After takeoff, I could not get the landing gear to indicate "UP" and it felt like the gear or a gear door was sticking out. The gear lowered normally and looked good on a check from the ground with binoculars. On touchdown, the jet started leaning hard right and it felt like the right gear was collapsing. I had slammed the throttles up into afterburner at the first hint of the right tilt and as the burners lit, the jet fell out from under me. I sucked the stick back all the way and kept it in the air, barely missing the ground. It turns out the right gear was compressing normally and when the aircraft tilted right, the left gear, with a broken strut that was jammed at full extension, broke out of the cylinder and collapsed. Now the wheel and strut assembly was swinging in the breeze horizontally. While I circled and burned down fuel, the squadron confered with McDonnell Douglas by telephone. The first solution was to take an arresting cable with the tail hook. I turned that idea down since the left gear could catch the cable first and spin me around or flip me over. Then, they considered a controlled ejection--I wasn't interested in that at all. So, I landed on the right wheel and lowered it on the external tanks and, as they say now, it was all good. This is the video of the one-wheel landing. Dave
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