The War Planners Series

by Andrew Watts

  Juan said, “Is that twenty minutes until bingo or twenty minutes until the low fuel light?”

  AWR1 piped up, “Ah, he’s getting smart!”

  “Until bingo.”

  She was being nice. Giving him more fuel—and more time—in the scenario. Bingo fuel was the point at which the helicopter had to turn back to the ship, lest it run out of fuel prior to landing.

  “Alright, then. AWR1, let’s set up for SAR.”

  “Sir, my rescue swimmer is all ready to go. Our checklists are complete.”

  The enlisted man spoke like he had said this a thousand times. He probably had. A senior petty officer, he was up for chief this year. He had probably helped to train hundreds of junior officers as they went up for their HAC qualification.

  “Cutlass 471, Farragut Control, the ship is setting flight quarters.” The radio call came from the external communications system. It was broadcast over the UHF radio from the ship to the helicopter. Farragut Control was one of the ship’s enlisted personnel who manned the radar scope and acted as a controller and tactical operations relay between the ship’s combat information center and the helicopter.

  Juan responded, “Farragut Control, 471, roger.”

  The ENGINE FIRE light came on again.

  “Simulated.”

  Juan said, “Is the fire confirmed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Roger, Engine malfunction in flight procedure—perform.” His tone of voice uncontrollably increased in pitch under the stress of remembering the steps of the emergency procedure.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Control Nr. Contingency power on. Establish single-engine conditions. External cargo/stores/fuel jettison/dump. Identify malfunction—okay, we have an engine fire.”

  AWR1 said, “Ahhh, sir, it’s really hot back here.”

  Juan said, “Engine power control lever of affected engine—simulated off.” He used his leather gloved finger to wipe sweat from his eyes.

  Victoria placed her hand up on one of the engine power control levers. “Okay, I’m ready to take off engine number one, do you concur?”

  Juan glanced up quick, barely able to see her leather gloved hand in the dark. His bulky NVG set, two black plastic tubes, protruded from his helmet outward from his eyes.

  “Roger, engine number one…oh, wait! Ma’am, that’s the wrong engine.”

  She had her hand over engine number two. In a real emergency she would have been pulling back the only functional engine. That would have been a pilot-induced disaster.

  Victoria said, “Alright, Juan, you’re done for tonight. Good catch. Take me home. And don’t drop the pack. You’re landing and you better stick it.”

  He let out a sigh of relief. He had a lot more of that emergency procedure to regurgitate. But they had been flying for almost three hours, and much of the flight had been like this. Constant training. Constant questions. He knew it would make him better, but he longed for just a quiet flight.

  Now for the hardest part: landing on the back of a boat at night.

  Juan repositioned himself in the seat, trying to get psyched up. They ran through their before-landing checklist, flipping switches and changing the lighting configuration. The night vision goggles became useful again as Juan began to make out lights on the horizon. The ship was still about twenty minutes of flying away. But the powerful NVGs could—

  A flash of bright light in front of them bloomed out his vision through the NVGs. Lightning.

  Victoria said, “Farragut Control, Cutlass 471, are you guys going through a storm?”

  “Uh, stand by.” Deep in the hull of the ship, he probably had no idea if it was raining or not. He would need to get someone on the bridge to let him know.

  AWR1 said, “You kidding me? They found the only storm cell within fifty miles. They probably went towards it knowing that we’d be coming in for landing now.”

  Victoria said, “AWR1, what do you see on radar?” Their radar was meant for picking up surface contacts. And while it was not technically certified to detect the storms, it was sensitive enough to detect a submarine’s periscope and did a pretty decent job at telling her which clouds to stay away from.

  “I have the controls,” Victoria said.

  “You have the controls.” Both pilots had their own set of pedals, cyclic, and collective sticks. The pedals controlled yaw, the cyclic controlled pitch and roll, and the collective controlled the power of the aircraft.

  Free from flying, Juan typed a few keystrokes into his multipurpose display and saw the radar image that AWR1 was bringing up.

  The crew of three was flying an MH-60R helicopter about one hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Central America. The deployment was supposed to have been a counternarcotics operation—they should have been looking for speedboats full of cocaine and other drugs on their way to Mexico. Instead, the Navy had seen fit to assign them to an international training exercise. Most of the participants were from Central and South America. Farragut was the only US Navy ship.

