Large Scale Central

Holy &%#@! F18 crash right here!

An F18 just crashed up the street from our house!!! I heard a small boom of the ejection, and a huge boom of the plane’s impact, and ran outside to see fire and smoke all over the street about two blocks from us!! There were smaller booms that kept going off as the fire burned.

Someone spotted a parachute in the canyon and me and a few other guys tried to find the pilot. The chute was all tangled and the ejection seat was dirty, didn’t really look like anyone had been in it. We searched all over the hillside but could find no sign of him.

At least one house is on fire and several cars are destroyed.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,463725,00.html

Cale,
Too close for comfort!
Unfortunately, he took out some innocent lives.
Maybe he tried to control it until it was over an unpopulated area, but failed.
You are lucky.

Ray,

Sounds like you are living right. Glad you are okay.

Shee-oot! news says one woman and one kid dead, another person and another kid missing.

Pilots career is over, get ready for a s**t storm over the how and why it occured, neighbors gonna be pissed! victims families will be screaming bloody murder, get ready for it.

Holy Crap!

At 1 pm I had to take Cris to an appointment, was somewhat shocked to find that the entire neighborhood had been sealed off by police. When we got back around 3:30 they still wouldn’t let any cars in, so we did some shopping to kill time for an hour or so. By then they had just reopened the streets to our house, but everything west of our block is still cordoned off and filled with police, fire, military, utilities, and news vehicles, plus trucks that hauled in heavy equipment.

A very tragic day, I feel so sad for the people who lost homes and loved ones.

My sister lived 2 streets over from the crash site of the AeroMexico DC9 that went down in Cerritos back in the 1980’s, I went over to make sure they were safe, she was really stressed, it was shear chaos, when the authories arrived, she was quarentined in her block for almost a week, I had to bring groceries to her and hand them over to her at the check point.

A guy I worked with had the rear wheel land in his backyard, all I will say is that big jets leave big horrors when they crash, and prey you never have to see the aftermath of one.

That’s very sad all-round. But a couple of things in the comments and Fox news bother me…

  1. ‘Putnam had no details on a possible cause. Investigators will review information from a flight data recorder, and there was no indication the pilot was using alcohol or drugs, she said.’

Since when have military aircraft like this had flight recorders? FAA and CAA rules that all civilian a/c over a certain capacity MUST have them, but in almost forty years dealing with military aircraft, I’ve never heard of one. There may be a cockpit recorder, but not a flight recorder per se.

  1. ‘Locked-in students’ in a nearby univerosty?

WTH? Why?

  1. After a civil airliner crashes - Quarantine of an entire neighbourhood with inhabitants having to be fed ‘over the wire’?

Never heard of anything like that in my life. You get people OUT - you do not confine them IN. I was part of a safety and emergency management team for a number of years where we exercised the scenario of a fully-laden C-5 Galaxy crashing short of the main runway at our local base, or shortly after take-off, into the local township. I tell you that a whole lot of time was spent clearing the area of inabitants, NOT confining them to their homes.

…and just in case you think I’m jaw-flapping here, I have first-paw experience of a military aircraft crashing into a residential area, killing eight people apart from the two crew-members. In May 1977, Flt Lts John Armitage and Laurie Davis crashed their 25-ton Canberra into the Oxmoor housing estate in Huntingdon as I watched from my off-duty location in a nearby youth centre where we were marking up the five-a-side football ground. I was about the third person to get there, on my bicycle, and with a few others, we quickly got a cordon set up and everybody that could be got out, out, while the emergency services arrived to deal with the chaos.

tac

If anyone’s interested, I’ve posted the few pics I shot today at the crash site:

http://www.raydunakin.com/Site/FA18_Crash.html

Coming at it from the east, I couldn’t see the worst of it, which is just as well.

Terrible accident.

Used to live in the most sparcely populated part of Illinois. They’d do their practice there for that specific reason. Now and then they’d have an accident. The crash would occurr in a field and everybody would say, “At least the pilot is ok!”

Pilot once came down in the softball field in the park in Vermont IL, right behind “Kepple’s.”

Ray, I’m glad you and your property are unharmed. My initial reaction was why did the pilot eject? When in trouble over populated areas isn’t it the pilot’s duty to stay with it to the last to try and minimize damage and casualties?

The pilot did stay in as long as possible, ejecting only seconds before impact. Had he remained in the plane, there would have simply been five dead instead of four.

An F-18 without power glides like a skyscraper. He was already flying on one engine after a declared emergency 100 miles out at sea. He nearly didn’t get out, and in many cases like this, the pilot doesn’t get out.

Let’s wait for the inevitable BoI before you start blaming the pilot ahead of time.

