With an explosion and sparks, the landing gear of this $60 million Navy jet fell apart in seconds

• A critical system failed as a fighter jet was landing on an aircraft carrier earlier this year.

• The $60 million F/A-18 fell off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman and fell into the Red Sea.

• A new Navy investigation shows how the landing fell apart in moments.

As the fighter landed on the carrier, a critical part of the landing gear exploded, shot into the engine room, crashed into the equipment a sailor was sitting on moments earlier and then hit the deck spinning “like the Tasmanian Devil”.

“Something bad just happened,” said a sailor in the room as he ran to get help. The other sailor who avoided the catastrophe suffered a minor injury and had his helmet ripped off in the incident.

One of the arresting gear cables – the tensioned wires to which US Navy fighter jets engage during sea landings – had snapped when the crucial force-absorbing machine for the landing gear broke apart under the cockpit. The failure destabilized the F/A-18 Super Hornet that had just landed.

Asymmetric forces threw the aircraft off-center. With no chance of regaining flight, the airmen dived as it hurtled off the deck and into the sea. It all unfolded in seconds.

A new Navy investigation into the disastrous landing, reviewed by Business Insider ahead of its release Thursday, highlights how quickly routine carrier operations can go horribly wrong.

The May 6 incident, which injured two naval aviators, marked the second Super Hornet loss in as many days — and the third overall for the carrier USS Harry S. Truman’s deployment to the Middle East.

The command’s investigation into the costly accident details how one of the carrier’s arresting cables failed to stop the fighter jet, which left a trail of sparks and flames as it toppled off the flight deck and into the Red Sea.

Rear Admiral Sean Bailey, commander of Truman’s Navy Carrier Strike Group 8, told the inquest that the loss of the $60 million fighter jet was “completely preventable”.

A hard landing

Truman and his strike group spent months in the Red Sea conducting Navy combat operations against the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen that had attacked important Middle East shipping routes.

Flight operations were carried out at a faster pace, with the carrier launching and recovering aircraft dozens of times a day.

For aircraft recovery, Nimitz-class carriers such as Truman typically have four tension arrest cables on the flight deck to grab the tail hook of a landing aircraft and decelerate it instantly.

On May 6, as the two-seat F/A-18F was landing that night, everything seemed normal until the plane caught the arresting cable.

Sailors arresting the rig heard what sounded like an explosion, parts were flying around the engine room, and on deck, sparks were shooting from the plane, followed by flames.

It was dark, and the air chief supervising flight operations and landing signal officers, unaware that the cable had broken, believed that the fighter’s engine had ingested foreign object debris.

The aircraft banked to the left as it moved down the landing area. “POWER!” The lead LSO called. “SPIN, KILL!” The fighter jet was traveling too fast to stop, but not fast enough to take off. A backup LSO realized the aircraft was not climbing and called.

“EJECT, EJECT, EJECT!” shouted the officer.

The aircraft rolled and then banked 90 degrees. Moments later, it sank into the Red Sea.

The “man overboard” call was issued one minute after the plane first touched down on the deck. Sailors on the flight deck did not see parachutes deploy after ejecting from the cockpit amid the chaos, but minutes later, they saw the two airmen shining flashlights into the water about 100 yards away.

Twenty minutes later, a rescue helicopter and swimmers arrived on the scene to retrieve them. The airmen suffered minor injuries.

“Critical point of failure”

The command investigation attributed the accident to a mix of factors, including the ship’s high operational rate, insufficient personnel and operator errors in the arresting equipment, which ensures the system is ready to counter the thrust of the landing aircraft.

According to the investigation, the “primary contributor to the chain of events leading to the accident” was inadequate maintenance of the damper cross member and head pin, components of the locking system.

The root cause, the inquest report said, was “material failure of the head pin”. The pin was missing a washer, a small piece that helps hold the system in place. That maintenance oversight ended with a jet in the water and two airmen overboard.

This mechanism may have been loose for some time before the accident, the inquest said. A missing washer could allow the pin in the stop gear to work loose and come off, eventually causing the internals of the gear to loosen and the stop cable to break.

Sailors on all sides were poorly trained, the investigation found, and a maintenance support sailor who was supposed to inspect the stop cable and its mechanisms had not done so thoroughly.

Vice Admiral John Gumbleton, acting head of Fleet Forces Command, wrote in a letter attached to the inquiry that Truman’s leadership at all levels “allowed the standards of the Air Department’s Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment Maintenance Program to decline, ultimately leading to a critical point of failure.”

The May 6 incident was the fourth major casualty that Truman and the rest of his strike group suffered during the months-long deployment to the Middle East.

In December, the cruiser USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down one of Truman’s F/A-18s. A few months later, in February, the carrier collided with a merchant ship. And in April, a little more than a week before the arrest cable incident, a fighter jet and a tow tractor fell overboard as the carrier made a hard turn to avoid Houthi missile fire.

Read the original article on Business Insider