USMC KC-130J/F-35B midair near KNJK

MikeD

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F-35B ran into the KC-130J tanker, F-35 pilot ejected safely; KC-130J damaged but appears to have made a successful emergency landing near KTRM.

story here:


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USMC came so close to no Class A flight mishaps in FY20 which ends in 25.5 hours.

Aerial refueling simply isn’t this hard.


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That's why the USAF uses a boom to refuel. It keeps the Navy pilots away.

Better to bend the boom than bend an aircraft.

Forward 10, up 5...

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Well that is about as bad of a tanker midair as I have ever seen (other than the Japan mishap a couple three years ago). Though of note, it is the second F-35 Class A I know of involving tanking.
 
Is that damage most likely from the hose snapping forward and hitting the props, or did the F35 somehow get up underneath the wing? I'm guessing the latter, as they took enough damage to warrant bailing out.
 
Is that damage most likely from the hose snapping forward and hitting the props, or did the F35 somehow get up underneath the wing? I'm guessing the latter, as they took enough damage to warrant bailing out.

if the hose hit the props, they’d slice the hose cleanly in half. However, how a fighter got so far forward as to contact the wing/drogue and props, is beyond me....
 
Only thing I can think of is that something happened to force the ARS pod forward and detach it from the aircraft, thus fouling both props as it went forward, down and away. No idea, but that would be my uneducated guess. If that were the case, I could see damage from the resultant FOD coming off the props and pod damaging the F-35 enough to warrant an ejection, even without the jet itself making contact with anything that far forward.
 
Only thing I can think of is that something happened to force the ARS pod forward and detach it from the aircraft, thus fouling both props as it went forward, down and away. No idea, but that would be my uneducated guess. If that were the case, I could see damage from the resultant FOD coming off the props and pod damaging the F-35 enough to warrant an ejection, even without the jet itself making contact with anything that far forward.

So much for "battled hardened" airframes.
 
any of the modern jet engines taking any kind of FOD down the intakes will shell them instantly, with how thin some of the far back stage blades are.

Oh for sure. Part of the next gen fighter contract was a whole bit about battle damage resiliency, including engine damage. But it was all dumped from the requirements when both LockMart and Boeing whined about it.
 
Oh for sure. Part of the next gen fighter contract was a whole bit about battle damage resiliency, including engine damage. But it was all dumped from the requirements when both LockMart and Boeing whined about it.

Agreed. They were supposed to be, but that fell by the wayside. Gone are the days of rock solid airframes such as the F-4 and F-105, and stout and strong engines like the J57 and J75.

Everyone involved in this incident are darned lucky. I can’t imagine that right wing likely feeling like it was going to separate at any time, possibly factoring in a decision to land off-field rather than take it to a near airport.
 
Very glad to read about the results, I feared the worst with the headline. Damn nice job with the off-airport landing that everyone walked away from.
 
Im glad the plane landed safely and no one was physically injured....

but the pic of the C-130 in the field brought back memories of the one time I mismanaged my energy and landed "out" - that cost me a few pizzas and a cooler of beer for the recovery crew to come out to my location, disassemble the wings off the glider, load it into the trailer and get brought back to the field....

That's an awful lot of pizzas and a few pallets of beer to disassemble that C-130 and stuff it into the trailer.
 
65 years of production and counting. Pretty amazing if you think about it.

For the DC-3 to match, they would have to have been built up until 2010.

it’s rare, but every once in a while a design is just the embodiment of perfection for its given task
 
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