Did John McCain cause the Forrestal fire?🔥
Short answer, no. It comes up a lot online, usually some version of the claim that McCain hotdogged his jet, did a "wet start" to blow flames at the plane behind him as a prank, and touched off the whole disaster. It is not true, and the Navy's own investigation says so in detail.
Here is what actually started it. The fire came from a Zuni rocket that fired by accident off an F-4 Phantom, a completely different aircraft parked across the flight deck from McCain. An electrical fault, stray voltage during the switch from external to internal power, set the rocket off with no one touching a trigger. It streaked across the deck and ruptured a fuel tank, and the spilled jet fuel ignited. The official Aircraft Carrier Safety Review board traced the cause to that electrical malfunction in the rocket and launcher circuitry, plus the batch of old, unstable bombs that then cooked off. McCain's plane did not fire the rocket. He was a victim of it.
Where the myth gets its foothold is that McCain was right there. He was strapped into his A-4 Skyhawk when the fuel spilled and caught fire underneath the aircraft. Some accounts, including McCain's own memoir, say the rocket struck his plane, while the official report identifies the struck Skyhawk as the one flown by another pilot, Fred White, parked right next to him. Either way, McCain was sitting in the middle of the fire, not causing it. He scrambled out of the cockpit, climbed down the nose, jumped through the flames, and then turned back to help another burning pilot right as the first bomb went off and threw him ten feet and peppered him with shrapnel.
The "wet start prank" story has been checked by fact checkers and rejected, and no serious investigation, official or independent, blames McCain or any single pilot for the fire. Fred White, the pilot most closely tied to the struck aircraft, was killed by that first explosion and never got to say a word in his own defense, which is part of why it is worth being careful with the story.
You can hold whatever opinion you want about John McCain the politician. But on this specific question of history, the record is clear. The Forrestal fire was caused by a freak electrical fault and a deck full of aging bombs, not by the man in the cockpit who barely got out alive.
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