Beyond limits: we shut off the right engine, did the checks, but, when it came time to restart, nothing happened

Approach, July-August, 2005 by David de Carion

We only had a few weeks left in our six-month deployment to Iwakuni, Japan, and we were enjoying a relatively ice--for Iwakuni--Friday afternoon. The maintenance department was catching up and getting the jets ready for our departure, and we needed a Pro A on aircraft 7.

My weapon-system officer (WSO), "Gary," and I briefed, walked, and started the A card. We took off in our Hornet and headed to the Lima area, about 20 minutes out. The card went smoothly, all the way until the 15,000-foot checks--which thankfully since have been deleted.

We shut off the left engine, did our checks, and got it restarted. We shut off the right engine, did the checks, but, when it came time to restart, nothing happened. The rpm's momentarily started to increase, but then they dropped to zero--great. I turned us toward the area's exit point, started to climb, cranked the right again, and still nothing. Gary broke out the book, and I tried a third time to get the engine to turn over--still nothing.

We decided to try a windmill start. At 17,000 feet, I put the left throttle to mil and nosed it over. At 14,000 feet, we got a flicker on the rpm's, and, at 9,000 feet, we had 15 percent--enough to bring the throttle to idle. Finally, at 5,000 feet and 420 knots, three things happened: The bingo bug went off, we got an FCS X, and the right engine came back on-line. Gary reset the bingo bug, I reset the FCS, and we climbed to go home.

I said, "Well, I've had enough fun for one day, how about you?"

He replied, "Yeah, that's about enough excitement for me." Little did we know.

We headed back to the field, disappointed we weren't bringing back an "up" jet but glad we didn't have to declare an emergency. As we came out of the break, tower told us to check our gear; we were cleared to land. I dropped the gear, but, just when Gary was about to answer, we looked down and saw the right main didn't indicate down. Then the light in the gear handle and the gear-warning tone came on.

"You have got to be (kidding) me," Gary said. I agreed.

We told tower we only showed two gear down. They asked if we wanted to do a flyby so they could check, which we did. Tower said that not only was the right main not down and locked, it wasn't even out of the airplane--great.

We requested a climb into the delta pattern, went to half flaps, and checked our gas. We had 2,800 pounds of fuel, so we had some time. Gary already had the book out from our restart adventure, so he began to look up the procedure. I told tower we were troubleshooting but did not yet want to declare an emergency. We also told base we showed one unsafe gear, and we were going through the procedure in the delta pattern. They asked if we needed anything; we replied, "No, not yet."

Gary and I decided he'd verbally go through a few steps of the procedure and that I'd tell him what I was doing as I did it.

After two trips around the delta pattern, we had completed the unsafe-gear procedure, accelerated, decelerated, yawed, and pulled as many Gs as we could get out of a dirty Hornet going 150 to 200 knots. The gear didn't budge. To add to our annoyance, we kept getting an FCS X in one of the channels, which reset every time. We decided to continue resetting it, unless we were in the middle of doing something else but then later reset it.

Base came back and asked how it was going, and we gave them the update. We still had about 1,900 pounds left, so we again ran through the procedure, but, this time, base walked us through it from the big book. We decided to declare an emergency with tower, who already had notified the crash crew and had arranged to rig the arresting gear.

We completed the unsafe-gear procedure a second time, punctuated by the statement, "Well, that's the end of the checklist."

In earlier training sessions, our ASO had done a superb job informing us of recent Navy and Marine Corps fatalities with off-runway landings; we were aware of what could happen.

We knew it would have to be a two-gear landing, and it was going to turn out either really well or really bad.

We were down to about 1,300 pounds when base suggested we do a touch-and-go on the good gear to knock down the bad gear. Gary and I came up with a plan, told the tower what we were doing, set full flaps, did our new version of a landing checklist, and came in for a touch-and-go. I told him if anything started to go wrong, or if either of us didn't like where it was going, I would get us up and out of there as quickly as possible.

We did a min-sink-rate approach, and I kept up the power to give the control surfaces more authority. As the left wheel touched down, I held off the right tank (we were double bubble) with aileron. We rolled for about 1,500 feet and took off again. Our right main still showed unsafe, which tower confirmed. I did, however, have a better feeling of how the jet was going to behave on just one wheel.

We had run out of time and gas, and it was time to land on our two good gear and right wing tank. We told tower we would try an arrested landing. We turned back around and set up for a low, long approach. Again, we came up with a game plan in case either of us felt things weren't going right. If we boltered, we were going to take it around. I told Gary I wasn't going to use the brake, just the nosewheel steering, because one wheel wouldn't be turning, and the other one would. We briefly discussed taking the gear off-center to compensate for the extra drag on the right side, but we decided against adding another variable to our problem. Base reminded us to safe our seats before unstrapping--good idea.