Belgian Air Force Needs A Few Replacement F-16's

You'd think those 20mm Vulcan M61A1 cannons would have a safety on them.

I thought they were WOW (weight on wheels). But I guess if you are performing maintenance it's possible to have been disabled. Pretty nuts though. Sounds like a whole chain of errors for that to happen.
 
Yep. I don't know if it's the same for fighter aircraft, but every Harley-Davidson service manual I've ever seen had "DISCONNECT THE BATTERY" as the first line.
Even replacing the seat...
 
The technician who caused this mishap will never hear the end of it.

NEVER.

He'd probably deaf now.
 
Wonder how far he jumped when that thing touched off in, what I assume was, very close proximity to his head. Ears are probably still ringing, and will be for life.

Yikes!

Edit- I just said the same thing Reptile did. At the time I read his comment, it flew right over my head. I was picturing coworkers yelling at him until deaf.

That was 5 this morning, it’s 8 now and I just got it.

God that’s embarrassing.
 
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Interesting comments:
  1. This seems unlikely. Virtually all fighter aircraft with weapons systems have a “weight on wheels” signal that prevents the weapon systems from operating while the plane is on the ground. I have to believe there’s information missing from the reporting on this incident.


  2. 1d41b3834786b71f8a1ef0fd079447c8
    Steve Pole 14 October 2018 at 23:16
    The weight on wheels switch (WOW) disables many safety related things on the ground, like firing missiles, firing the gun, transmitting radar, etc. This switch can be manually overridden with a person by the wheel with a screw driver.

  3. fe3f25a76eaacc6b68d1457e83b3f192
    Dean Harper 15 October 2018 at 12:01
    In addition to the WOW safety interlock, which would have to be overridden, there should also be a safety pin (with flag) that the pilot or armourer would remove as the pilot performs his pre-flight walkround. Within the cockpit, the Master Armament control would have to be set to Live and the Gun would also have to be selected via the weapons selector (Gun, Missiles, Bombs etc). Also – why is an armed aircraft inside a hangar and electrically powered-up (other sites have pics with the F16 in question inside a hangar). There is a lot more to this story than has been divulged so far.
 
"Six-barrels 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon"

Wow those must rip

They do....The A7 Corsair and F4 Phantom used them and it was cool when those planes were on downwind getting ready to land on the carrier, they would dump what armaments they still had on board. They would let the Vulcan rip and it sounded just like the plane was burping. The ocean in front of it a few thousand yards would spray up as the projectiles hit the water. if I remember, the rate of fire on those Vulcans was around 6000 rounds per minute.
 
Wow I thought only pilots wrecked planes like that. We'll have to pull a couple out of mothballs and send them to our friends in Belgium.
 

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They do....The A7 Corsair and F4 Phantom used them and it was cool when those planes were on downwind getting ready to land on the carrier, they would dump what armaments they still had on board.

Serious question, I understand the safety aspect of why they would dump unused bombs before making a carrier landing, but why blow off the ammo from the guns too ??? Is it to reduce landing weight ???
 
Serious question, I understand the safety aspect of why they would dump unused bombs before making a carrier landing, but why blow off the ammo from the guns too ??? Is it to reduce landing weight ???
My guess is to make sure the gun still functions. Especially if you didn’t need to use it on that flight. I could be wrong and probably am.
 
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