CochiLoco

It looks like a scene that no Hollywood director would dare put in a movie because audiences would never believe it was real. Yet the official U.S. Navy photograph taken on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on July 6, 1991 proves every word of it. At fifteen thousand feet over the Indian Ocean, Navy Lieutenant Mark Baden was flying a Grumman KA-6D Intruder, with bombardier-navigator Lieutenant Keith Gallagher sitting beside him in the right seat. Without warning, a mechanical failure triggered the ejection seat under Gallagher while the glass cockpit canopy was still locked shut. The seat rocket blasted twenty-six-year-old Gallagher straight through the thick acrylic glass roof, but stopped halfway up the rails. His boots and legs remained jammed inside the cockpit while his head, shoulders, and chest stuck straight out the top of the airplane into a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour hurricane of freezing air. Worse still, his parachute pack popped open in the slipstream, wrapping white nylon shroud lines tightly around the Intruder's vertical tail fin like a giant net. Hammered against the metal frame by wind forces strong enough to dislocate his shoulders and rip his helmet visor off, Gallagher blacked out. Inside the shattered cockpit, Pilot Mark Baden looked to his right, saw only Gallagher's boots and limp legs, and assumed the blast had killed his friend. Why did Baden not pull his own ejection handle and abandon the crippled airplane? Because if Baden ejected, the firing rocket of his own seat and the pilotless crash into the ocean would kill Gallagher for certain, and a moment later Baden saw Gallagher's gloved hand move in the wind. Dropping the nose toward the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln below, Baden slowed the jet to one hundred and forty knots so the wind would stop suffocating his friend. With a shredded tail fin, an open canopy roaring like a tornado, and a human being sticking out the roof, Baden lined up on the pitching flight deck. He slammed the Intruder onto the steel deck and snagged the number-three arresting wire while deck crewmen swarmed the fuselage to cut Gallagher out of his harness. Gallagher survived with a dislocated shoulder and bruises, returning to active flight duty six months later because his pilot refused to leave him behind.