Yessir, that was the story I heard as well......to include the part where the cargo crushed the loadmaster guys in the back to death on the cat shot, followed by crushing the pilots up front to death as they swapped ends and plummeted towards the water. Either way, they all died a horrible and needless death.
Not to threadjack too much, but I will admit that I'm afraid of the COD. It is cool that it can take you from the boat to home, but cat shots in the COD are probably about the scariest thing I have done. The power comes up and it sounds like the whole thing is about to fall apart, including the engines (picture a dash-8 that is 100 years old and running at like 120% power), fog starts coming up from the floor, the lights are from like 1952 making the whole scene look like a nightmare. And you are in a tube which, in spite of the pre-launch briefing, is absolutely going to be your casket if anything goes wrong. A friend of mine watched a COD come within a couple feet of plunging into the water following a soft cat, and I have no doubt that everyone on board would have been killed, maybe with the exception of the pilots if they were quick enough to get through the overhead hatches. They walked away with air medals for it, and rightly so, but the thing is a death trap in my mind. I'm more comfortable with traps in the thing, as it has at least already proven that it is capable of flight for the previous couple hours, but there is just too much that can go wrong on a cat shot to make me breath easy. I rode one home last week, and one of my sailors who was sitting next to me couldn't believe that I was nervous.
