Flaming Flattops
To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal.
In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the heat of a jet engine starter, cooked off and sparked a chain reaction of explosions. In those three incidents, 206 American sailors died and 631 others were injured.
Government safety engineers had believed that strict safety and storage procedures on U.S. carriers would make explosive accidents merely a remote possibility. However, carelessness combined with unforeseen series of events meant that the possibility still remained.
“There are 14 carriers in the fleet and I bet they have several fires a day when at sea,” estimated Lt. Cmdr. John Donnelly, executive officer of the U.S. Navy Damage Control Training Center, in a 1974 Popular Mechanics article. The Philadelphia facility was responsible for training sailors in damage control, including firefighting. “Fires have to be expected on a carrier,” Donnelly continued. “You can’t escape that fact—not with the overwhelming amount of fuel and explosives involved, mixing with carelessness and chance [with] 5,000 people living together in a relatively confined area.”
was no stranger to accidents at sea. Off the coast of Korea in March 1953, an F4U-4 Corsair fighter landed with a bomb that fell off
