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Fish Tale: Turns out that missile was not explosive
Update...There they were, a crew of four, aboard the commercial fishing boat, the Bold Venture, about 60 miles west of Panama City. Trailing behind the vessel, connected to a hydraulic spool, was eight miles of line with 2,000 hooks, designed to snare up to 3,800 pounds of fish. One of those hooks caught something other than the yellow-edge grouper Capt. Rodney Prudo and company hoped to ensnare in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That hydraulic spool started grinding to a halt. Slowly, the crew hauled in the heavy catch. As it was lifted out of the water, First Mate Mark Wheeler looked at it and thought it was a boat propeller. But Prudo was the first to identify it correctly. "When we brought it up, the captain goes, 'Oh, it's a missile,'" Oh? Wheeler said. Prudo and crew loaded the 8-foot-long, AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile onto the roof of the Bold Venture, so it wouldn't roll around with the fish on the deck, and, after another eight to 10 days of fishing, came ashore on Monday. Since then, a clearer picture has emerged as to how the weapon ended up in the Gulf in the first place. Prudo says he was called a knucklehead by a Pinellas County sheriff's deputy for bringing what was originally presumed a live missile back to land. But once the Air Force ran the number on the missile through its records, authorities discovered it was a so-called telemetry missile, or one that is fired for testing purposes, and it was not armed. The one Prudo caught was fired on Aug. 16, 2004, by an F-15 fighter jet that was part of the 390th Fighter Squadron out of the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, said Lois Walsh, spokeswoman for Eglin Air Force Base in the Panhandle. The squadron took off that day from Tyndall Air Force Base, she said. "It did not contain any kind of explosive," Walsh said. "It just measures and transmits data." Typically, the Air Force conducts exercises like the one in 2004 to ensure the missiles are firing correctly from the jets, said Sam King, another spokesperson at Eglin, where the weapons evaluation program is based. As a missile flies through the air, software on the AIM-9 transmits detailed information to aircraft in the area, which will be analyzed later by engineers. Then the 9-foot-4-inch, 191.7-pound missile hits an airborne unmanned drone, and both drone and missile plummet toward the sea. Boats search the area where the two should land, to pluck the wreckage from the water, so no one else can benefit from the research put into the missile. That's why Prudo, who originally wanted to keep the missile as a souvenir, wasn't allowed to, and the missile was destroyed by a team from MacDill Air Force Base, Walsh said. This morning, Prudo said he was also admonished that, if he were ever to come across another missile at sea, he is supposed to leave it be and contact authorities. Roughly 300 missiles are fired for testing purposes over the Gulf each year, Walsh said, but, in her experience, Prudo's was the first one that was recovered by a fisherman. "I've been here 20 years and this is the first time I've heard of one turning up," she said. Some drones have washed ashore, but no one remembers a fisherman plucking a missile out of the water. Prudo and Wheeler said that, during their 14 days at sea, they came across another missile, one that looked newer and more high-tech than the 5-year-old one. But they thought it might be live, so they left it in their wake. Walsh said the Air Force knows nothing about a missile that resembles the newer one described by Prudo and Wheeler, and speculated another branch of the armed forces might have fired that one Posted by: tu3031 2009-06-10 |
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