Fixing an RF-4C Phantom
In late 1974 I was working as a heavy maintenance aircraft mechanic. I worked in AeroRepair, or what we called R&R (repair and reclamation). We were responsible for doing heavy maintenance on the several makes and models of aircraft at Shaw AFB. The primary aircraft on the base was the RF-4C Phantom. This was the photo-reconnaissance version of the F-4C Phantom fighter jet. This model of the F-4 did not carry any armament, only camers and sensors. The most common work we did in R&R was to remove and replace landing gear assemblies, outer wing sections, horizontal tail assemblies, canopies and the various flight control assemblies. We also adjusted the flight control mechanisms, did operational tests on various systems, and prepared engine bays for engine replacement.
Another part of our job was crash recovery. If an aircraft crashed on or near the base we were responsible for recovering all the pieces and helping with the crash investigation (from a maintenance perspective). Most of the mechanics in our branch were qualified to drive all the vehicles used in our job, including the giant 50 ton motorized crane, which could pick up and transport a complete F-4. I was licensed to drive every vehicle in our branch.
One day we got a call that an RF-4C, tail number 265, had just crash-landed on the runway. We immediately responded. The plane was still on the main runway and had to be removed. We brought out the 50 ton crane to do the job. I rode in it and helped direct it to the accident site. The driver was a friend and co-worker named “Pappy” Atkins (Pappy was diagnosed with leukemia and died several years later in his hometown of Slidell, LA). We “carried” the jet to our maintenance hanger and set it down on jacks because two of it’s landing gear assemblies had been damaged in the crash-landing.
We learned that the pilot in the front seat was transitioning from another jet to the RF-4C. An instructor pilot was in the rear seat. They had a normal flight and were coming in for a landing. The pilot didn’t bring the nose of the aircraft down quickly enough after the main wheels touched the runway and the instructor pilot told him to get the nose on the runway. It seems the student jammed the flight control stick forward, causing both of the main landing gears to jump into the air and all of the weight of the aircraft to go onto the nose landing gear. The instructor immediately grabbed the stick and pulled the nose back off the ground, allowing the main gears to settle back onto the runway. When he lowered the nose again, the nose landing gear shattered, the radome (big black fiberglass nose of the aircraft) dropped to the runway, and the pitot tube (the hollow sensor projecting out of the radome) went under the arresting cable that runs across the runway (usually grabbed by the tailhook of the airplanes, like on an aircraft carrier). The thick cable cut through the radome, destroyed the forward radar package, and buried itself in the frame of the nose of the airplane. The plane came to an abrupt stop just at the edge of the runway. The arresting cable also wedged itself between one of the main tires and the landing gear strut. The pilots tried to open their canopies but the entire front end of the airplane had been slightly bent and they wouldn’t open. They were afraid a fire would start at any moment so they blew the canopies. One of the canopies landed on a wing of the airplane, destroying the trailing edge flap. No fire ever broke out.
