The Time a Plane Launched Directly Into a Wave
All seemed calm as the Grumman S-2E Tracker took off, but then…

By Kyle Mizokami
Dec 7, 2017

In 1971, the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga was launching and recovering aircraft when a freak accident occurred: a S-2E Tracker anti-submarine aircraft accidentally flew right through a wave. The incident, which was recorded on video, surfaced on YouTube more than forty years later.

The USS Ticonderoga was an Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II. By the 1950s she was on the small side, as the larger, more powerful Forrestal-class aircraft carriers rolled out of shipyards. Smaller carriers were given more specialized tasks, and in the 1960s Ticonderoga was designated an anti-submarine warfare carrier.

The main anti-submarine aircraft of the time, the S-2E Tracker, was a prop-driven airplane with a crew of four. On this day in particular a Tracker from VS-38, "The Red Griffins", was lined up on a bow catapult waiting to take off. As War History Online tells it, carrier Launch Officers typically time catapult launches between waves, for the safety of the aircraft and the aircrews.

This time, however, a rogue wave surged just as the Tracker was taking off. The plane disappears from view, hidden by a wall of water, and loses altitude before finally re-emerging into the view of the camera and flying on. The plane and crew were safe, although the Tracker probably needed a good hosing down to remove corrosive seawater from...pretty much everywhere.

Read more at War History Online