It's funny, these photos pop up a couple of times a year. Wish I got royalties because I took the black and white photos.
I was VF-213's Aviation Safety Officer and was working two F-14 mishaps that we had just before this incident. Since we had lost three planes in less than two weeks some were suggesting we should change the squadron name from Blacklions to Sealions.
One of the things that's very important in investigating a mishap is evidence. In the second mishap I was investigating one of our F-14's had crashed when he was in the "break" overhead the ship. There was a big question as to whether one or both the wings had been moved from their aft swept position to forward but, even though this had happened directly over the ship I got conflicting answers from witnesses and had no photographic evidence. When I heard about the A-6 I grabbed a squadron camera and ran up 10 ladders to get photos in case they were needed.
What happened with the A-6 was a bolt on the seat broke which allowed the seat to slide up the rails (the ejection seat slides up on vertical rails during ejection) when the pilot pushed the nose over. Lucky for Keith he couldn't reach the ejection handles to "complete" the ejection as his drough chute had wrapped around the empennage. Had he managed to fire the seat things wouldn't have worked out very well and he most likely would have gone from riding on top to being dragged behind the plane. Needless to say this would have been a problem during landing.
After it was all over there was considerable discussion about what would have been done had he come completely out of the cockpit and was dragging behind. There were absolutely no good options and none of bad ones were pretty at all. It's sort of like that WWII story about a B-17 ball turret gunner being stuck in the turret when the airplane had to belly in. What are you going to do? Some said they'd pull high G maneuvers to pull him loose hoping that his main chute would open afterwards. Other's suggested that if that didn't work then drag him off in the water. Still others just said land the plane with him still there. Keith was luckier than you guys know.
Keith sustained relatively minor injuries when you consider the circumstances. The biggest problem he had was some nerve damage in his shoulders due to his arms flailing in the wind. He returned to flying and rejoined the airwing about a year later if I remember correctly.
