A USMC TAV-8B Harrier suffered a landing gear malfunction when trying to return to MCAS Cherry Point.
The Marine aviator realizing his gear failed to extend naturally referred to SOP that dictated activating the backup safety nitrogen bottle to blow the gear down.
Unfortunately for the pilot and plane, when communicating the issue over the radio, a higher-ranking officer ordered him not to follow standard operating procedures and instead had a stack of strapped mattresses placed in the center of the runway.
SNAFU
Much to the surprise of the Officer who devised the imaginative contingency plan (without foreseeing the obvious, AND ignoring procedure) when the fighter jet blowing down over 20,000 pounds of vectored thrust from its engines settled down on its bed, the landing mattresses immediately responded with an athletic self-executed rapid kinetic disassembly exploding in a shower of metal springs, fabric and coils that were quickly ingested through the spinning blades of the jet engine.
When ground crews jacked up the Harrier Jump Jet, they we able to blow the gear down with no problems.
This is when the story takes an even stranger turn. Once the jet was placed in the hangar, relatively undamaged structurally speaking, an EZ-go golf cart came flying into the hangar and smashed directly into the jet, causing depot level repair damage.
It turns out that the cart operator was huffing keyboard cleaner shortly before making his parts run in the EZ-go. He got dizzy, lost consciousness and the cart, now driverless, turned directly into the hangar at full speed through a gap in the hangar doors and smashed into the parked Jump Jet.
