Winters/Sharp F-111A Crash Site

Many thanks to Walt Witherspoon of Lancaster, CA, for providing the following information on this crash site. I have done some editing and so any mistakes/omissions are mine [SK].

The site is the spin test crash of F-111A SN 65-703 on 11 Sep 1972. The plane impacted at well over 500 kts virtually straight down after the crew ejected. The orange wiring fragments seen are indicative of Class II modification, making the site an Edwards flight test bird.

When I saw your posted photos I knew something was out of place for the site to be an F-4 unless it was something new, which I considered a possibility. There are three F-4s in the Cal City area including the zone within Edwards spin range #3, south of Castle Butte. A George AFB bird is too far east, closer to Cal City for the area of your photo. I've been to the Edwards YF-4E in the area and it's too far north. That left the F-4E spin crash of 1970 and it's a pancake impact with minimal scatter so it didn't fit either.

I knew the photos showed a spot near Cal City or east of it based on the alignment of the mountains north of Mojave. I went out there and finally found the place. Once I found the site I approached it as a clean slate, with no assumed identity. I figured on letting the site reveal itself, not try to force out details matching some specific crash.

The first impressions are the extreme level of disintegration and lack of fire evidence. What crashed hit very hard, vertically or close to it, carrying a lot of energy, and all fuel vaporized in the impact leaving little to burn and leave ashes or melted nodules post-impact. This ruled out a low energy flat spin crash like the F-4E. The debris contained epoxy honeycomb and milled forgings not seen on 1950s or earlier birds, ruling out a T-33A and TF-100 also out in the area, let alone a couple P-38s and P-39s from WWII. So I knew it was 1960s or later at this point. I found mangled turbine blades with Pratt & Whitney markings so that narrowed the field to a Pratt powered bird, killing the possibility of an F-4 right there. There were many orange wire fragments. All components and wire added as Class II flight test instrumentation are colored orange to distinguish them from production components. Given the commonality of orange wire the bird had a lot of it, which narrows things to probably an early production bird with lots of instrumented functions, not a mature airframe doing specific tests with limited instrumented functions. There were also skin fragments with white or light gray, and some red.

At this time I knew it was a 1960s or later P&W powered bird, assumed to be early production or a prototype, which impacted at high speed making an almost symmetric debris field. The only P&W powered test jets post 1960 were F-111, F-15, and F-16. No F-15s or 16s have been lost from Edwards (disregarding the non-fatal crash landing on the lakebed of an FSD F-16 in Oct 1980.) There was also no canopy glass at the site, which would have been present if any bird with a conventional windscreen/main canopy combo had crashed, leaving the windscreen glass even if the canopy is gone. The only modern P&W powered jet which crashed in a high speed vertical dive and could not leave canopy debris at the site because the canopy was not with the jet at impact was the F-111A spin crash.

The jet is also laying in an unusually brush free area, which matches a description of crash film from the F-111 showing a clear area below the F-111 as it was about to hit. Even without a part number or QA stamp the circumstances and other evidence rule out all but an F-111 or some classified asset I considered extremely unlikely. The F-111A spin bird was white or light gray with red stripes on the tail and some other areas, it was also the third production plane built, and highly instrumented. Finding a part with the number 12P4545- was just a clincher, as 12 followed by a letter is F-111. I cleaned some dirt off that part and found an ink stamped "GDFW" QA stamp. GDFW in a circle is General Dynamics Fort Worth division.

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