An avalanche of visitors

Someone on Reddit linked to a post I put up back in October 2008, with pictures of a Harrier jet fighter making an emergency landing on a heap of mattresses. The result was a bit like an avalanche. Yesterday I got more visits to the site than I normally get in an entire month! Guess that proves Reddit sure does have an impressive readership . . . The reader comments on the Reddit thread were sometimes quite funny, too!

One of the commenters there included a link to a Dutch forum, where more information was provided about the Harrier crash. It’s a couple of years late for the original post, but better late than never!

TAV-8B USMC VMAT-203 at MCAS Cherry Point

Basically, the nose gear wouldn’t come done. The Harrier has a backup system with a nitrogen bottle to blow the gear down in this event. Well, someone significantly outranking the pilot ordered him not to blow the gear down (which is the specified emergency procedure) b/c by his reasoning, if the nose gear didn’t come down, he was afraid the jet would break its back by having all that weight on the long nose of the T-bird. With that, he elected to gather mattresses and strap them down to support the extended nose, and you have the obvious result. ‘Normally’ a Harrier that can’t get it’s gear to come down will suck up the gear and do a vertical landing on the strakes/gun pack, they’ll jack the bird up, fix the gear, and it’s back to flying rather quickly. In this case, the motor was hilariously trashed with mattress springs protruding out and everything. This has since become a legendary event in the Harrier community (rather small community) and is laughed about often. The best part was, when they jacked the plane up in the hangar and pulled the gear handle to blow them down, all 4 came down and locked in place.”

Another quote:

They experienced hung landing gear (repeat gripe on that jet) and contacted base for troubleshooting. The EP involves cycling some Circuit breakers, cycling the gear, and requesting visual inspection. If none of that works (which it didn’t), you blow down the gear. At some point, the squadron let the MAG CO what was going on (for what reason, I have no idea). He was worried that if they blew the gear down and the nose gear still hung up, it would crack the frame of one of the scarce T-birds. He directed that the pilot do a gear up vertical landing. It would crush the strakes and probably FOD the motor, but it’s better than cracking the frame. He directed the mattresses to be placed under the nose. When the pilot heard about all of this, he refused to do it unless he heard it directly from the MAG CO. The MAG CO got on the radio and told him to do it. The landing was pretty unremarkable, despite the photos. The damage was limited to the engine (Fodded), and the strakes (crushed). Expensive, but not the end of the world. When they jacked it up, they we able to blow the gear down with no problems. This is when the story gets even weirder. Once the jet was in the hangar, relatively undamaged, an EZ-go golf cart came flying into the hangar and smashed into the jet, causing some D-level repair damage. It turns out that LCpl. Schmuckatelli was huffing keyboard cleaner before making his parts run in the EZ-go. He got really dizzy, lost consiousness, and the cart went out of control. It drove directly into the hangar at full speed through a gap in the hangar doors and smashed the jet. Like I said, the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make up something that bizarre.

Thanks to the anonymous Reddit poster who provided the link. I wonder if LCpl. Schmuckatelli has finished doing pushups yet?

Peter