Thursday, February 13, 2020

Missing Something


8 comments:

  1. One of several that happened to, but IIRC the only one that didn't crash as a resjlt. Some amazing piloting there.

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  2. Amazing! Here's a link to an article on this:
    https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/news/a27584/b-52-landed-without-a-tail-fin/

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  3. Built by the lowest bidder....

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  4. That is a great story - helluva aircrew! It also reminds me of some of the B-17s in Europe during WWII that RTB'd with extensive damage, some of which had very little vertical stabilizer left.

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  5. In about 1989 while working at Boeing I was sitting in the now closed Blue Max restaurant after work with some colleagues. The Blue Max was in the King County Airport terminal building right on Boeing Field. (The Presidents land there when visiting the area.) Suddenly someone loudly said, "Look at that!" We looked as a 767 came roaring by way way too low. It's vertical stab was largely missing! I was doing video work helping to train pilots to fly '67's so I got the skinny the next day. The test flight pilots were over the Olympic Mountains doing kick tests where they kick the rudders back and forth as hard as possible. Some went ka-bang and a chase plane, likely the little F-86 they had to escort flights back then, met them in the air telling them what happened. They then flew low so the tower-full of engineers could take a look and decide about landing. To say the least the filed looked light Christmas with all the emergency vehicles along the flight line. Wild days!

    Sure miss the Blue Max, though; great place to sit if you like aviation and plane watching.

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    Replies
    1. There is a restaurant in the terminal at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa. On some weekends, I would take my son there for lunch and we would end up spending the day watching the planes land and take off: A-10's from Korea, F-16's from Korea, F-14's and F-18's if a carrier was working local, C-130's, KC-135's C-5's, C-17's......the entire flock.

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