TRADUCTION FROM FRENCH VOICE:

"Here, the nose of the aircraft breaks when landing, the pilot is safe.

But when the plane can not grab the cable, the outcome is often lethal.

- (Wilbur Butler) I believe the worst thing that ever happened to me was to see a pilot friend who told us he had trouble landing with his plane...
He landed, he was going too fast, his plane caught fire. It's really horrible...

November 1994, a F14 landed hard on bord the Kitty Hawk and caught fire. Despite the violent touchdown, the pilot is still conscious and is able to eject.
A few seconds later, the parachute goes down in the middle of the flames but he'll be saved.

- (Bob Dillo) The plane was at the end of the track and there was this huge wall of fire, everything was burning, it was horrible.

Horrible but quite frequent: there are in average each year about 20 serious accidents onboard aircraft carriers.
The main causes of these accidents are bad weather conditions which make it almost impossible to land.

But the worst event took place on the Forrestal in 1967.

An accident caused this time by a human error.

During a normal training session, men are moving a bomb under a plane... one of them will make it go off.

Chain reaction: other bombs explode and other planes full of gaz are caught in the middle.

In a few seconds, half of the bridge is in fire. The fire will last two days and two nights.

In total, The fire left 131 crewmen dead.

Following this tragic event, new security measures were taken to change weapons removal procedures.

Even today, this document is used by the US Navy to train crewmen."

*see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal_%28CVA-59%29#Fire for more on this story.