A Squared
Well-known member
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2001
- Posts
- 3,006
Just came back from a day of annual recurrent training. There was an interesting presentation on aircraft incident, interesting indeed. One of those things that you would be disinclined to believe if you didn't know 2 of the participants and hadn't seen the video. It happened on a ferry flight of a C-119. The 119 had had some serious "issues" one dark stormy night and found itself sitting undamaged on a 2200 foot gravel runway on Kodiak Island. It sat there for 13 years, forlorn, but not forgotten. I'm not sure whether ownership changed, or the some owner eventually found enough time and money to resurrect it, at any rate, it was eventually readied for a ferry flight. On the appointed day, the local townspeople all turned out to watch ... something like this is a pretty big event in a town of 238, and this airplane had been a major landmark for over a decade, so spectators were in abundance. One of the villagers thought that the perfect place to get some really good video footage was right on the overrun of the departure end of the runway, so he positioned himself and his son there with their 4 wheeler (4 wheelers are more common than cars in the villages) The son was given the video camera and instructions go get footage of the entire takeoff. The C-119 started the takeoff run and somewhere past the point of no return had a partial power loss on the #1 engine, swerved left, took out a couple of runway lights and wandered back onto the runway. The villager on the overrun sensed that things were not going well with the takeoff and ran and jumped off the embankment at the end of the runway, the C-119 continued on past the departure threshold, across the overrun off the end of the embankment, skipped the mains on the surface of a beaver pond off the end of the runway, bounced off an embankment on the far side of the beaver pond, staggered into the air and disappeared out of view, training smoke from the #1 engine..... oh yeah, what about the kid, the one with the video camera? Well, taking his instructions to heart, he stood there beside the 4 wheeler, filming the takeoff....as the plane went across the overrun, he passed between the fuselage and the main gear ... the camera bag he had slung over his shoulder and onto his back was cut off by the prop as he passed through the arc of the prop. The prop never touched him. Apparently, that day wasn't his day to die. Like I said, I'd be reluctant to believe it myself if I didn't know people involved and hadn't seen video of the event.
