Ground safety?

[BonerCat]

Quick question. Is there any way to fire weapons (more specificly, the cannon) with weight on wheels, like on the warthog?

[viper2097]

I would guess that you have to pull the WOW CB, butt they are not modelled yet.

[Spiceman]

There are several interlocks to fire weapons... weight off wheels, nose gear door closed, and landing gear handle up.

[Chaogen]

There are several interlocks to fire weapons... weight off wheels, nose gear door closed, and landing gear handle up.

 

 

I imagine an accidental weapons discharge on a carrier is a bigger problem than on an Airbase. Like the USS Forrestal.

[viper2097]

There are several interlocks to fire weapons... weight off wheels, nose gear door closed, and landing gear handle up.

 

Is it possible to bypass all of them from the cockpit?

As I guess, there should still be the possibility to fire weapons in an emergency if any of those sensors would have a failure. Or the ngd got blown away because of whatever...

[Spiceman]

I don’t believe these can be bypassed with circuit breakers, else we probably would have done it that way doing our weapons checks, as opposed to hauling special tools around.

[Alicatt]

It's certainly possible with the F-16 block 30, a maintainer managed to do it in Belgium and wrecked another F-16 quite recently.

 

First article in this report:

[Spiceman]

I think his question was from the cockpit in flight. A maintainer on the ground can certainly do it. By definition we did it every time we tested the system. We had tools to make the weight on wheels switch, make the nose gear door switch, and there was a ground safety override switch in the nose wheel well which bypassed the landing gear handle interlock. We had a test set we hung on the missile rails which basically had the electronics of the missile and we “fired” missiles and the test set verified all the signaling and proper LTE timing to the missile.

Edited October 16, 2019 by Spiceman