US Navy pilot, war veteran, aerospace engineer, astronaut and first man on the moon Neil Armstrong was also an incredible test pilot, with 900 flights in experimental aircraft including the dangerous Lunar Landing Testing Vehicle. On 6 May 1968, he almost died flying one. This is the video of the crash.
The film — stabilised here by redditor Theodore Funkenstein — shows the entire sequence of the accident, which happened just a bit over a year before the Apollo 11 launch. The controls on his LLTV started to go crazy at an altitude of 30m, and the vehicle started to bank dangerously. Armstrong ejected and landed safely, but, according to the post-accident investigation, he would have died had he ejected only half a second later.
Every astronaut hated this damn thing — a vehicle used to simulate the Lunar Module that had a jet engine turned 90 degrees to imitate the moon’s reduced gravity. Armstrong was particularly good at flying it.
Here’s the film without stabilisation and a still photo of the crash site as Armstrong descended with his parachute.
Armstrong — who was famous for having nerves of steel — survived not only because of luck but because this wasn’t the first time that he went through a dangerous situation. He experienced several incidents during his naval pilot time in Korea and his career as a test pilot at NACA’s High-Speed Flight Station, which later become NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and now is NASA’s Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.
But perhaps the worst incident — which almost ended with his life and the life of pilot David Scott — happened during the Gemini 8 mission, which showed that Armstrong had the right stuff to be the commander of the first mission that would land on the Moon.