Snakes on a plane? Wait for it, someone will have a story to tell. I'd put money on it being a Marine.
It’s a relatively calm time of the application cycle year. I think part of it is loneliness
Plus Midshipman are either home or training. Not much going for people at home.It’s a relatively calm time of the application cycle year. I think part of it is loneliness
Agreed. One of the most sideways threads I've ever seen on any forum. Hilarious.
I'm not sure I ever want to meet you. You are a forum legend.
Never meet your heroes.
I'll take this as an invite for a sea story........ No snakes but wait for it ! Out doing some "routine" training flight ops so we could log some NVG time so there was nothing exciting going on. I was literally hot seating pilots for what seemed like an eternity. I was the Crew chief and I may have closed my eyes for a quick second
when all of a sudden the helicopter (Phrog) jerked pretty violently causing me and the co-pilot to be respond with the expected WTF Sir? To which he responded in a very high pitched voice something ran up my leg! I was like yea ok maybe he feel asleep too! Only a few seconds later I saw a MOUSE run out of the cockpit. I couldn't stop laughing, the pilot did not find it funny at all. I still to this day could not imagine how a mouse got onboard but if I was a betting man I'd put my money on one of the those Texas Marines trying to mess with me since I liked to poke fun at them. Cant make this stuff up!Oh my goodness! You can stay where you are? I hope your family and home are safe!
I'm not EOD, but that was probably the most anxious I ever was in the military, even when the SCUDS were blowing up over us in Riyadh.That is incredible he was still able to land the plane. Was the plane salvageable? Were they able to fix the wing and make the plane flyable again? When you say "explosives," do you mean the explosives that actually eject the pilot? I can't imagine how anxious you were.Another WTF moment ......
After the main fighting was done in Iraq for Desert Storm, they had set a whole bunch of oil rigs on fire and the smoke produced was ridiculous. One day, I was on the flightline waiting to launch one of our aircraft and it started to get darker, but orange-ish. Visibility was almost zero. And this was at 1300 in the afternoon. Needless to say, we did not launch any aircraft for a few hours. It was surreal!
That's not the moment I'm talking about, but it was a direct influence on future events.
Another night, two of our birds were out on recon (OV-1D, fixed wing reconnaissance aircraft for the Army with a side looking radar system), and after finishing their patrol, flew back to the airfield. However, visibility was back to sh-t when they were nearing the runway. One of the pilots did four or five passes to try and locate the runway and was running out of fuel, then followed textbook, asked for a heading away from civilization, and he and the observer punched out and ditched the plane. Some of the other mechanics went out to the site the next day and disabled electronics and data boxes accordingly until the security units could get there to watch over it until it could be disposed of.
The other pilot (one of our most experienced) made some passes, couldn't locate the runway, but decided on taking another. He was really low, saw the runway at his 2 o'clock right below him, banked incredibly hard right. So much so, that the right wing hit the runway and about 6 feet of the wing was bent upward around 30 degrees as a result. But .... he adjusted accordingly and landed the plane.
I was on day shift, so did not see any of this, but they hauled me out of my rack in the morning and said I had to go make the bird safe. You see ...... the observer had actually pulled his ejection seat handles when it hit the runway, but not far enough to engage the explosives. And being one of the only ejection seat qualified mechanics in the unit, I had to go out to the plane and make sure everything got pinned properly without it going off.
... a friend who's a tank company commander found delight with glee of "personnel in the open" and "let it reap."Heck of a thing to have run point!
My title was misleading, it's not a fire, just a storm at sunset. We are good, thank you!
