An imperfection in the tip of an F-15D’s nose ultimately brought the Eagle down, causing it to crash on Oct. 8 in a north England field, the Air Force announced this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The F-15, assigned to the 493rd Fighter Squadron, RAF Lakenheath, crashed during a training flight. The pilot was able to <\/span>ejected and sustained minor injuries. The F-15 was destroyed at a loss of more than $44 million, and the Air Force paid a local farmer more than $600,000 to clean the wreckage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The F-15 was part of a two-ship flight performing basic fighter maneuver training that afternoon in the East Anglia airspace north of the base. During the third and final exercise, the F-15 participated in a short-range defensive engagement at about 18,000 feet when the pilot performed . The pilot began with a slightly nose-low, 7g turn at full after burner before performing <\/span>a maneuver called “vertical jinks” as a way to get away from a trailing jet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The pilot lowered the throttle and performed two nose-low – <\/span>maneuvers, dropping about 2,000 feet and changing direction abruptly. During this maneuver, the F-15 began to oscillate and entered into a flat spin. The pilot began to follow instructions on his heads-up display, but was unable to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About two minutes after beginning the maneuver, the pilot radioed to his wingman “I’m out, man,” and ejected. The F-15 crashed into<\/span> a local <\/span>field, and the pilot was recovered by a pararescue crew out of Lakenheath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Air Force investigators were able to recover the front section of the Eagle’s radome, which showed an imperfection on the tip, called the nose cap. There was a gap between the radome body and the cap, with about 3\/16th<\/sup> of an inch of sealant extruding from the section creating “an uneven aerodynamic surface,” an Air Force Accident Investigation Board report stated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The F-15 System Program Office told investigators that an imperfection like this is consistent with wind tunnel tests that found it would cause a high enough yaw rate to create an aircraft spin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The accident board concluded that the F-15 crash was caused by this imperfection, combined with the pilot’s abrupt aft-stick pull that put it the aircraft into the spin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An imperfection in the tip of an F-15D’s nose ultimately brought the Eagle down, causing it to crash on Oct. 8 in a north England field, the Air Force announced this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":57853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":67,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[16,67],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1695],"class_list":["post-29212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-air-force"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"52SYSJI43RDNBALTAMLZLRNF34","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-air-force\/2015\/03\/13\/air-force-tiny-imperfection-on-f-15-s-nose-caused-october-crash\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n