We freed the RF-4C from the arresting cable, lifted it with the 50 ton crane, and took it to our maintenance hanger. We carefully set it down on a set of jacks because of the missing nose landing gear mechanism. Everyone who was anyone came to the hanger to see the crashed jet. The Wing Commander, Col. Roland Hull also came. He was relieved that the pilots were OK but he was concerned about the condition of the jet. It’s a bad reflection on a commander if he loses one of his planes. He asked our boss if there was a possibility that the plane could be fixed. Our boss said it probably could be, but it would take a couple of days to determine the extent of damage. The Commander asked him to do his best to get it fixed and back into the air quickly. Our boss knew he needed to assign someone to the airplane to supervise the repairs that would be done by many different shops on the base. He asked me if I’d like the job. I’d been in the shop for about a year. I was a pretty good mechanic and the boss knew I was very organized. He knew he’d need someone who could keep track of the ordering parts and the maintenance flow. I told him I’d love the job but I had some requests. I explained that when I was in Thailand I saw something that caused me concern. Two F-4E aircraft were waiting to taxi onto the runway when a bigger airplane tried to taxi by them. The wingtip of the bigger plane hit the vertical tails of both F-4Es, badly damaging both airplanes. One was repaired quite quickly but the other one was more badly damaged. They put it into a hanger but didn’t assign anyone to it to supervise the repairs. Whenever a mechanic got hurt and couldn’t walk around the flightline, they’d put him into the hanger to try to order parts and schedule maintenance on the broken plane. As soon as that mechanic would get well the plane would just sit. Parts that had been ordered for the jet would just be thrown into the hanger around the plane. When someone on the flightline needed a part quickly for another jet they’d just drive by the hanger to see if the part was there. If they found what they needed they’d just take the part. That plane didn’t get fixed the entire time I was in Thailand because they hadn’t assigned one mechanic to supervise the repairs and they didn’t control the parts for it. So, I told my boss I’d love the opportunity to supervise the repairs if he’d guarantee me that we’d keep someone on the plane 24 hours a day until it was repaired. I also asked him if he’d talk to the Chief of Maintenance for me. I wanted to know that no one could just come in and take parts I’d already ordered for this jet and also that no one could take parts off my jet to fix another jet (this is a common practice known as cannibalization–you take good parts off a badly broken plane to fix a good plane quickly and then you back-order the parts for the badly broken plane). He got the Wing Commander to assign a security policeman on the plane round-the-clock and the Chief of Maintenance let all the shops know they couldn’t take anything off the plane without his written approval.
The Wing Commander told our boss that he really wanted the plane to fly again before two months. If a plane was damaged and couldn’t be repaired in that time it was moved into a different category of damage, which reflected badly on the Wing Commander. My boss told him he couldn’t promise it would fly that quickly but that we’d try to make it happen. I worked long hours on the plane for two months. During this time I didn’t work on any other jets. However, I did compete in the NCO (Non-commissioned Officer) of the Month competition during that time and won the top prize for the whole base! We went right down to the line to get the plane repaired in two months. It was difficult because some of the parts we needed weren’t anywhere in the Air Force supply system. We had to get the lower camera access door off a plane that had crashed in the Gulf of Mexico, was recovered, and was laying in a heap in the Air Force aircraft graveyard in Arizona. They had to turn the wrecked hulk over with a bulldozer to get to the door. It was so badly damaged that our sheet metal shop had to replace all the skin on the door before we could use it. We finally got everything fixed and did all the required operational checks we could do in the hanger. We turned it over the the test flight pilots on the last day of the two month repair time. No one expected the aircraft to be cleared by the pilot on it’s first FCF (functional check flight). The pilot kept the plane in the air for almost an hour and a half. When he landed he smiled and said, “It cleared!” It was returned to the operational fleet.
From the outside, no one could tell 265 had ever been in a serious accident. However, if you opened any of the doors on the nose section and looked inside you could see all the repairs that had been done to the structure of the plane. Also, they did measurements on the plane and determined that it was bent almost two inches from the front of the windscreen to the tip of the radome. You couldn’t tell that it was bent but it was. Pilots later told us that it couldn’t fly quite as fast as other RF-4Cs they’d flown. About a year after 265 was returned to the fleet I was walking on the flightline. I saw some pilots at the plane and stopped to talk with them. They told me they were from the Idaho Air National Guard and they were taking the plane to their unit (it was common for older planes from the active fleet to be given to the National Guard units in various states). I asked them if they knew that 265 had crash-landed. The pilot looked astonished and said, “It crashed? It CRASHED!” I told him the story of the crash-landing and the repairs we’d done. I showed him some of the repairs up in the camera bay in the nose of the plane. I told him the plane had been flying with few problems since it had been repaired. He seemed somewhat comforted but still slightly uneasy about climbing into it for the flight to Idaho. That was the last I saw or heard of RF-4C tail number 265.
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