Once again, my thanks for sending the excellent newsreel clip of BuNo 144830/SS 906 and the Coral Sea mishap. Even though I'd never seen it, I knew that it (or a newsreel of some sort) had existed at one time, because shortly after the event my parents in Titusville, FL were attending a movie and, much to their surprise, saw their #1 son pop out of a wounded bird right there on the silver screen in a newsreel. And now, out of the blue, 44 years later, this gift appears in my in-basket.

When CDR Robert E. Morris assumed command of VAP-61 at NAS Agana, LT Chuck Dumont was assigned as his Photo Navigator and I was assigned as Crewman Navigator. In some squadrons, at least in VAP-62, the 3rd seaters did little or no navigation. In VAP-61, we did virtually all the nav. Since nearly every flight out of Guam was a transpac, and since there was nothing in the way of electronic navaids on board (we never counted on the radio DF) once you got about 200 miles offshore, navigation meant celestial. We had the Baird Atomic sextant hard-mounted at our crew station, and it was sun lines all day and 3-star fixes all night.

Early in 1963 we began workups for a 4-plane detachment to Australia and CVA-43. Our tasking was to provide precision cartographic mapping photography of New Guinea; the plan was to depart Guam for Royal Australian Air Force Station Townsville, then RAAF Richmond out of Sydney, where we'd join up with Coral Sea. The Skipper, naturally enough, wanted to lead the detachment, so we spent a lot of time in the pattern doing FMLP's. Now CDR Morris was, as far as I was concerned, a really fine human being. But I honestly don't recall anyone ever describing his piloting abilities in glowing terms. I think I recall him mentioning that he was a bit "rusty" from having been tied to a desk for too long, and it had been a really long time since his last work aboard the boat. To exacerbate matters, the night before we departed Agana for Australia he stuck his hand into a fan while reaching over in the dark to turn it off, and showed up for the flight with his throttle hand in bandages. So I was excited about my upcoming first carrier landing in more ways than one!

When we got to RAAF Richmond, the whole area was abuzz about Coral Sea's visit. I for one hadn't been aware of the importance of the Battle of the Coral Sea in WWII, and how likely the Aussies would have wound up speaking Japanese if our Navy hadn't done so well in that conflict. But every Aussie darn sure knew it, and the hospitality was amazing to behold. After an all-too-brief stay, Coral Sea embarked a number of dignitaries and news teams and headed out of Sydney Harbor for a day of demonstrations at sea. We manned our birds and launched to join up with the carrier. An air show was scheduled, but weather forced its cancellation. Turned out we gave them one anyway.

Our first pass was a touch and go, and even to this novice it felt especially rough. I remember hearing on UHF "906, Paddles, you lost your nose mount." To that the Skipper seemed to chuckle a bit as he replied "Yeah, it felt like we might have blown a tire." The comeback was "No, 906, your nose gear just went off the angle." At that point it seemed to me the flight deck was getting higher in my field of view, meaning we were sinking. No surprise, since the speed brakes were still out and the throttles hadn't been two-blocked yet. Chuck Dumont later said he finally had to shove the throttles forward himself. It all seemed to take a lot longer as it was happening than it looks now, watching the video. LT Frank Burrows, flying one of the other VAP birds (I think it was SS 911) joined up on us to assess the situation. He reported that the entire nose gear was, indeed, torn away, and the gear door was bent toward the fuselage in a "more-open-than-normal" position. We were bleeding hydraulic fluid from the empty gear well. One of the main mounts, I believe it was the starboard, had a blown tire.

Aboard the ship much thought was being put into what should be done with us. At that time no airfield within our bingo distance had MOREST gear, so a field landing would have meant a long slide on the nose and the attendant likelihood of fire. Bailing out where the sharks grow to 20 feet and more didn't seem an attractive option either. The decision was made to erect the barricade, but that wasn't entirely straightforward, since the photo version of the A3 weighed considerably more than any aircraft that had ever been flown into a barricade before. We did blow the lower hatch, which on the version A3's is a very robust structure, in the hope that it would provide some support. It crumpled like so much tinfoil on impact.

You know, of course, the outcome. But we proved nothing about the barricade, because we caught two wires on that final pass. What the video doesn't show is that the fuselage was actually buckled just aft of the cockpit. In the next-to-last scene of the video, the 3 blokes standing are, left to right, Dumont, Morris, and Peele. Our crew sat out the entire trip back to Guam, and when we arrived there our bird was offloaded onto a barge. From there it was towed to NARF Alameda and rebuilt. According to the VAP-61/62 website, it was lost on a transpac between Cubi Pt. and Agana in November 1966 due to a fuel transfer malfunction. The A3 Association website erroneously states that it was "lost in flight on May 16, 1963". CDR Morris completed his CO tour and went to Pt. Mugu to become Astronautics Operations Officer. He later made CAPT. He was from the Dallas area; we RON'd there once while back in the states to turn one A3 in to NARF Alameda and pick up another one for the return to Guam.