Good Close-ups of a pranged Bone

Apparently, the landing gear warning lights and audio alarms weren't working either.

Apparently, the crew's brains weren't working either. Call-response items on a checklist are only useful if you follow the checklist and do your job.

I wonder if they will get a "Definately Promote"?

Jim Williams Old BUFF Crewmember

My neighbor told me about flying training in WW II Seems that on his first solo flight in a T 6 he came in for the landing absolutely perfect. Except he stalled the aircraft 5 feet above the runway. He said that was the hardest 5 feet he ever fell. (it hurt)

Now the Bone guys, who knows what they were thinking. Isn't there a gear warning horn in the cockpit ? Besides looking at the gear handle, I mean didn't anyone LOOK ? (well obviously not......) I've been on some long flights, 11hrs isn't that long. (but then I'm not the one strapped into an ejection seat for those 11hrs.)

AM

She'll fly again...

That's an awful lot of duct tape in that first picture!

Tom

Well, none of the four crewmen; pilot, co-pilot, nav, and bomb-nav will ever fly a military aircraft again. Does that make you feel any better?

Not really. I would expect at least that much of a punishment. What would make me feel better is to know what they were (or were not) thinking when they had this "slight mishap".

Were they horsin' around, drunk, high or just terminally stupid? Or did they experience some sort of collective hallucination? Or was this just blamed on some UFO?

Peteski

or were they freaked out from the fire? did they have a bunch of malfunctions that had them preoccupied? stupid mistake, sure, but what else was going on? i suspect none of them wanted to throw away military careers.

Have to agree...WHEN did the stated fire start, and what was the procedure for dealing with it? One might quickly assume the fire started during the skid, but it doesn't look like it from the pictures. I don't see any eveidence of external scorching, so I would have to asssume an internal fire...so what systems might have been affected inflight if indeed it was an inflight fire? How big was the fire? Was it a compound emergency? Series of cascading system failures? Maybe the proceedure if you can't get all three down and locked (or a at least a set of two specific gear down and locked) is to belly land. Dunno...haven't seen either the B1B DASH1 or the Incident Report.

Maybe the crew couldn't GET the gear down...had that happen with a fire on a Harrier once...at NIGHT. Pilot landed skidding down the runway on the gunpacks - no fire, didn't scrape either the nose or tail...the he was awarded the Air medal later that year. (Same jet caught fire - in the same wire bundle, with the same crewman - about two weeks later during a daylight op. Got the gear down that time...but he was lucky.)

So the crew may actually be deserving of a BZ...the jet looks repairable to me...could have been a lot worse.

I also thinks it's interesting that you can't read the jet's serial number in ANY of these shots...two numbers at most. I'd bet these are USAF released photos, and if there were anything particularly embarrassing to the Branch concering the incident, they woudn't have cleared the PAO.

Bottom line is nobody here knows what actually happened.

zackly. thanks for putting better voice to my doubts.

Even though your tone was rather smart-assed, I'm going to reply to your comments rationally and factually.

I'm afraid none of your suggested causes apply. They were not drunk. They were not horsing around. They were neither high nor terminally stupid nor experienced a collective hallucination, Further, there was no mention of a UFO. What did happen was that they were was at the end of an extremely long flight and there was, of course, no augmented crew so they were all very fatigued. Yes, there was a warning signal that the gear was not down but they did not say why they did not react to it.

Think about this: Perhaps you've never been tired, really tired. I don't mean being awake BS'ing with buddies or watching TV. I mean like being awake and constantly busy, having to concentrate intensely for 16-18 hours. Sometimes when you're extremely tired like that the mind can "skip" on you a bit causing you to zone out - actually dozing with your eyes wide open.

I'm sure you've never done anything like driving home at 0300 or so after a long night (and I'm not talking booze, just being awake for a long time) and blown through a stop sign without even realizing it or let your car creep off the edge of the pavement? I don't know about you but I'm human and I've been that tired several times during my 29+ years of military service. Hell, I zoned out right in the middle of a firefight once. It was only for a couple seconds but that's all it takes.

How about giving them a break, huh. They screwed up. They know they screwed up. The entire aviation community knows they screwed up. I suspect you've never had wings but if you had, you'd understand that losing their wings is punishment enough. Let it be unless you're hunting for a couple more pounds of flesh.

You correctly judged my tone.

Sounds like you have some insight into the story.

I work grave-yard shift (with at least 10-hour nights). Some nights are more stresful than others. Sometimes I'm up for close to 24 hours straight. Yes, I sometimes somewhat zone out while driving home in the early morning, but not enough to make a major judgement error (so far). And I'm not flying a plane either...

I'm just surprised that this problem occured with more than one person in the cockpit. If I was driving home from work (tired) and had someone with me in the car the chances are that one of us would do something to avoid a mishap. But again, I don't have the complete story here to make any judgements.

You're right - they are screwed. I do feel really sorry for them but the scope of their mishap is a bit larger than driving my car up a curb or scraping against some parked cars.

Peteski

My father worked on aircraft for many many years. And he can tell ya all about the people who have yanked the gear handle UP while the plane was still on the ground... (back in the prop days)

Told me it was quite impressive to stand there and watch it suddenly happen right in front of you.

See specific comments inserted below.

For some reason my Reply here doesn't include the quoted messages, so I'll remark without them.

Not taking everything I read on the net for granted, I searched for an official site that gave an official cause on the accident and could not find one. I found another site, other than the one provided, and it was a carbon copy of the first. I also checked the official USAF website and they have an article about the accident in May and that the accident is under investigation.

Just because someone writes "The Air Force Accident Investigation concluded the pilots forgot to lower the landing gear" doesn't always make it true.

I realize that I may have missed the investigative results in my search, but if the AF investigation has not been completed and posted, then where did the story come from that it was pilot(s) error? The AF website has investigative conclusions on two other B-1b accidents, and an F-16. B-1B

I wouldn't expect to find any further "official" info on the incident, seeing as how the Board may not be complete with it's findings, it was a military mishap and that information is not generally made public, and it happened outside of CONUS - so I wouldn't expect the FAA to have a parallel investigation running which possibly would be in the public domain (which was why I tried to read the tail number in the photos...).

That's interesting...as far as I know, it's not the US Navy's habit to post the results of mishap board investigations publicly, so that's the model I was going by because that's what I'm familiar with.

As I was Googling, I found quite a few public articles on B1B mishaps, but they were all old and smacked of trying to get the program cancelled, so I disregarded them. The USAF B1B incident accounts you cite are pretty old too (on the order of a year) given military op tempo (as I'm familiar with it).

So I'd still speculate that since this specific incident is not posted on the USAF mil-news site that the investigation may still be ongoing; and that the reference to "pilot error" in the original link (come on - the "People's Provisional Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia"?..yeah, that smacks of credibility...although THEY don't say anything about "pilot error" - an RMS poster did...) was also an uneducated leap to a conclusion based solely on the circumstances of a gear up landing.

I won't believe much of anything about what happened to "SLIP 57" until I see the official USAF write up...now that I know it should (eventually) be available.

It was never my intention to come through as "sharpening my knife and slicking off flesh". It was more "shaking my head in disbelief" tone.

Now I see someone posted a more detailed report which seems to be related to this incident. Seems like it was an "operator error" after all.

As I don't walk around my car kicking all 4 tires to see that thy're ok before I get in and drive, I suppose that I can excuse those pilots for failing to notice that their gear was up. :-)

Peteski