Classic British Flight Sim

Filonian wrote:The start of some amazing evasive tactics?


I opened the canopy in flight and guess what? The amazing thing was that it carried on flying - no problems.

Graham

The operational history of the F-8 Crusader has an interesting distinction. In August 1960, a US Navy pilot took off from Naples, Italy, and climbed to about 1.5 kilometers. When he leveled off, he found he needed an unusual amount of pressure on the stick. Looking around for the cause, he discovered that he hadn't unfolded his wings!

The pilot was obviously cool-headed, since he decided to investigate how the aircraft handled in this configuration while he dumped what fuel he could. After about 24 minutes of flight he came back in for a landing, which was fast but otherwise uneventful. He reported no particular handling problems with the aircraft. Vought engineers were very pleased when they heard the story, though Navy brass was far from happy with the incident.

This is said to be the first case where an aircraft took off with folded wings and safely landed again, but Crusaders took off with folded wings at least seven more times afterward. Unsurprisingly, it usually happened at night. One pilot managed to waggle the aircraft and get the wings back down in flight. In response to the posting of an early version of this document on the Internet, the executive officer of the French Aeronavale squadron operating the Crusader, Antoine Guillot, said one of his pilots had pulled the same trick at an airshow in Belgium. At least under such circumstances the pilot might have been able to claim he did it intentionally as a stunt

I agreed to go to Da Nang to assess an F-8 of Marine squadron VMF232. This was the last few days of April, 1967. The aircraft had received a round up through the wing striking the rear spar of the center wing section. It was not possible to see all the damage without major disassembly. The squadron had X-ray capability so they X-rayed the wing. From that I could assess the extent of damage. I authorized a ferry flight to Japan for wing replacement. Shortly after I finished the damage report I was standing outside the hanger talking with squadron personnel when three F-8’s roared over us at very low level and at near sonic speed. Once over the hanger they zoomed up into a loop and circled for landing. I learned that VMF-232 and the neighboring squadron competed every month on the number of sorties flown. VMF-232 had won for the month. The fly by was to celebrate the win.

This squadron had experienced two wings-folded takeoffs by F-8’s in a one-month period. One occurred because the normal procedure was to spread wings before taxi. On this one occurrence the pilot had folded the wings again to clear traffic on the taxiway and forgot to put then down. On take off he realized something was wrong and stayed in afterburner until he gained enough altitude and cleared the area so he could jettison his bombs. Just as he got rid of the bombs the afterburner blew out. He was able to return to base and land.