So as not to resurrect a 6 1/2 year old thread…
:eek: Good grief, that’s one heck of a tale! Ought to do wonders for DMark’s knuckles.
Yes, the OP should avoid flying in WW II vintage open cockpit aircraft. 
Though I survived in part because of all those old safety features.
No, but I just found out that a plane my father once owned crashed about three years after he sold it, killing the pilot/owner. Seriously creepy.
(According to the FAA website, the cause of the crash was operator error.)
All the yes answers are amazing.
And I answer mostly yes. When I was 8 years old my family and I saw a black and orange mushroom cloud while driving on I 280. It was about on the opposite ridge near one of the Crystal Springs lake. Didn’t see the airplane go down, but that was all that it could have been.
To directly answer the OP, I didn’t see the crash itself, but I was at ground zero of one.
I was injured in the Green Ramp disaster back in March of 1994. An F-16 and a C-130 collided in mid-air. The C-130 circled around and landed, but the F-16 pilot ejected and his plane slammed into the runway and slid into a C-141 which was parked near where my unit was gathering prior to conducting a training parachute jump that was scheduled for later that evening.
The C-141 exploded and a fireball of flaming fuel and wreckage came flying into our immediate vicinity. If you look closely on the sketch of the area included in the wikipedia article, I was just to the right of the mock doors, which are labelled as 3.
I had my shoulder broken pretty badly, banged up my knee and suffered a pretty good concussion, but luckily wasn’t burned. BTW, the wikipedia article says that 24 died and over 80 were injured. Actually, while over 80 were injured seriously enough to be hospitalized, approximately 200 Soldiers were treated and released.
I was there that day, too. That was when I was taxi-driving. I was on IH635 where it merges into HWY 121 about the time it flew over. I remember the wind being weird. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see anything. But the time I got into the end of the taxi queue, the word was making the rounds on the CB radio. It got real quiet for a while. Later, when I heard about the guy on the freeway that was decapitated, it made me pause and think for a moment.
That was a long night for the taxi-drivers, too. I didn’t go home until about 3:00 the next morning. It was profitable, but it was hard to enjoy the money, given the circumstances.
My wife saw Delta 1141 crash. She described it in detail to me later that evening. She said it was like watching in slow motion.
Was that the one where the Reserve pilot snuck one of his buddies into the back seat?
I was in a midair collision in my sailplane - lost about 5’ of my right wing. I bailed out and watched my plane spin to the ground, arriving about 30 seconds before I did.
In my situation, I was much better off staying with my aircraft.
Mainly because I didn’t have a parachute, but also because I doubt I was high enough to successfully deploy the parachute I didn’t have.
What altitude did you bail at? What model sailplane did you bail on?
QtM, who flew a few sailplanes waaaay back in the day too.
I missed one by a day. My father, sister and I had planned to go to an airshow at Concord (NH) Airport one Saturday, but something came up so we ended up going Sunday. If we had gone Saturday, we would have seen a father-daughter wing-walker team (father piloted, daughter was the wing walker) crash. Neither survived.
I heard the impact and saw the smoke cloud of a 727 crash in San Diego in 1978. The point of impact was less than a mile from where I lived at the time.
Almost, two years ago. I’ve told about this before, but can’t find the thread.
I had arrived in Madrid, for a 3-week trip to Spain. My wallet had been stolen in the airport the previous year, so I was determined to get through the airport and into a taxi as fast as possible.
I went through customs, got my luggage, and was hurrying to the taxi, when I heard someone scream, some people running, another person screaming, more people running, and an alarm was going off. I just singlemindedly rushed to the taxis, jumped into the nearest one, and went off toward my hotel. It took forever to get there because there were a lot of emergency vehicles and road blocks. The taxi driver was on the phone constantly. At one point he turned to me and said, “There was a terrorist attack at the airport.” I looked in the vicinity of the airport, and saw a column of black smoke.
