Pics of Aircraft in Odd Places

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cammerjeff said:
My Father used to say the cheapest way to acquire a Harrier in the 1970's was to buy some property around Cherry Point NC, sooner or later one would drop in.
Click to expand...
We had AV-8s all over Orange County without any mishaps, but I do recall one time that a flight of three CH-53s were flying along the beach and one kept getting lower and lower until it skidded to a stop on the beach.

Turns out they were trying to make it to El Toro but the hydraulics were too far gone. Pilot did a hell of a job avoiding people and picking just the right spot - the sand at Huntington Beach is deep and irregular, but he performed a wheels-up landing in the much firmer upper reaches of the surf.
 
Courtesy of the Grauniad (40 extraordinary places to stay in the UK), fancy a holiday in a non-airworthy Wessex helicopter:



Apparently it's not the only wacky accommodation at the camp site, as this extract from the website explains:

Possibly the zaniest glampsite in the country, Windmill Campersite has a choice of wacky shepherds' huts, VW campervans, a wooden shack and even a helicopter, bang in the middle of the Isle of Wight. It will have the kids' eyes out on stalks. The steampunk-style facilities include an old farm silo transformed into the spaceship-like Siloflix Cinema and a launderette in a converted Robin Reliant. The site is home to chickens and a horse, a silent disco area and a 20-acre field. If you're tempted to escape, there are two pubs a 10-minute walk away, and Carisbrooke Castle is nearby.
 
cammerjeff said:
My Father used to say the cheapest way to acquire a Harrier in the 1970's was to buy some property around Cherry Point NC, sooner or later one would drop in.
Click to expand...
I worked in the NARF there in 1974-75 and there was a big pile of crashed Harrier carcasses out behind one of the hangars. For years I carried around a cartoon from one of the newspapers showing a briefing room where pilots were being told something along the lines of "it's going to be dangerous, and a lot of you won't be coming back, but I'm sure you'll do your best on this routine training mission." The early Harriers were apparently capable of inputting more rolling moment in hover via their reaction control system nozzles than it was possible to counteract with opposite stick, and that's what led to many of the crashes. Or so I was told by the AV-8A engineering staff just over the partition in the next part of our office.
 

According to this (LONG!) list of Harrier accidents, engine failures and bird strikes seem to be common causes. There are several "lost control" but not specifically tied to VTOL manoeuvres.

List of Harrier family losses - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
 
Things posted in articles and books say when in hover, the nose must be kept pointed into the wind. If wind changes during hover or if the plane is allowed to drift so that one intake is shielded from incoming wind, a control problem develops which may not be recoverable at low level. The early Harriers needed some amount of forward movement.
 
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