This is interesting – presumably the FBW system was not working properly, or at all
The story has been circulated relatively widely, but I haven’t seen a video before. Maybe @Pilot_DAR has some interesting input to contribute!
Also interesting that he chose to land on grass; normally that is no a good idea, due to a high risk of digging in and flipping. But maybe he just wanted a wide runway 
He c@cked it up by getting airborne in the first place and then wanting to save his own day (meal), by returning it to its owner (GD) as good as he could. The other option, after f@cking it up, would have been to just pull the ejection (erection) handle and apply for another gig. Each to his own! ;-) Landing on the grass probably made sense in 1974, with a decapacitated airplane.
There was a very similar thing which happened at Brunthingthorpe some years back with a Victor tanker. They did a fast taxi run and somehow got airborne unintentionally. The pilot, a very experienced Victor driver, managed to land it off runway on the grass and then steered it back onto the runway without any damage. It became widely known as “The last flight of the Victor”.
https://youtu.be/rCyNJ3-8fKY?si=Vlnjn3s8ZY1UwXlM
Some footage here of the event.
https://youtu.be/TGjPu6DPzWU?si=YkGXKXYHm0-s2DNX
PIC’s explanation. Wing Commander Bob Prothero passed away recently after a long and accomplished career. He carried on demonstrating the Victor at Brunthingthorpe until 2015. Unfortunately those days are over now.
However, it was known that the Victor could fly
Those YT URLs need editing but I keep posting the instructions. I can get the import code modified but it is expensive…
Back in the days when test pilots were test pilots I have seen this video footage ages ago. Gripen had a similar mishap due to the flight control system on the first or one of the first flights. They called it Pilot Induced Oscillations at that time (PIO). Pilot induced, my foot Fully flight control system induced IMO, not fully up to speed that there’s a pilot in the loop as well.
Yeager wrote:
He c@cked it up by getting airborne in the first place
Seems a bit mean. There’s an interview with him about it here
My first thought was that the fly-by-wire might have misbehaved whilst transitioning to flight, but here he blames it simply on the aircraft’s unexpected sensitivity.
The relevance to us mortals is that if you’re flying a single seater for the first time, there’s some debate about whether to do some gentle hops and get a feel for the handling, before progressing to a proper flight. If it all goes wrong you can cut power and drop back to the runway. The counter-argument is that it’s safer to explore low speed flight as far as possible from anything that you might hit i.e. you take off decisively and hope that you’ve learned to fly the thing before you need to land.
