And this tidbit was posted on another forum (non-public access I'm afraid):
"Basically, the nose gear wouldn't come done. The Harrier has a backup system with a nitrogen bottle to blow the gear down in this event. Well, someone significantly outranking the pilot ordered him not to blow the gear down (which is the specified emergency procedure) b/c by his reasoning, if the nose gear didn't come down, he was afraid the jet would break its back by having all that weight on the long nose of the T-bird. With that, he elected to gather mattresses and strap them down to support the extended nose, and you have the obvious result.
"Normally" a Harrier that can't get it's gear to come down will suck up the gear and do a vertical landing on the strakes/gun pack, they'll jack the bird up, fix the gear, and it's back to flying rather quickly. In this case, the motor was hilariously trashed with mattress springs protruding out and everything."
TexL1649 From United States of America, joined Aug 2007, 229 posts, RR: 0 Reply 5, posted (3 years 7 months 1 week 2 days 10 hours ago) and read 9863 times:
I've long felt an IQ test of some sort was appropriate for folks promoted to O-6 and above.
DL767captain From United States of America, joined Mar 2007, 2539 posts, RR: 0 Reply 6, posted (3 years 7 months 1 week 2 days 5 hours ago) and read 9763 times:
haha i thought the mattress idea was pretty smart!
DL767captain From United States of America, joined Mar 2007, 2539 posts, RR: 0 Reply 9, posted (3 years 7 months 1 week 1 day 14 hours ago) and read 9472 times:
Quoting UH60FtRucker (Reply 7): But in those cases, there isn't the massive amount of jet wash thrashing the mattresses!
Zkpilot From New Zealand, joined Mar 2006, 4572 posts, RR: 12 Reply 10, posted (3 years 7 months 4 days 21 hours ago) and read 8864 times:
Well the other thing that could have happened from this idiotic idea is that the mattresses could have easily caught fire from the very hot exhausts and set the whole aircraft on fire in a big inferno!!
HercPPMX From United States of America, joined May 2008, 192 posts, RR: 0 Reply 11, posted (3 years 6 months 3 days 17 hours ago) and read 7372 times:
That happened at cherry point, NC a couple years ago, unless it's happened again. Thats what makes the presences of the "lawn darts" interesting you never know whats gonna go wrong next you just sort of know something is coming.
I wonder if this happened at the end of a training flight?
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