Hmm… Lemme think about that. You refer to our old buddy who now works for Mrs. Bombardier, teaching young sprogs the finer points of RJ handling. You understand, of course, that I wasn’t part of that event, just an innocent by-stander but therefore a witness.
That’s 35 years ago this month but if memory serves it was a dark and dirty night in mid-Atlantic with a lot of confused deck motion and already a few bolters and wave-offs. This light fleet carrier (CVL), sister-ship to Karel Doorman, Melbourne, Cinqo de Mayo and others, had a lively motion in a seaway. So our friend’s line-up on final is more axial than centered on the angled-deck, the ship pitches and the wires drop away under him as the Grumman S2F [the Stoof] comes across the landing area, momentary touch down too far forward as the full power comes on and he encounters his next obstacle: the forward deck park where previous landers are resting.
I remember the bits of sheet metal flying through the air and live ordonance from the under-wing racks rolling around the deck but our friends kept on flying with a good portion of the right wing missing. As I said in a previous post, Mrs. Grumman builds a solid airplane. Bingo fuel’s long gone though and with some serious controllability issues, he can’t bring it back on board so he ended up ditching at night alongside one Her Majesty’s Cdn destroyers who were gracious enough to turn on some lights for the occasion. The crew got picked up by the lifeboat, brought aboard the destroyer and promptly served a sufficient amount of pusser’s rum to ensure a relaxed state of mind.
So in answer ot your query, Madtrap, I think it was neither a mid-air collision nor a maneuvering accident but a clear case of controlled flight into a [several] ground-based obstacle[s]. So there we were, witnesses to a CFIT event long before the term got coined – although there is some room for debate about the ”controlled” part in this case.
Regards