Not Good
Following some sort of propulsion issue, a British F-35B crashed on takeoff from the carrier Queen Elizabeth:
Video footage has emerged of a British F-35B fighter jet falling off the front of aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth after a botched takeoff.
The leaked clip, seemingly from a CCTV camera on the carrier's bridge, shows the Lockheed Martin-made stealth aircraft slowly trundling down the deck before tipping over the ski-jump ramp on her bows.
As the £100m RAF jet nosed over, the pilot ejected – only for his parachute to snag on the carrier's bows as he descended back towards the ship.
Had he gone underneath the 65,000-tonne Queen Elizabeth or been caught in one of her two 33-tonne, 6.7m-diameter propellers [PDF], he may not have survived.
The cause is still under investigation, but given the reports of a red plastic cover being found in the water, and the fact that the exercises it was participating in continued without pause, it's pretty likely that they identified as something like FOD, either a cover left over an inlet, or one sucked off the deck, that caused this.
In any case, there's about 88 million quid down the drain.
1 comments :
Had something similar happen on my carrier back in the 80's Short shot off the catapult, and the plane just barely cleared the deck. RIO punched out, pilot, not so lucky. I was in the forward magazines when it happened, heard and felt the ship run the F-4 over. After we went to Philly for drydock work, we went down in the dock and could see the scar on the hull.
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