F-16 oh dear.

[stuart]

A Norwegian fighter jet has accidentally machine-gunned a control tower with three officers inside.

http://news.sky.com/story/1684626/fight ... trol-tower

[Boac]

Reminds me of the apocryphal 'Puddy Cat' story from his Meteor cockpit at Chivenor:

"tell the bastards I'm towing the target, not pushing it"

What is really worrying about this Noggie episode is that they basically missed the target.

[Ex-Ascot]

Guess the Noggie pilots really don't like ATCOs.

[Boac]

Aarr! They be range controllers, not ATCOs.

[Ancient Mariner]

Happened to me when we were towing a target for the costal artillery in the Oslofjord. The feckers at Bolærne couldn't figure out which way we were moving so shells rained down on our little 60 foot aluminium boat.
Strong words exchanged over the radio.
Per

[Alisoncc]

Heard recently that the Iraqi air force have just taken delivery of half a dozen F-16's. Sure it wasn't one of their pilots who had got a teensy weensy bit lost.

Alison

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

It happened once on an APC I was on. The fines in beer, payable to the tow aircraft crew, were enormous, but gratefully paid and no incident officially reported. The Boss admitted to having been similarly fined in his youth. The tow crew got famously drunk for an entire weekend and all was forgiven.
The worst bomb drop whilst I was on weapons training missed by about 4 1/2 miles. The pilot pulled out of the dive dry, then hit the pickle button in the climb whilst trying to replace the safety cover. He effectively toss-bombed across the estuary. Fortunately, there was an Army Tank gunnery range on the other side of the estuary. Which wasn't active. "Can we have our bomb back, please?" More huge quantities of beer and no reports.

[Sisemen]

And then there’s being clunked by the spent cases while the target, some distance away, is being deconstructed.

[izod tester]

I remember reading about a Supermarine Swift which shot itself down whilst strafing. The aircraft caught up with the rounds it had fired earlier.
Tried to find an on-line verification on the incident but unsuccessful so far.

[500N]

A post on another forum re the Blue Angels reminded me that a US F-11 Tiger (excuse if that is the not 100% accurate)
shot itself down when testing a ? 20mm ? Cannon by flying into the stream of bullets and being hit 3 times.

[Boac]

Ricochets (that well-know Irishman) from strafe targets are a well-known hazard, as are the explosions and debris thrown up when you actually destroy something with live ammo.

[izod tester]

When I was on TCW we used the Otmoor range once or twice every month. I noticed that aircraft from one of the flying schools from Kidlington were regularly flying quite low over the range. I invited their CFI to a shoot and as a demo we fired tracer from a GPMG into the butts to show where the ricochets were going. His aircraft flew a much higher pattern after that.

[500N]

When I was on TCW we used the Otmoor range once or twice every month. I noticed that aircraft from one of the flying schools from Kidlington were regularly flying quite low over the range. I invited their CFI to a shoot and as a demo we fired tracer from a GPMG into the butts to show where the ricochets were going. His aircraft flew a much higher pattern after that.

We were doing a full on, live fire raid on the old Launching pads at Woomera Rocket range.

Our mission was to blow up one of the pads, an F-111 was tasked with dropping live 500lb bombs
on the other one about 1km away.

We were supposed to be long gone out of the area by the time the F-111 was supposed to arrive
but due to various delays, we were still on the target, 100 soldiers happily firing away with every
weapon we owned - including at least 6 x M60 machine guns. Now this is a very rocky area on the
edge of Lake Hart and so ricochets were going in every direction, including many vertical.

The F-111 came in at about 100 feet and flew right through the lot and I know 2 of the M60's were
firing exactly in his direction. How he wasn't hit, god knows as I clearly saw tracer going vertical
through his flight path.

[54Phan]

A post on another forum re the Blue Angels reminded me that a US F-11 Tiger (excuse if that is the not 100% accurate)
shot itself down when testing a ? 20mm ? Cannon by flying into the stream of bullets and being hit 3 times.

Yes, it was a U.S. Navy Grumman F11F.

[500N]

Thanks. I read it many years ago.