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"Underwater Missiles"
- Thread starter BigRed389
- Start date
We were the only squadron to do it. P-3s hadn't deployed to an air war area since Viet Nam and CPW-10 was worried. We had quite a few overstress inspections during the training/testing. The squadrons that followed us had a basic 2 or 3 flight syllabus from RAG IPs based on our findings but did not get to fight anyone.Fly Navy said:
All the DACM training came to a screeching halt after we almost pulled the wings off one of our planes flying out of Cocos Islands (Australian). They did a low altitude, high speed (for a P-3) fly-by after takeoff for Diego at max weight. While the g meter only read 2.5, the engineering investigation on the pieces of the leading edges that were recovered showed 8 to 9 gs. Up until then, no one had ever taught P-3 pilots about rolling g's. The pilots were basically exonerated for a lack of this training by the FENAB.
The aircraft lost both leading edges from the wing root past the engines and half the horizontal stabilizer on the starboard side (I think it was that side - hit by one of the leading edge pieces.) The leading edges took a bunch of wires with them and the crew thought every engine was on fire. The aircraft shook so much that the boxes in the equipment bays started falling through to the floor boards. When they dropped the gear for landing the aircraft violently pitched nose down and they barely recovered it to miss the trees at the end of the runway (pictures & video were used to determine they cleared by 4 feet in a very high nose up attitude after disappearing below the trees first).
The engineers believe that the plane would have not fallen apart despite this way out of limits g load if it had not been used to for all the DACM flights at Nellis 7 months prior. They thought it was overstressed too many times there and weakened.
BTW, the stuff at Nellis was more than just DACM. We were the first P-3s to deploy to the Gulf with flares, chaff and IR jammers. We ran the ranges against SAMs and manpads too to develop tactics to counter those threats. It was a very interesting time.
