Death of a Six
From:  "Crocker, Jim" <crockerj@FSI029.FlightSafety.com
19 May 2000

I have a funny but true story about the death of a Six. I wish I had more details - maybe some research is called for. In about 1979-80, the 518th FIS used the 106 at McCord AFB in Tacoma, WA. {During that time they regularly trashed all competition at Red Flag, but that's another story}. Early one sunny morning (a rarity here in the Pacific NW), a two ship was doing a standard takeoff when '2' had a flame-out shortly after liftoff.  The pilot struggled to get the airplane pointed at a gravel pit, but she wouldn't cooperate. He punched out... Shift POV to a friend of mine* in an apartment quad about 1/2 mile from the runway. He just got out of the shower and heard the usual roar of the Sound of Freedom. Unlike usual, however, this time there was a loud pop and only one engine continued. My friend walked to the window and opened it to see an F-106 coming straight at him ass-first! He claimed to not remember how exactly he ended up across the street naked and shivering - only that somehow he did. What he didn't understand, nor did the rapidly growing crowd, was why there was no explosion or fire! Surely a fully loaded fighter should have destroyed the entire quad, and it was very unlikely that they had all shared the same hallucination. Besides, he wasn't the only one naked! They gingerly walked back to their apartments and looked out the windows facing center of the quad. There they found a very wet, muddy, nasty looking F-106 steaming in the mud at the bottom of what was a duck pond, along with the tops of three 10-inch diameter Ash trees; cleanly clipped off about 20' AGL. Official casualty count: 2 Mallards. Meanwhile, as the Base fire department was driving through the chain-link fence, a gentleman who was raking his yard heard a voice yelling at him from above. He looked up just in time to see the ejection seat falling into his garden, followed by the pilot in full parachute. It took almost three weeks to extricate the airframe from it's location, surrounded by apartments. The pilot received a medal (DSC?) for staying with the airplane as long as he did. *I have, unfortunately, lost track of this friend. He had a couple of my albums, too!