{"id":113460,"date":"2021-05-13T09:53:18","date_gmt":"2021-05-13T13:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=113460"},"modified":"2021-05-13T09:53:18","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T13:53:18","slug":"a-10-pilot-honored-for-landing-warthog-without-working-landing-gear-cockpit-canopy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=113460","title":{"rendered":"A-10 pilot honored for landing Warthog without working landing gear, cockpit canopy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Capt Taylor Bye, A-10 pilot extraordinaire<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is one badass, ballsy young aviator. If the story sounds familiar, the same exact thing happened to a Michigan Air National Guard pilot, Major Brett DeVries<\/a>. He earned a DFC for his airmanship, and I think Captain Bye deserves similar.<\/p>\n

Air Force Times reports<\/a>;<\/p>\n

A typical training flight over Georgia last spring turned nightmarish for A-10C Thunderbolt II pilot Capt. Taylor Bye when her attack aircraft began falling apart in midair.<\/p>\n

Juggling a malfunctioning 30mm Gatling gun, a landing gear that wouldn\u2019t deploy and a cockpit canopy that fell off in flight, Bye managed to safely land the aircraft with minimal damage to the runway or the plane.<\/p>\n

Her courage and cool in crisis earned her the Air Combat Command\u2019s Airmanship Award in a May 5 ceremony at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, where she serves as a 75th Fighter Squadron pilot and its chief of standardization and evaluation.<\/p>\n

The emergency occurred April 7, 2020, while Bye was flying at the Grand Bay Bombing and Gunnery Range east of Moody. During a surface attack ride, a key maneuver for swooping down to shoot at enemies on the ground, Bye tried to fire the A-10?s gun but suffered \u201csevere failures,\u201d according to a May 7 Air Force release.<\/p>\n

She climbed farther away from the ground to check whether her engines were still functioning. Her nearby wingman, Maj. Jack Ingber, the squadron\u2019s assistant operations director, looked over her jet from his own plane and helped guide Bye back to the runway.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen anything [unusual] happens, it\u2019s apparent and very easy to spot it and fix it,\u201d Ingber said in the release. \u201cIt\u2019s my primary job to think of everything that [Bye] is not because she has a massive handful of an airplane that is falling apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

On her canopy-less descent back to Moody, Bye tried to shift down in her seat to shield herself from the 350-mph winds whipping the plane \u2014 but blocked her view of the runway in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, \u2018where\u2019s the ground, where\u2019s the ground\u2019 \u2026 I was holding my breath at that point,\u201d she said in the release. \u201cI guess I was nervous the whole time, but I didn\u2019t have time to think about being nervous. My job was to take care of myself and to take care of the jet.\u201d<\/p>\n

A chase aircraft accompanied her back to base, where airmen on the ground hoped she could avoid a fatal crash.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s most important is preventing total loss of the A-10 or even worse, her life,\u201d squadron commander Lt. Col. Stephen Joca said.<\/p>\n

Bye maintained control of the aircraft and safely landed the Warthog on its belly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BZ Captain Bye! I feel like after the first pilot lost their canopy unexpectedly they’d find and fix that problem. Not exactly the sort of thing you want to lose routinely in a high performance single seat jet aircraft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one badass, ballsy young aviator. If the story sounds familiar, the same exact thing … A-10 pilot honored for landing Warthog without working landing gear, cockpit canopy<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,410],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-force","category-bravo-zulu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113462,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113460\/revisions\/113462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}