When I finally got to my hotel, a small crowd of people were watching a TV in the lobby. As I was checking in, I saw scenes of a downed plane and a lot of smoke and flashing lights. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I didn’t hear what the reporter was saying. As soon as I got into my room, I turned on CNN, and learned that it was not a terrorist attack; rather, a plane had crashed shortly after take-off. The plane was filled with vacationers, headed for the Spanish islands.
Something like 150 people where charred beyond recognition. There were a handful of survivors, mostly with serious burns.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think that’s the same crash (long time ago, so memory could be hazy). If you’re referring to events at Carswell AFB, I know there was an F-16 crash that involved a Reserve pilot sneaking a friend into the back seat of an F-16D (I think). At the time, I was working on the upper floor of a building that overlooked the crash area. It happened on a weekend, and by Monday morning, there was only a (surprisingly small) burned area in the grass beside the runway.
If my memory is to be trusted, the crash I witnessed happened on the Friday prior to a Memorial Day weekend. Probably 1986 or 87. I was leaving early to get a head start on the weekend, and just happened to be standing in the parking lot watching the flight of F-4s pitch up for landing. One of them just kept descending… then the canopy blew off, and I only saw one crewman leave the plane. The other apparently left after the craft disappeared below the trees. Both apparently too low for parachute deployment. It’s kinda sad, because I believe newer ejection seats can (usually) save the pilot even if the ejection occurs on the ground.
It was an LS-4 - I departed at around 2000’ AGL. Once the pilot is out the glider has a seriously aft CG, which results in a flat spin and a rate of descent not dramatically greater than a person under a parachute.
The other plane suffered little damage and landed safely.
I got curious and googled it. You’re right, it was an F16D. My foggy memory was it was an F4. It was in 1989.
Almost been in two.
While in training, I was doing touch-and-gos. CFI wanted me to see the big city airport, so we went to BNA for a couple of rounds. During the winter, they scrape the snow and ice to one end of the runway. After a couple of months or more, there’s a pretty high - 40-50 feet - mound of ice sitting there. Couple that with quarry off the end that acts as a sinkhole…
I came in low, and hit the cold air above all that rock and sank a few more feet. He firewalled everything and pulled up, but we still snapped off the nose gear of his 182 on the ice pile.
We circled until he could stop his new prop flat, then he side-slipped it around to a perfect 2-point landing, angled over to the grass and dropped the nose. We slid a few feet and had very little damage, thank og.
The other was less violent, but more scary. Riding with my buddy who’s the traffic guy for his local radio station. We lose the engine, and since I have more hours than he’s got hairs, I took over and landed on the highway just outside of town. No damage
Now, motorcycles? That’s a whole 'nother story…
I saw one from the cockpit.
I worked for a company that made auotpilots for general aviation. I went up in a company plane with a company pilot to do some testing on an omni coupler.
The pilot took off on an empty gas tank. On takeoff the engine died. He switched tanks and tried to restart the engine but it wouldn’t. He tipped the nose down and saw houses and trees. He decided to make a 180 back to the field. (I was told later that was exactly the wrong thing to do.)
We didn’t make it and went in on the left wing and nose and cartwheeled.
The pilots back was broken but I walked away with only a cracked sternum I got when my chest hit the steering yoke - we had seat belts in those days but no chest belts.
The FAA took the pilots license away. I developed a completely illogical fear of flying that took me a while to overcome.
Yes, about 1976 in the Venice/Marina del Rey area, Southern California. We were at school, at P.E. when we heard a loud boom overhead. Two small planes, (Cessna types) had collided. I remember as one seemed to slowly fall, all the strips of fabric-like material floating around it. It hit the nearby police station and went up in a 100-foot fireball. They found the head of one of the persons involved on the grounds of a nearby private school for younger children.
Oh yeah, that’s the equivalent of lighting a match to check for a suspected gas leak.
The three most useless things for a pilot:
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Fuel back at the airport.
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Altitude above you.
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Runway behind you.
Amen…
We said, “Gas on the ground.”