Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"We stopped maybe twenty feet short of the barrier. As I was running the last fifty knots, bleeding off, my wingman said, 'You aren't going to believe what you flew on.' I opened the canopy, and I reached back to shake the hand of the navigator. And as I was reaching back, that was the first time that I looked and I saw that I didn't have a wing on the right-hand side. It's highly likely that if I would have seen it clearly, I would have ejected, because it's obvious that you couldn't really fly an aircraft like that." -- Israeli Air Force pilot Zivi Nedivi, after safely landing an F-15 that had lost a wing in a midair collision with another aircraft. ( History Channel, via YouTube The incident happened 1983-05-01; I don't know when the interview was.) [McDonnell Douglas engineers later concluded that the wide fuselage of the F-15 acts somewhat like a lifting body at sufficiently high speeds. (The pilot lit the afterburners to regain control after the collision, and hit the runway at about twice the normal landing speed, tearing off the tailhook.)]