things
while flying. First, his parachute had deployed and wrapped itself
around the tail section of the plane. Second, the timing release
mechanism had fired and released the BN from the seat. The only things
keeping him in the plane were the parachute risers holding him against
the back of the seat.


On 6/13/05, Mark Kaynor <mkaynor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Brad (and other pilots),
> 
> I was stumbling around the web this afternoon, ran across this site, and
> thought of you - there are some pretty "interesting" aviation-related photos
> here:
> 
> http://www.micom.net/oops/
> 
> For instance:
> http://zeeb.at/oops/F8overshoot1.jpg
> 
> Mark
>