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Best of BS 2016: See How A Student Crew Landed A B-58 Hustler With Damaged Landing Gear After Fourteen Hours In The Air!


Best of BS 2016: See How A Student Crew Landed A B-58 Hustler With Damaged Landing Gear After Fourteen Hours In The Air!

If there is one thing that will put the truest icy spike of fear into your spine, it is when something breaks on the aircraft you are operating. I once had the cable that operates the rudder on a Cessna 172 snap on me. No joke…there was a “twang!” noise that sounded like someone snapped a guitar string, and the foot pedals went absolutely dead. The only lucky part of the story is that it happened during…and I’m not kidding about this…the final ground check before I was supposed to hit the runway and climb into the sky. Care to guess how long it took me to inform the tower that I was taxiing back and parking? There might have been a tiny sonic boom from my finger going to the radio control. Ok, so that might not be the most drastic example ever made, but the basic thing is that if something goes wrong on an aircraft, your life expectancy number has just pancaked to the very short term until the issue is resolved. Some aircraft are natural gliders. The Convair B-58 Hustler isn’t one of them…when things went wrong, they went seriously wrong. In this incident from 1961, a B-58 on a training flight saw the left rear bogey (landing gear set) come apart, bend into a 45-degree angle. Just to add on to the misery, the aft main fuel tank had been punctured and over 15,000 pounds of fuel had been torched off by the afterburners at takeoff. Fourteen flight hours, eight exceptionally tricky refuels and a trip to Edwards AFB in California later, and the Hustler was landed on a runway covered in foam. That’s the kind of experience that can make even a jaded pilot question their commitment!


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