These are two photos of the transport of the remains of a 4 star
general.
Sorry, but I don't have more details.
Source: USAF Photo
The info and photos below were obtained from
Chris Behrens' now defunct web-site, www.ChoxNPins.com.
Tail Scrape on aircraft 0020
Many of you (even those who have flown for a
bunch of
years) have never
experienced a tail scrape. At best, it's an obscure theory that you've been
foolishly tasked to look for because it's been done that way for years. Well
here's evidence that those obscure theories have a solid foundation.
On
October 16,
1998 I was sent out to fly a local and found this on an aircraft
that had just gotten back on the ground. The most obvious questions raised
include:
Why had the scanner on the previous leg not spotted this during his
post-flight
walk-around?
Why had maintenance not found it on their thruflight
inspection?
Didn't the crew feel or hear the impact?
The answers as of
yet
are not known, but this is proof positive that you NEED to
look under the belly. If you hadn't guessed, the scrape covered 4 distinct areas
(where the bulkheads are) and included a 5th area on the skid strip on the ramp
although that part is not shown in these pictures. You can see that the scrape in
some spots went through the entire piece of sheet metal and more than likely did
damage to the bulkheads although that won't be known until the aircraft has
undergone a thorough NDI inspection.
The ensuing investigation revealed the reason for the scrape was that the flight
engineer inadvertently transposed the numbers from the TOLD card to the T/L card.
The individual in question transposed Approach speed (Vapp) and Rotate speed
(Vrot), so the crew was almost 20 knots slow on the approach. Luckily the pilots
had a gust on approach and held some extra speed until touchdown or it could have
been a lot uglier than it was. Again, the mistake passed from the engineer to his
instructor, to the jump seat, and to the pilots. Any one of those folks should
have spotted the discrepancy with either the TOLD card or the FSAS.
For a few years I'd been threatened by AMC that I'd better take down the pics.
Ongoing investigation, classified incident, military secrets, et al. Well, the
issue is closed, the report was filed years ago, and the plane is out in the
boneyard. Who can it hurt now?
Chris Behrens
I was TDY to Iceland to recover this aircraft which had been grounded
for flight control problems. A former coworker from NJ had been assigned
to the Black Knights. We met and of course after a few bottles of wine
this tagging resulted. It was on the aircraft for two months before any
formal objections were noted.
--James Snyder