The USS Forrestal Fire of July Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Sixty-Seven, Chief Gerald Farrier, and the Ninety Seconds That Rewrote How the Navy Fights Fire

On July 29, 1967, an accidental rocket firing aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal (CVA-59) touched off a fuel fire and a chain of bomb detonations that killed 134 sailors and injured 161 off the coast of Vietnam. The disaster killed the ship’s trained firefighting team in the first ninety seconds, led by Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Gerald Farrier, who ran toward the flames knowing the aged bombs in the fire could detonate at any moment. The tragedy reshaped U.S. Navy firefighting doctrine, ordnance handling, and ship design for the next sixty years.

What Happened Aboard the USS Forrestal on July 29, 1967?

The USS Forrestal was the first of the U.S. Navy’s true supercarriers - large enough to operate the heavy jets of the jet age. In the summer of 1967 she was on station in the Gulf of Tonkin, flying strikes into North Vietnam. She had been on the line only a few days, crewed by sailors who were sharp, well-drilled, and confident.

That morning the crew was spotting the deck for the second launch of the day. Aft of the island, aircraft were packed wingtip to wingtip: A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantoms, fully fueled with JP-5 jet fuel and armed with bombs and rockets. Pilots sat strapped in with canopies down, engines turning, waiting to taxi to the catapults.

One of those Skyhawks, aft on the starboard side, held a young lieutenant commander named John McCain.

What Started the Forrestal Fire?

The fire began with an electrical fault. As a ground crew switched one of the F-4 Phantoms from external to internal power, a power surge did something it was never supposed to do: it fired a Zuni rocket - a five-inch folding-fin aircraft rocket - from a pod under the aircraft’s wing.

The rocket streaked across the width of the packed flight deck and struck an external fuel tank on an aircraft on the far side. Accounts differ on whether it hit John McCain’s aircraft or the one beside it, but the result was the same: the tank ruptured and roughly 200 gallons of jet fuel spilled across the hot steel deck and ignited.

A flight-deck fire has nowhere to go. It doesn’t run off into a field - it pools and spreads beneath the aircraft, the fuel tanks, and the bombs. McCain climbed out of his cockpit, ran along the refueling probe on the nose of his burning Skyhawk, jumped into the flames, and rolled clear. He survived; many men trapped in that pack of aircraft did not. Within three months, McCain would be shot down and taken prisoner of war.

Who Was Chief Gerald Farrier?

Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Gerald Farrier led the flight-deck crash crew. When the fire erupted, he grabbed a PKP fire extinguisher - the purple potassium powder used to smother fuel fires - and ran directly toward the flames.

Farrier understood something the men around him did not fully grasp: the bombs hanging in that fire were not ordinary ordnance.

To keep pace with the intense bombing schedule that summer, the Navy had loaded some older weapons - 1,000-pound bombs dating to the Korean War era, filled with an older explosive called Composition B. As Composition B ages, it becomes both more sensitive and more powerful. A modern bomb in a fire is designed to burn, or “cook off,” slowly - roughly ten minutes before detonating. These old bombs offered no such margin.

Farrier knew the first old bomb to reach its critical temperature would not simply burn - it would detonate. Every second he held the fire back was another second for trapped pilots to escape. He stood alone in front of a wall of burning fuel, working to buy time with a fog of powder as his crew brought up the hoses behind him.

He got perhaps sixty to ninety seconds. Then the first bomb exploded.

Why Was the Forrestal Fire So Deadly?

The first detonation killed Chief Farrier and nearly his entire firefighting team instantly. The men who knew how to fight the fire were the first the fire took. The blast tore a hole in the flight deck, and burning fuel poured through it into the compartments below, where sailors were sleeping and working - putting the fire inside the ship.

More bombs followed. In all, there were nine major explosions, each tearing a fresh crater in the deck, hurling burning debris, and killing more of the men trying to save the ship.

With the trained crews gone, the fire was fought by everyone else: cooks, yeomen, airmen, and teenagers who had never held a fire hose. They picked up the hoses from the hands of the dead, pushed burning aircraft over the side by hand, and carried live bombs to the deck edge to heave them into the sea. Sailors aboard the carrier USS Oriskany - which had suffered its own catastrophic fire the year before - came alongside and shouted hard-won advice across the water.

The deck fires were beaten down by mid-afternoon. The fires below decks burned into the next day. The final toll was 134 dead and 161 injured - one of the worst losses of life the U.S. Navy has suffered since World War II, and it happened without an enemy in sight. No MiG, no missile - just an electrical glitch, a rocket, and a puddle of fuel.

How Did the Forrestal Fire Change the Navy?

The Navy studied the disaster in detail and let it drive lasting change:

Firefighting became everyone’s job. Using real footage shot from the ship’s island, the Navy produced a required training film called Trial by Fire, ensuring every sailor understood that fighting fire is not just the crash crew’s responsibility. The principle that every sailor - cook, clerk, or captain - is a firefighter first came directly out of the Forrestal.
The dangerous ordnance was removed. The old, oversensitive Composition B bombs were phased out.
Aircraft wiring was tightened so a stray power surge could no longer fire a weapon on deck.
Deck wash-down systems - sprinklers that flood the flight deck and sweep burning fuel over the side before it can pool - were improved.
Firefighting equipment was redesigned and restowed so it is always within reach.

The Navy also named its firefighting school after Chief Gerald Farrier - the man who stood alone in front of a bomb with a hand extinguisher because he understood, better than anyone, exactly what it would cost him, and stood there anyway.

Why the Forrestal Fire Still Matters to Every Pilot

Aviation safety is written in names, even when we don’t know them. Every checklist, every fire extinguisher clipped to a cockpit floor, every fuel-handling rule at a small airfield exists because someone, somewhere, paid for that lesson the hard way. The carrier sailors who have served safely in the decades since owe a quiet debt to the 134 men who died on that deck.

For deeper reading, the definitive account is the book Sailors to the End by Gregory Freeman, and the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command maintains the official record. The training film Trial by Fire remains a stark twenty-minute watch - as it was meant to be.

Key Takeaways

On July 29, 1967, the USS Forrestal (CVA-59) suffered a catastrophic flight-deck fire off Vietnam that killed 134 sailors and injured 161.
The fire began when an electrical surge accidentally fired a Zuni rocket into a fuel tank; aging Composition B bombs then detonated in a chain of nine major explosions.
Chief Gerald Farrier and most of the trained firefighting crew were killed within the first 90 seconds, leaving untrained sailors to fight the fire for hours.
The disaster transformed the Navy: mandatory all-hands firefighting training, removal of unstable ordnance, safer aircraft wiring, and improved deck wash-down systems.
The Navy’s firefighting school is named for Gerald Farrier, and the story endures as a reminder that aviation safety rules are paid for in lives.