A good amount of paint came off the starboard fuselage just ahead of the tail too. Depressing to see just how second hand she looks after such a gentle ditching and short immersion.

I think emergency gear extension is free fall, plus maybe some "G" to lock down - looked to me like it was sitting on the seafloor almost immediately after it stopped.

Makes sense, thanks. I wondered about an air bottle or some such.

CG

The pilot that lost his life when he ditched that P-47D in the Hudson river after engine failure a few years ago, likely lost his life because he failed to jettison the canopy prior to hitting the water, as per SOP and was trapped inside as the aircraft then sank.

A bit battered and bruised...
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....ed7721cce0.jpg

Prop looks like it might straighten. as for gear freefalling I was surprised they never tried it before lifting, then as it rose they could pull it manually down and lock it, that way they would have had the gear to put it down on when lowering out of the sea, but I don't know the system it uses.. Cowl paint simply hasn't adhered to the primer, that would have eventually shown itself up.

CG/Treads/Nutty,..the gear can be lowered by using the handpump; if that fails there is an `unlock the uplocks`` handle ,and it should freefall with springs assistance...likewise the wings can be folded by the same handpump,but is `knackering`....don`t ask...!

Sycamore, I assume you never flew Stephen Grey's Wildcat? I think the standard method of undercarriage retraction/extension involved a considerable number of turns on a cranking mechanism, with the facility to crack yer knuckles if your hand slipped...

If Lomcevak reads this, he can probably confirm the first bit, hopefully not the second!

That’s correct for the wildcat. But this isn’t one.

update.

Avenger was hydraulic with back up hand pump and free fall emergency facility, found the TBF1 manual here

https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/thread...andbook.38589/

I owned and flew my TBM Avenger for 20 years. The gear is hydraulic and the emergency extension is pull the uplocks manually and free fall. Agree our man should have opened the canopy. Lots of damage to that aircraft particularly underneath.

Apologies, I didn't intend to suggest the Avenger uses the same gear retraction system as the Avenger - rather that the Wildcat's (and presumably the earlier pigeon-chested Grumman biplanes) standard method of gear retraction was as knackering as the backup system in the Avenger (I think I recall 40 turns being required to stow it)... and some people profess to enjoy flying it...! :)

Seems to me that most of the damage to the tail must have been done during the recovery operation.

Interesting photo's appearing elsewhere taken from their B-25 of the formation enroute to Cocoa Beach and its quite clear that there is an obvious blue smoke trail coming from the TBM before even getting to Cooca Beach.

Looks like an extraordianrlily hazardous place for a forced landing with all those swimmers who would be invisible until the last moment. As it was he seems to have only narrowly missed a couple, and there was a whole crowd of them just ahead of where they stopped. Fifty yards further out and there would have been no hazard to 3rd parties...but a sunken airframe. I wonder if that was a factor in landing so very close to the beach.

Possibly.
Plus pilot also not appearing to be wearing any life vest/preserver for an over water display, so again not wanting to be risking ditching in deeper water?

No, not your error, mine, I was in a rush so just put a short answer that may have appeared a tad abrupt, one meant to post a longer version later but fell asleep.

and the wing, though bouncing up and down in the surf you don't know what its beating itself against, the missing bomb door for one

You can see in Airbubba's first pic how the flaps are folded under the wing by it being dragged out of the oggin and up the beach. It will have suffered quite a bit more damage in that process before it got close enough to a crane on a hard surface to be able to lift it (and that rather brutally by the looks of it). The steel hawser has chewed up the engine firewall pretty badly.
No lifejacket. No helmet. Canopy closed.
Hmmm.
I'll await the NTSB's views on very nearly landing on top of swimmers instead of a safe distance offshore with interest.

I've seen it suggested elsewhere that he was hoping to get it down on Patrick AFB's runway, but didn't get quite close enough. Looking at the pic in Nige321's post above, the ditching appears to have taken place adjacent to the beach side car park in the centre of the map here - about half a mile short and with the beach and A1A to cross.

Watched Discovery launch from KSC from around that spot in September '88 - a bonus was watching a U-2 launch from Patrick a short while before (a U-2 and not a TR-1!).

All the the want of a bit more altitude. There's 5 substantial runways within a 20 miles radius of the ditching point, but if you can't there, you can't there.