F-15 Emergency landing – Runway Overshoot led to Ejection

Here is a video of F-15 Emergency landing – Runway Overshoot led to Ejection

On 9 November 1995, the pilot of an F-15A (SN 76-0061/SL), call-sign “Misty One”, experienced an engine fire in the right engine.

The pilot shuts down the engine, but the fire continues, as observed by his wingman, “Misty Two”. He declares an emergency and heads to nearby Whiteman AFB in Missouri.

In the HUD display video above, you can see the airspeed and altitude tapes in the HUD and listen to his conversation with his wingman and ATC.

He touches down at very high speed (260 knots), but can’t get it stopped on the available runway and ejects just as the plane exits the departure end of the runway.

The pilot is very professional in handling this emergency: listen to his rate of respiration. The camera and aural alerting continue throughout the rollout–he gets the message about “bingo” fuel after all the parts have stopped moving.

Two inexperienced F-111 pilots made belly landing using a retractable hook

Some of above video is out of focus. In 1985 video cameras just came out. The Air Force firemen had never use one and it goes out of focus at the end.If this bothers you, “Move along, this is not the video you were looking for.”)

After takeoff, Pilot could not get the landing gear to indicate “UP” and it felt like the gear or a gear door was sticking out.

The gear lowered normally and looked good on a check from the ground with binoculars. On touchdown, the jet started leaning hard right and it felt like the right gear was collapsing.

Pilot slammed the throttles up into afterburner at the first hint of the right tilt and as the burners lit, the jet fell out from under the pilot.

Pilot sucked the stick back all the way and kept it in the air, barely missing the ground.

It turns out the right gear was compressing normally and when the aircraft tilted right, the left gear, with a broken strut that was jammed at full extension, broke out of the cylinder and collapsed.

Now the wheel and strut assembly was swinging in the breeze horizontally.

While pilot circled and burned down fuel, the squadron conferred with McDonnell Douglas by telephone.

The first solution was to take an arresting cable with the tail hook.

The pilot turned that idea down since the left gear could catch the cable first and spin jet around or flip me over.

Then, they considered a controlled ejection–Pilot wasn’t interested in that at all.

So, he landed on the right wheel and lowered it on the external tanks and, as they say now, it was all good. This is the video of the one-wheel landing.