On June 21st 1963, F-8 Crusader Pilot Captain Cliff Judkins experienced what was perhaps the longest string of malfunctions to ever befall a pilot. During a routine refueling 20,000 feet above the Pacific on a flight to Hawaii, Judkins was watching his gauges to find nothing out of the ordinary when suddenly, the engine rpm gauge began dropping and the plane flamed out. Judkins put the plane into a slight dive with the hope of inducing a restart of the engine. Unfortunately, as will soon be very apparent, this was not Judkin's lucky day. The engine never restarted, and the fuel that was now leaking out of his plane was igniting the plane from the tail. Judkins attempted to eject his seat only to find the mechanism was broken. The apparatus had an alternative ejector for just such an emergency. However, this too, failed to function. Judkins would have to bail out of his plane manually. While seemingly simple enough for a World War II pilot, jet planes had the added obstacle of a 20 foot high tail fin waiting to cut the pilot in half should their jump not be perfectly placed. Judkins managed to avoid this dreadful fate only to be met with more nightmares. One free of the plane Judkins would find that the malfunctions were not yet finished. Plummeting from what was now 15,000 feet, his parachute did not fully deploy. The main chute was tangled up in the chords. Judkins crashed into the Pacific and miraculously survived. Nightmare over right? Of course not. Judkins failed shoot finally fully opened... underwater. The shoot began filling with water, sinking, and pulling the severely injured and surely traumatized pilot to the depths of the ocean. Judkins, luckily, had a knife in his chest pocket and managed to cut the lines and swim to the surface. Now the pilot was faced with the realization that he was floating in the middle of the Pacific with none of his survival gear, as this had been ripped from his suit on impact with the water. A plane flew by and dropped some dye markers to denote Judkins position, as well as a raft. Unfortunately for Judkins, his injuries made swimming over to the raft impossible. About an hour later a coast guard amphibian arrived but was unable to land due to the high waves. The plane circled overhead and dropped another raft, this time with a 200 foot line attached. The line landed close enough that Judkins was able to grab it and pull the raft to him. He was unable to board the raft due to his injuries, but he was able to stay afloat by holding on to it. This would prove quite helpful, as the ship that the coast guard managed to alert did not reach Judkins for two and a half hours. Once Judkins was finally lifted out of the water he was transferred to another ship which had a doctor on board to look after him until a helicopter arrived to fly him to a hospital in California. Judkins had sustained multiple fractures, a partially collapsed lung, and kidney and intestinal failure. He made a full recovery despite all of the worlds attempts at his life.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/09/survival-f-8-crusader-pilot-falls-15000-with-failed-chute-and-lives/
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