A Navy F-18 fighter just went down smack in the middle of a Virginia Beach apartment complex, demolishing buildings and leaving others ablaze after multiple explosions—the jet itself is an enormous flaming heap of jet wreckage.
WAVY-TV reports "the Navy told WAVY.com the plane was an F18 Strike fighter squadron 106," and is clearly still ablaze from on the ground images. No word on whether any pilot was injured (or dead), but there are already reports of injured pedestrians. No word on what caused the plane, which costs tens of millions of dollars to go down, but it somehow managed to avoid hitting a minigolf course and water park, though nearby residences may not have been spared. CNN relays one particularly awful detail:
I grew up under the traffic pattern at Oceana in Virginia Beach. Laying in bed at night, I could identify F-4s, F-8s, A-4s, and A-6s by the sound of their engines as they flew right over the house. Remember during a little league game looking up and seeing two chutes from the aircrew that had ejected from their A-6, coming down near our field.
Stuff's going to fall out of the sky occasionally. Hope not too many people are hurt.
To bad that rocket seat is not going to take him to safety. There is no way his chute will be able to deploy, so he is just going to go skipping off the ground in his rocket seat... though I guess he will fair better than if he stayed in his plane, or the crowed getting pwned by his plane...
"I swear by my life and by my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine"
To bad that rocket seat is not going to take him to safety. There is no way his chute will be able to deploy, so he is just going to go skipping off the ground in his rocket seat... though I guess he will fair better than if he stayed in his plane, or the crowed getting pwned by his plane...
Ever heard of a 0/0 seat ?
"Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt "
It was reported on the BBC that one of the pilots apologised to a home owner for crashing into this house, just before the said pilot was stretchered into an ambulance.
That's chivalry, and if I was an American, I'd feel pretty proud of that pilot.....
The picture I posted doesn't really go with the words. The only reason that Soviet pilot or our Amerkin Hornet flyin' brethren would ever punch out that low was if they were trying to not put the plane down on the orphanage, so to speak. The Hornet drivers floated down into the crash site, telling you just how low they were before pulling the handle. Bless'em all for hanging on. It is a funny picture, though.
