Chaps/chapesses,
I had the misfortune to be an ATCO at Her Majesties Open Prison RAF Machrihanish between Aug 77 and Jan 79. During that period one of the few periods of ‘excitement’ that we enjoyed was when the Laarbruch Buccaneers staged through Machrihanish to re-fuel and re-brief after using LFA 15 (as it was then) and associated TTAs on their Red Flag work-ups.
The reason for this post is that we had one incident when a Bucc couldn’t lower its gear – at all. It, eventually, diverted to Leuchars where a successful approach end cable arrestment was effected, the fire crews having sprayed some foam on the runway upwind of the cable. The crew were all OK when the aircraft came to rest on its weapon-bay fuel tank and vacated the aircraft without resorting to MB’s finest piece of engineering.
The story that we heard ‘back at the ranch’ – via the usually unreliable grape vine – was that prior to landing:
Only one CBLS jettisoned, resulting in an asymmetric under-wing load/drag distribution;
After jettisoning the canopy, a bird strike occurred on finals;
Having landed in the cable with minimal damage, restricted mainly to the weapon-bay door tank, the aircraft was removed to a hangar at Leuchars to determine the case of the failure of the gear to lower, but something then happened that Cat 4’ed the airframe. I say Cat 4 because the rumour at the time was the airframe was Cat 5, but I can’t find any reference to an airframe being lost in these circumstances and it does sound like the story being embellished to improve its telling!
Does anyone on here know any further details of this incident? Especially, wrt to the goings-on in the cockpit and are any of the subsequent trials and tribulations stories true? As I was the Tower Controller, I’d just like to get the whole story of an incident that I was involved with!