Standard Nimrod hospitality whenever we took a jet to an airshow. Happened the world over

When I was at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis in the early 80s there was a Red Flag exercise that included an F-15 squadron from the Fighting First at Langley. They were still flying A and B models at the time. One of their jets had a landing gear issue that caused it to come back Code 3 after a sortie. Whatever it was, a part was changed out. The jet was then written up with a Red Dash for an In-flight ops check on the landing gear. I say again, In-flight ops check on the landing gear. Needless to say, the In-flight ops check failed miserably. The right main failed to extend; the door wouldn't even open. The emergency gear extension failed. The pilot tried everything he could to get it to come down, to no avail. Eventually he was way past Bingo Fuel, and had to bring it down or punch out. His decision was to attempt to engage the approach-end cable with the arresting hook. He missed. He is now skidding down Runway 21R on his left main tire, the nose tire, and amazingly, the tail hook. As God is my witness, he rode that thing 3/4 of the way down the runway before the jet finally veered off into the dirt between the runway and the main taxiway adjacent to the flight line. Fortunately, it was a rare rainy day in Vegas that day, so the dirt was soft instead of the normal hardpan. We ended up babysitting that jet for six months while a depot-level repair crew came in and rebuilt the right wing. They didn't even let us turn it into a Hangar Queen that we could cannibalize parts from. So a word of caution to all you Air Screws reading this, if you see something written up for an In-flight ops check that might give you pause, refuse to fly in it. It's one thing to check the radar, but landing gear and flight control ops checks are best left to us Booger Hookers.

Starbaby is the BASF of flying stories. He doesn’t make the stories, he makes them BETTER!

That’s funny! I can’t even imagine that! My dad used to drink Scotch as his go to drink. I never liked it at all, with or without ice the stuff is just nasty! I’ve never really been a big drinker or liked the feeling of being drunk so that probably doesn’t help but it’s definitely not a good taste!

Haha!