BigIron said:
that reminded me of a story our CO told us. He was involved in the test program for LAMPS at the time of the incident....I can't remember all of the details, but the gist of the story was that they took a lightning strike during a test hop which fried some of their equipment, and sent the a/c into what he described as an uncontrolled descent (although they didn't know why at the time). Apparently the airframe vibrations were bad enough during the drop that neither he or the co-pilot could read any of the instruments. He said that just as he figured that they were done for, they miraculously popped out of the clouds almost directly over Pax River. They managed to put the a/c down, and upon inspection, they saw that the heat of the lightning (from the high voltage) had melted the composite bonds in the rotor blades, so they had each split into several feathered pieces, causing the degredation of control. Pretty wild story I thought
