To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal.
In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the heat of a jet engine starter, cooked off and sparked a chain reaction of explosions. In those three incidents, 206 American sailors died and 631 others were injured.
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