Appreciate your comments and get me an e-mail if you will.

Don’t know on the Plat tapes and not sure how to get, maybe accident center???

When the accident occurred, I was in Ready 5. I believe I had been on the previous launch, and was still in my flight suit. I remember seeing the plane just after touchdown and realized something was terribly wrong based on right-wing down attitude. As the plat image transitioned to the rollout perspective, we could see the aircraft in plan-view traveling up the deck engulfed in sparks. At the same time we could hear the stub or the right main mount scraping along the deck just over our heads. (Watching this unfold real-time and knowing the outcome had to be dreadful, was very sobering. It felt like being in a very bad dream and realizing you had absolutely no control over the outcome.)

I had no further involvement with the accident until later in the evening. The two dentists on the ship had a stateroom around the corner from Mike McCormick and me. When I would fly those night, low-level, deep penetration mission and come back pretty hopped-up, I would stop by their room, and they would ‘prescribe’ and provide a couple of fingers of scotch. When this took hold, I could relax.

Based on the number of victims and the limited medical staff aboard ship, the dentists had been called in to aid the medical staff following the accident. One of the dentists was a 6-year dentist, i.e., he had two years of undergraduate work, and then did a 4-year dental program. He was 24 years old.

When I visited their stateroom several hours after the accident, they were both pretty drained. This is when I learned they had been part of the medical effort. The young dentist told me that he had amputated someone’s leg. He said that he had never worked on a ‘live’ patient, and his only exposure to human bodies (other than the mouth) had been with a cadaver during an anatomy class in first-year dental school. He was pretty traumatized. I ‘prescribed’ two-fingers of scotch for him!

One thing you may not recall, when your A/C careened up the axial you also knock VF-161’s F-4B, #110, off it’s chocks. I can’t remember specifically if this was also the plane CAG had just flown, but I don’t think so. I think you hit 110 just prior to hitting CAG’s plane. Nevertheless, when the “man overboard” was finally instituted and the ship went into it’s hard starboard turn to go back and try to retrieve Bix, I had, by that time, made my way up to pri-fly and was looking down at the flight deck. Well, there was #110, the plane I flew in the MiG-19 shoot 5 moths prior, slipping back toward the crotch between the angle and the axial only to be gobbled up by the Gulf of Tonkin as it tumbled off the flight deck.

I’ve told this story many times since, but never heard your version, a version that brought back to mind the perils of the job and the amazing heroics of our top-notch Midway crew.

Thanks for sharing it with us shipmates.

Bart
VF-161, CAG-5, USS Midway ‘71, ‘72