My dad told me that during the Korean Conflict he saw a guy pulling chocks on a Corsair or Skyraider (I don’t remember which). The pilot revved up the big radial engine and blew the crewman into the propeller of the plane behind him. (He also said he saw a crewman straddle an antenna and a guy in the cockpit keyed the microphone. He said the guy straddling was burned in the crotch. Could that really happen? What kind of power did those old radios put out, anyway?)
There was a paragraph in Flying recently about a skydiver who decided to deliver a message to the pilot of the Twin Otter jump plane personally instead of letting the jumpmaster do it. (The jumpmaster had already told him that he would deliver the message for him, and to wait in the aircraft.) The skydiver exited the aircraft and started walking directly forward in spite of shouted warnings from the other jumpers. You guessed it: He walked right into the spinning propeller.
I definately remember this as being a true story, told in one of NBC’s ‘World Most Amazing Videos’ shows.
They interviewed the guy, who has facial scarring, but received no life-threatening injuries.
When they showed the story, they showed the video over and over (probably about 12 times). Then padded it with interviews of the victim, other flight deck crewmembers, his doctors.
I worked in communications and electronic warfare in the Canadian army and let me tell you, “Don’t touch an antenna unless the guy with the radio knows not to key the pressle switch” is the First Commandment of the CF Communications Command. Even a small 524 vehicle radio can throw you back with a sizable zap. If you’re standing on top of a radio truck when it does this, you may get a surprise nine-foot trip to the ground. Having been zapped in this fashion, I assure you it is not fun.
If you’re working with an HF radio, the threat is lethal. A simple wire dipole antenna will kill you instantly if you touch it when it transmits - we’re talking thousands of watts. Same with a jammer, which of course emits a huge amount of power inasmuch as that’s its job; touching the antenna will fry you like a steak. In fact, it’s best not to even stand in FRONT of it when it’s transmitting, as I’ve heard stories of people getting quite sick as a result.
click skip intro
click sick clips
give name and email address (they don’t spam)
click on drop-down menu and choose “Misc. Death”
then you’ll find the clip.
Thanks for the information, RickJay. As a child I always took it on faith that the man was injured (I didn’t mention it before, but dad said it “fried” him and he fell off the ladder to the deck). Hey, dad wouldn’t lie, would he? But not having any experience with radios, except for civilian aircraft radios, I didn’t really know how much power the Navy/military radios put out.
FWIW, dad was also a radar operator in San Diego (I think it was NAS North Island) before his commission. He said they’d turn the antenna toward snooping newspapermen and pulse them, popping off all of their flashbulbs. He also told me I wasn’t conceived until after he left the radar assignment. (Of course, my mom didn’t want kids after my sister was born, and it may be that it took eight years for dad to convince her to have another. He told her the next child would be a boy, and he’d have blue eyes. Good call, dad!)
I’d seen the tape in question several times in the previous decade. Every now and then, during annual flightline safety classes, someone would bring in a tape of that incident (along with a bunch of others) to watch during the breaks.
According to one instructor who claimed to know something about the incident, the person who was monitoring the camera that caught the incident was (against regulations) drinking coffee at his monitoring station. He spilled his drink just before the A-6 sucked that poor guy up like so much spaghetti. By the time he looked back at the screen, everyone was responding to the engine failure, and the monitoring guy hadn’t seen the ingestion. No-one even suspected the ingestee was missing until someone looked down the intake and saw the bottoms of someone’s shoes instead of a damaged engine.
From watching the ground crew’s actions, this seems plausible (that no-one knew that anyone had been ingested). If any of the ground crew knew someone had been ingested, there would have been a crowd around the intake as soon as the engine had been shut down. Instead, everyone is concentrating on the engine damage until someone looks down the intake. According to the instructor, the guy who was supposed to be monitoring the camera was severely disciplined.
Does anyone know if this was an embellishment to the actual story?
If you check the URL I posted above, you will see that at least one of the crew members notices the problem immediately and signals to the pilot to shut off the engine (I’m interpreting here). Your instructor’s narration does seem at odds with was is actually shown on this brief footage.
Yes, the A-7 was known for sucking things and people up. They call the S-3 the “Hoover” sometimes, but IMHO this is just because it’s got those bis ass TF-34-400 turbofans, and not because too many people have been eaten by them.
For the really old dudes on the board, you may remember the F9F a.k.a. F-9 Panther and other aircraft with the centrifugal intakes. On the F-9, the recommended method for adjusting something-or-other (the fuel flow control, I think) was via an access panel on the underside, but the access panel was positioned relative to the item so that you’d need a really, really long arm to reach it. So the more common method was to crawl down one intake to get at it —while the engine was running (at low power). Because the two intakes in a “Y” shape provided air to the aircraft’s one engine, it would “draw” harder through the unobstructed intake and not really suck too hard on the poor AD trying to service the thing. I first heard of this from my Sea Daddy who did this frequently as a young salt. Needless to say, he’s as deaf as a plank today.
As to the radio waves issue… you’ll note that EA-6Bs almost always have the radioactive symbol on the radome. They’re not kidding about it. If you look carefully at color pictures of them, both they and the regular A-6s (and many other military aircraft) have a gold tint on their canopies. This comes from a very thin layer (thin enough to be transparent) of real gold applied, which is enough to conduct away the RF energy (or so I hope). The aluminum fuselages also provide protection. I have heard other people say that all the stray RF from radars on carriers under operations is enough to goof up video cameras, and have seen people wrap their Sonys in aluminum foil while on deck shooting pictures for the folks back home.
I asked an EA-6B driver about that once. He said that it’s a recognition symbol for the LSO, not an indicator of radioactivity. Some EA-6Bs have a black cross instead of a radiohazard symbol. The pilot said that EA-6Bs and A-6s look very similar when they’re on final, and that the symbol is there so the LSO can verify which is which.
The S-3 Viking is called the ‘Hoover’, the ‘Flying Vacuum Cleaner’, and the ‘Whistling Sh!t-Can’ due to the distinctive noise made by it’s high-bypass turbofan engines, not because of any tendancy to eat flightdeck crew.
Johnny L.A.: The aircraft you heard about with the ‘big radial engine’ was almost certainly an A-1 Skyraider, a huge-ass prop-driven aircraft, with an enourmous propeller. Propwash from one of those beasts could certainly launch you a good distance if it caught you unaware. On a flightdeck, you can count on another aircraft being nearby to do a ‘LaMachine’ on you. Ouch.
It also could have been a Corsair. The ship, USS Philipine Sea, had Grumman F-9Fs, Vought Corsairs (the crank-winged kind; it was too early for the jet-powered Corsair II), Douglas AD-5 Skyraiders, and single-seat Skyraiders. So it was either a Skyraider or a Corsair. Both types had huge engines and props.
At the time my father was still an enlisted man, operating the radar gear in the three-place AD-5 Skyraider. I don’t remember the designation of the single-seat “Spads”.