Inside baseball home run.

And yes, massive CG changes can kill you. Cargo (jet engine) broke loose during launch and slide aft.

quote:

Originally posted by arabiancowboy:
Dropping bombs can get perilous too. A friend of mine recently ejected from an A-29 dropping a 500lbs GBU-12 from an outboard pylon. The sudden release of weight caused an asymmetric condition the pilot couldn’t recover from.

For some time, I chalked up a loss of control due to punching off a load to bad piloting technique or inadequate skill.

I knew about the fatalities surrounding the M18 with retardant drops; I was intimately familiar with all of them, and when the 15 mph window came out, I was very skeptical, as I had experience in type. That all changed on the dynamite fire.

After repeated efforts to get into a target on the lee side of a mountain, a burning depression or swail that some smoke jumpers wanted hit, and each time being overspeed and slammed (wind driven fire, mid-slope, very steep terrain, hard push over at the top of a ridge into rotors and severe turbulence), I determined to salvo the load,which meant a loss of more than 50% of the aircraft weight, rapidly, to force the load into the target without too much drift. It has to be a low drop, close to the terrain. Today the minimum drop height is 60', but back then not so; the drp height on this particualr run was about 15'.

When I pressed the trigger, my chin hit my chest, my helmt rotated slightly to block my vision and the airplane pitched vertically. Speed bled off quickly, I felt the airplane lose energy and the controls went slack, and as I tried to lift my head all I could see was blue and the airspeed drop off to unreadable. I was full forward on the stick, meaning I was out of control authority, without respose; there was no way to push the nose back down, so I rolled with aileron and rudder to a 90 degree angle and unloaded to let the airplane slide right and fall through, which it did.

Had that drop been on level ground, I'd be dead presently. Because it was on a steep mountainside, I had altitude as the terrain fell away from me. I let the nose continue to fall through and recovered, and was rewarded with "Good drop, load and return," which means go get more retardant and do it again.

It was an ah-ha moment. It could very easily have been fatal, and despite my belief that only bad pilots let that happen, I just did, and there was no possible recovery as there was no control authority to recover. My legs were shaking on the rudder pedals, and I declined the load-and-return. I advised I was going to shut down for a few minutes for fuel. I had some self-evaluation to do before going back out.

That sort of thing makes a believer.