Here's a Wikipedia article about the abort modes. It probably would get pretty tense if you had to abort when the rocket started going through 'rapid unplanned disassembly', though.
Similar protocols for the Shuttle of course; was in Gambia in 1990 and got chatting with some NASA folks just sitting round the pool at a nearby hotel - they told us they were there as there was a specific abort phase whereby the Shuttle would glide across the Atlantic and land at Banjul airport (whose runway NASA had paid to have extended for this purpose!); in that unlikely eventuality they would have to leap into action, otherwise it was a nice few days in the sun for them.
After posting I checked the dates from memory vs shuttle launch dates from Wikipedia, and this would have been some weeks before the launch ; so I wonder if in fact their job was to drop into the various emergency landing areas and just do a check that everything was lined up just in case; otherwise it'd be very costly to have teams in situ at all of them.
The shuttle was a very expensive program! Each launch was something like $450 million. I wouldnt be surprised if they had small teams at 2 or 3 runways as contingency plans. If the shuttle landed some where they would definitely need help getting out of it and I doubt it would be much cheaper to keep locals trained and ready.
Sadly the shuttle abort protocols were not effective for Challenger-like, catastrophic failure modes. My, admittedly layman's, understanding is that Apollo abort system would have been able to evacuate the crew in a number of pretty dire scenarios.
As a pilot, CFiT is very descriptive. RUD sounds to my (layman’s) ear to be a nice way of saying “uncontrolled unplanned self destruction.”
I could call an incident where a plane engine (on my plane) threatened to tear itself and the wing to bits because combustion became unbalanced, causing a vibration that had I not shut it down would have led to a rapid unplanned disassembly too, and likely not ended as well as the preventative.
Yes, I wrote a bit too quickly there. Pogo might, but doesn't generally shut down engines, it shakes the launch vehicle apart. Engines with out of control pogo oscillations could be commanded to shut down to avoid a boom.
It doesn't seem like anyone was enthusiastic about trying them even for practice. According to the Wikipedia page on space shuttle abort modes (linked to from the apollo abort modes page), NASA considered making the first flight of Columbia a practice RTLS abort; but the mission commander, John Young, declined, saying "let's not practice Russian roulette".
Right, if you're taking a big risk of death, have it be for the payoff of a useful mission. Not a practice flight where the payoff is simply that you didn't die.
