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| Grumman F-11 Tiger |
The early days of fighter aviation were plagued by the problem of pilots shooting down their own planes as they had to shoot their machine guns through the spinning blades of their aircraft’s propellers. This problem was solved with the invention of a synchronization gear that prohibited the guns from firing when the spinning propeller was in the way of the muzzle. Modern fighter jets are complicated and sophisticated machines that have been carefully designed and built to the highest degree of precision but technology has been known to fail.
The first
recorded incidence and the most dramatic example of a fighter plane bringing
itself down took place in 1956. On September 21 that year, Thomas W. Attridge,
a young U.S. Navy ensign took off in a Grumman F-11 Tiger from a test facility
in Long Island, New York, for a weapons test over the Atlantic Ocean. During
the test firing of the aircraft’s four 20mm cannons, Attridge inadvertently
overtook his own bullets, which had slowed down considerably because of drag
and was following a curved trajectory. Attridge was flying underneath the
trajectory of the bullets, and eleven seconds later as he began to pull out of
the descent, he flew into the stream of projectiles. One 20 mm round crashed
into the windshield of the cockpit from above. Another round hit the right
engine intake, and a third punctured the nose. The bullet that disabled the
plane’s engine got lodged in the first compressor stage where it ricocheted
between the fan blades breaking the blades and other components.
An investigation revealed that the object that struck the Tiger’s cockpit was not a bird but the rounds that Attridge had fired during the first burst. The Navy claimed that it was a “million-to-one shot”, but Attridge disagreed. “At the speeds we're flying today, it could be duplicated any time,” he said. On June 20th, 1973, Pete Purvis, a test pilot for Grumman, was flying out of Point Mugu, California, in an F-14 Tomcat, when his plane was hit by its own 'Sparrow' missile. The missile had failed to drop and properly clear the airframe after launch, and then pitched up and punctured the plane's fuel tank. The F-14 was travelling at nearly Mach 1 at the time of firing. Fortunately, the missile was a dummy and the damage was purely from impact. Purvis lost control of his aircraft and had to bail out.
Attridge
returned to flight status a little under six months after the incident. In
subsequent years Attridge would become the project manager for LEM-3, the first
lunar module rated for human flight. He then became vice president of Grumman
Ecosystems. He passed away in 1997.
Video: F11 Tiger The Fighter Jet That Shot Itself Down