As the fighter jet landed on the aircraft carrier, a critical piece of the landing system blew apart, shot across the machinery room, slammed into equipment a sailor had been sitting at only moments earlier, and then hit the deck spinning “like the Tasmanian devil.”
“Something bad just happened,” a sailor in the room said as he raced to get help. The other sailor who narrowly avoided catastrophe suffered a minor injury and had their headset ripped off in the incident.
One of the arresting gear cables — the tensioned wires that US Navy fighter jets hook onto during landings at sea — had broken as the crucial machinery that absorbs the landing plane’s force came apart beneath the flight deck. The failure destabilized the F/A-18 Super Hornet that had just touched down.
Asymmetric forces threw the aircraft off-center. With no chance of regaining flight, the aviators ejected as it shot off the deck and into the sea. It all unfolded in a matter of seconds.
A new Navy investigation into the disastrous landing, reviewed by Business Insider prior to its release on Thursday, highlights how quickly routine carrier operations can go terribly wrong.
The May 6 incident, which injured two naval aviators, marked the second Super Hornet loss in a matter of days — and the third overall for the carrier USS Harry S. Truman’s Middle East deployment.
The command investigation into the costly mishap details how one of the carrier’s arresting cables failed to stop the fighter jet, which left a trail of sparks and flames as it flipped off the flight deck and into the Red Sea.
Rear Adm. Sean Bailey, commander of the Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 8, led by the Truman, said in the investigation that the loss of the $60 million fighter jet was “entirely preventable.”
A rough landing
The Truman and its strike group spent months in the Red Sea leading Navy combat operations against the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen that had been attacking important Middle East shipping lanes.
Flight operations were running at a higher tempo, with the carrier launching and recovering aircraft dozens of times a day.
For aircraft recoveries, Nimitz-class carriers like the Truman typically have four arresting cables tensioned across the flight deck to catch the tailhook of a landing plane and decelerate it instantly.
On May 6, as the two-seater F/A-18F was landing that night, everything looked normal right up until the jet hooked the arresting cable.
Arresting gear sailors heard what sounded like an explosion, parts were flying around the machinery space, and on deck, sparks were shooting out of the jet, followed by flames.
It was dark, and the air boss overseeing the flight operations and landing signal officers, unaware that the cable had parted, thought the fighter’s engine had ingested foreign object debris.
The aircraft was leaning left as it moved down the landing zone. “POWER!” the lead LSO called. “ROTATE, CLIMB!” The fighter jet was traveling too fast to stop, but not fast enough to take off. A back-up LSO realized the aircraft wasn’t climbing and made the call.
“EJECT, EJECT, EJECT!” the officer called out.
The aircraft rolled and then knife-edged at 90 degrees. Moments later, it plunged into the Red Sea.
The “man overboard” call went out a minute after the plane first touched the deck. Sailors on the flight deck didn’t see any parachutes deploy after their cockpit ejection amid the disarray, but a few minutes later, they saw the two aviators illuminate their flashlights in the water around 100 yards away.
Twenty minutes later, a rescue helicopter and swimmers arrived on scene to recover them. The aviators suffered minor injuries.
The ‘critical point of failure’
The command investigation blamed the mishap on a mix of factors, including the ship’s high operational tempo, understaffing, and errors by the arresting gear operator, who ensures the system is ready to counteract the landing aircraft’s momentum.
According to the investigation, “the primary contributor in the chain of events that led to the mishap” was inadequate maintenance on the sheave damper crosshead and clevis pin, components of the arresting gear system.
The root cause, the investigation report said, was “the material failure of the clevis pin.” The pin lacked a washer, a small part that helps keep the system in place. That maintenance oversight ended with a jet in the water and two aviators overboard.
It’s possible this mechanism had been loosening for some time before the mishap, the investigation said. A missing washer could allow the pin in the arresting gear to work loose and shear off, ultimately causing internal parts in the gear to come apart under and the arresting cable to break.
Sailors across the board were poorly trained, the investigation determined, and a maintenance support sailor who was supposed to inspect the arresting cable and its mechanisms hadn’t thoroughly done so.
Vice Adm. John Gumbleton, acting head of Fleet Forces Command, wrote in a letter attached to the investigation that Truman’s leadership across all levels “allowed the air department’s aircraft launch and recovery equipment maintenance program standards to decline, ultimately leading to a critical point of failure.”
The May 6 incident was the fourth major mishap that the Truman and the rest of its strike group suffered during the monthslong Middle East combat deployment.
In December, the cruiser USS Gettysburg mistakenly shot down one of the Truman’s F/A-18s. A few months later, in February, the carrier collided with a commercial vessel. And in April, just over a week before the arresting cable incident, a fighter jet and a tow tractor fell overboard as the carrier made a hard turn to evade incoming Houthi missile fire.
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