Having been to a real event where ten people died, my thoughts are with all concerned in this tragedy.

tac

As Terry said, without power, the FA-18 has the glide ratio of a brick.

The news this am (if’n you can believe it, but they usually do try to get it right, mostly) said he lost the second engine going feet-dry (crossing the coast) and was guiding the plane to an uninhabited canyon, thought it would make it, and punched out at the last nano-second.

That area of Sandy Eggo County around Miramar has a canyon almost every third street, so I tend to believe that, just take a look at Ray’s railroad, if you need confirmation.

My sympathies are with the families of those who lost loved ones, and with the pilot, who will second guess himself for the rest of his life.

Terry A de C Foley said:
An F-18 without power glides like a skyscraper. He was already flying on one engine after a declared emergency 100 miles out at sea. He nearly didn't get out, and in many cases like this, the pilot doesn't get out.

Let’s wait for the inevitable BoI before you start blaming the pilot ahead of time.

Having been to a real event where ten people died, my thoughts are with all concerned in this tragedy.

tac
www.ovgrs.org


Not blaming the pilot. Just not understanding letting the plane go down unmanned. I hear what Ray said and maybe there was nothing else he could do. I agree and I’ll reserve judgment until all the facts are in.

EDIT - I hadn’t heard that he just lost the second engine when getting over land - so I struck a remark about ditching.

Jon Radder said:
Not blaming the pilot. Just not understanding letting the plane go down unmanned. I hear what Ray said and maybe there was nothing else he could do. I agree and I'll reserve judgment until all the facts are in, but I also wonder why if the trouble developed over water why he didn't ditch in the ocean.
Jon,

As he went feet dry, he still had one engine. The FA-18 will fly just fine on one engine, and had, for 100 or so miles. Mirimar is close enough to the ocean to see the surf from the western end of the runway. He thought he could save the very expensive airplane.

He just ran out of altitude, airspeed and ideas, all at the same time.

See edit above. Was trying to figure out how to do strike-through while you were posting.

Terry A de C Foley said:
That's very sad all-round. But a couple of things in the comments and Fox news bother me..
  1. ‘Locked-in students’ in a nearby univerosty?

WTH? Why?

  1. After a civil airliner crashes - Quarantine of an entire neighbourhood with inhabitants having to be fed ‘over the wire’?

Never heard of anything like that in my life. You get people OUT - you do not confine them IN. I was part of a safety and emergency management team for a number of years where we exercised the scenario of a fully-laden C-5 Galaxy crashing short of the main runway at our local base, or shortly after take-off, into the local township. I tell you that a whole lot of time was spent clearing the area of inabitants, NOT confining them to their homes.

tac


The school lock down is standard now when theres an emergency, its to keep student “safe” inside the school. the concept was mostly developed post-Columbine shootings to keep kids from being exposed to possible danger outdoors and is now standard practice, the kids are kept at the school until a parent can pick them up. Of course this has never been put through a major disaster like an earthquake or major fire yet.

When AeroMexico crashed into my sisters neighborhood, the crash site was wide open for about an hour with emergency crews running around a several street area, along with neighbors, TV crews and lookie lue a-holes come to gawk at the wreckage, it was complete chaos. Police finally cordened off and evacuated the immediate crash site about an hour after, I was at my sis’s house which was a couple streets away for a few hours after, then we got word that the FAA ordered the suburban block area (about a 1/4 mile square along major streets) be blocked off, quarentined, to keep gawkers out and to prevent people from carrying off souveneers and potential evidence. Everyone who left was then checked and not permitted to return. Because the wreckage was over such a large area and in the middle of a suburban area, the word was spread that people who lived outside the evacuation zone but inside the quarentine zone could be allowed to stay in there homes but with the understanding that if they left the blocked area they would not be able to return until the quarentine was lifted, so when I left I was questioned shortly about why I had been in the area, the fact that I lived very close by and that I was checking on my sister’s safety after ment I didnt get much scrutiny, I hope the sick idiot gawkers from outside the city had to answer some serious questions why they were there before being let out. So for about a week my sis would call with a list of groceries they needed I went to the store, then parked on the block, walked over to where the street was blocked with only plastic barrier tape, and handed the groceries over the tape to my sisters kids. I think I did this twice. There were several others doing this as well. It only lasted about a week while FAA investigators combed the area for wreckage and body parts, once they were certain they had retrieved or documented everything, they lifted the blockade, but they were in the immediate crash zone for months which remained blocked off.

The homes were eventually rebuilt and people moved back in, but one home lot where an entire family having a birthday party was killed, was turned into a small memorial park.

Terrible tragedy. I’m sure the pilot did the best he could. Since the seat was found nearby, he apparently ejected at the last second.
Ralph