How Wonderful
US 98, the main East-West route along the beaches in the Panhandle is closed at Panama City until some time tomorrow because a QF-4 drone crashed on take-off from Tyndall AFB this morning. The road goes through Tyndall.
The QF-4 is a conversion of the F-4 Phantom, and is used as a target for weapons systems. As a safety measure the aircraft has a detonation charge that can be remotely activated if the ground loses control. They don’t know if that charge went off when the aircraft crashed, so they are closing the road to prevent any risk.
They had to use the charge to destroy another QF-4 last week over the Gulf, because it decided to wander off course.
US-98 over here goes through Hurlburt Field and an Eglin AFB facility on the local barrier island.
6 comments
Someone asked me why the Predator drones flown over Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran didn’t have detonation charges. This is exactly why — because if one of them crashed on landing, it would be more of a threat to the base than the threat posed by one of them falling into Taliban hands. If one of our drones crashes in Afghanistan, a couple of F-16’s shredding it with their auto-cannons will handle that situation. No need to add hazardous explosives to the payload.
Of course, there’s a big difference between that and the QF-4. The QF-4 is *big*. If it crashed on a populated area, it could cause major carnage, especially if it hit a school or sports stadium or something. Furthermore, the QF-4 is flown domestically, so we actually *care* that it could cause major carnage, while if a crashing Predator wipes out an Afghan tent school full of little tykes, well, eh, they’re just ragheads, right? (Cynical take on the American military’s mentality towards death of Afghan civilians, but probably all too accurate). Being able to blow up the QF-4 into nice-sized chunks while it’s still up in the air is thus preferable to having a 20 ton aircraft go smashing into someone’s elementary school, all those adorable little tykes being pulled out of the smoking ruins of the school would be, like, bad press, y’know. But it does mean that they have to deal with the problem that the Predator drivers don’t have to deal with — i.e., what to do about a crashed plane whose self-destruct explosives may, or may not be armed. A 20 ton crashed plane. A 20 ton crashed plane that contained enough explosives in the first place to turn it into shards a few pounds in size at most. *Decidedly* the kind of situation that gives base commanders gray hairs and causes bomb disposal squads to need Depends!
They couldn’t send in the firefighters because of the charge, and it had a full fuel load, so the JP-4 will burn for a while. If they were using C-4, it would burn, but not detonate. They damn sure didn’t want to risk shorting something with water, so they will wet down the perimeter and wait.
This has been a problem forever. The state insisted on having the road run right along the coast, and the military put in runways that got the aircraft over the Gulf as soon as possible to eliminate worries about damage to civilian property.
A QF-4, eh? My new wheelchair is a Quickie™ QX1, highly customized to fit me by the TIRR Wheelchair Clinic in direct consultation with the manufacturer. Am I in danger of being remotely detonated? I’d have thought this wheelchair more likely to carry a bum than a bomb…
Does it have rocket packs for quick starts, and jet engines for cruising?
I spent hours making adjustments to the wheelchair my Mother used for a couple of months after a bad drug reaction, and was never able to make it really comfortable for her because the adjustments were just too course.
Actually, at the moment, the QX1 doesn’t move very fast even underway, because something is binding against a tire, making a scraping sound any cyclist knows not to ignore. I will be at TIRR in the Texas Medical Center (the main TIRR, not the location of my P.T.) tomorrow; if I’m very lucky I may be able to talk to the Wheelchair Clinic folks. Unfortunately, it’s not my highest priority in going there, so I may have to wait for another occasion.
If you can’t have the pros look at it you might want to have Stella use it a bit so you can see what’s going on.