Originally Posted by
RedhillPhil
Apologies if it's been mentioned, I haven't read the complete thread. Has the Shackleton that scraped along the runway u/c up at the 1957 BoB show in Gibraltar been mentioned? I believe that it was going to do a low and slow when one of the inboards went into overspeed and somehow the same side outboard was stopped and feathered instead.
I passed though Gib in the late 1970's in a U.S. Navy plane. The BOQ or Officer's Mess or whatever it was called was near the front gate and the bands competed on either side of the border during morning flag raising ceremonies.
We had a few pints with our generous RAF hosts and a couple of airshow tales emerged.
Someone told me a Shackleton airshow story, perhaps an embellishment of the 1957 incident described above. Or, was this another incident?
Supposedly the AEW Shack was doing the Gib airshow and was making multiple passes, feathering an engine each time until the last pass which was planned to be a high speed run with only one engine screaming at full power. As they set up for the last pass, one engine was feathered, inadvertently the other was shutdown and a four engine glider sailed past the crowd and ditched in the Mediterranean off the end of the runway.
The crew got out and attendance was twice as high at the next year's airshow. Or so the story went.
Also, I was told of a Phantom driver trying to upstage an in progress Harrier demo with an unscripted high speed pass at an airshow or VIP performance somewhere. The planes collided but the pilots got out. This sounds a lot like an account posted here years later by fantom.