You are entitled to buy into the revisionist history you are trying to sell if you like @PeteS in CA. The account included in my post is from someone who was there and fought the damned fire!
Stop with the silly buzzwords,
@Bigun. It is not "revisionist history" that McCain's jet exhaust was pointed out to sea. And since McCain's jet exhaust was pointed away from and his A-4 was across the deck from all the F-4s it was simply impossible for McCain starting his engine to have triggered the Zuni.
Whoever really wrote that stupidly false account is so ignorant of modern carrier operations that his claimed scenario was based on how planes were spotted for strikes on WW2 Yorktown and Essex class carriers rather than modern practice. His scenario is also absurd even by normal WW2 practice. In spotting a strike, heavily loaded torpedo and dive bombers would be spotted
behind fighters, because they needed more flight deck length to reach take-off speed.
So not only was the writer of that piece
ignorant of how a strike would be spotted in the 1960s - lined along the edge of the flight deck aft - he also is
ignorant of the order in which a WW2 strike would be spotted (bombers
behind fighters).
The simple bottom line is that because McCain's exhaust was pointed out to sea away from all other strike aircraft, starting his engine could not have affected the Zuni rocket dozens of feet across the deck from McCain. You can throw around BS-buzzwords and condescend all you like, Bigun, but you can't cause jet exhaust to do a 180-degree change of direction.