  Most of the last two hours had been spent performing over-water surveillance—flying circles in a pitch-black sky that could only exist over a hazy and humid ocean. The dark night sky was occasionally lit up by lightning from a band of thunderstorms that had been steadily getting closer throughout the flight.

  While Juan normally loved watching summer thunderstorms roll over his home in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he was significantly less comfortable tonight. Watching thunderstorms from the comfort of your covered porch was one thing. Dodging them at a few thousand feet over the water was another.

  AWR1 Fetternut made calls from his radar scope in the back of the helicopter. “Come left to two-two-zero. That should get us through these two cells, and it should be clear on the other side.”

  “Okay, that looks good, left to two-two-zero,” responded Victoria. The aircraft veered left and then leveled out.

  Juan sucked back water from his CamelBak straw. After three hours of flying in this heat, he was very dehydrated. The heavy gear, constant concentration, and late hour were all taking their toll. He just needed to nail this approach and get it in the trap. That combination of efforts had proven elusive to him on many nights this cruise. To put it bluntly, he sucked at landings.

  “Cutlass, Farragut Control, the ship is at flight quarters.”

  “471, Deck. I’ve got numbers when you’re ready.” That was the voice of one of the other junior pilots on the ship. Now that they were landing, he had manned his station behind the protective glass overlooking their landing spot on the rear of the ship.

  “Stand by,” Victoria said. She said internally, “Juan, your controls.”

  “I have the controls.”

  “You have the controls.” The three-way positive change of controls was one of the many safety precautions aviators took. Most mistakes were made when everyone assumed that someone else was doing a very simple task. Bad things often happened when something taken for granted stopped working for a moment. The three-way change of controls made sure that one of the pilots was always responsible for controlling the aircraft.

  Juan said on the external radio, “Deck, 471, ready for the numbers.”

  “Seven-one, Deck, roger. Ship’s course and speed is one tree at ten, winds one-niner-zero at two, pitch one, roll tree, how copy?”

  “Ma’am, you got it?”

  “Yup,” Victoria replied, penciling the numbers down on her kneeboard.

  “Copy all, Deck,” Juan said, and then took a deep breath. He looked at his distance measuring equipment. It gave him a distance estimation to the ship, accurate to the tenth of a mile. He also had twisted in the ship’s course. A needle on the compass in front of him centered up as he maneuvered the aircraft to be on centerline while flying his approach.

  The needle used information from navigational instruments on board the helicopter combined with a beacon on the ship. The needle started sliding away from centerline as Juan began to stray off course.

&n
bsp; Staying on course required constant adjustments from the pilot. He had to make these adjustments based on barely noticeable changes from his instruments. All the while, he had to lower the aircraft’s altitude and reduce speed on a specific profile. Failing to do this would cause them to crash or wave off.

  Victoria said, “I’ve got you a little left of course.” He could feel his stick move in his hands as Victoria made her own inputs on her controls, “helping” him to make the correct control input.

  “Roger,” was all he could say. His tired eyes were racing from one gauge to the next. Altitude. Airspeed. Ball. Fuel. Distance to the ship. Repeat.

  “One point two miles, starting the approach. On instruments.” He lowered the lever in his left hand that decreased the power and collective pitch of the aircraft. The radar altimeter began ticking down.

  “Passing three hundred feet…” He blinked away a drop of sweat. It blurred the vision through his NVGs. As they got lower and closer to the destroyer, more and more detail came into view. Now he could make out the wake of the ship.

  “Still a little fast, Juan. I have you at eighty knots. Start bringing that airspeed back.”

  From the back, AWR1 Fetternut double-checked the altitude and distance. He said, “One mile.”

  Juan pulled aft on his cyclic with his right hand and continued to take power out with his left hand. The faint glow of the green flight deck lights was now visible on the aft end of the ship.

  Juan still felt dizzy. He realized he was cocking his head to the left.

  “Two hundred feet,” he said.

  “Point four miles.”

  Victoria said, “You’re high and still fast. Take out some more power. Aft cyclic.”

  He tried to do what she said. His scan of instruments was all over the place. He fixated on his airspeed, which started getting really slow. There was that dizzy, sliding feeling again.

  He tried to look out the chin bubble, the glass floor of the helicopter, at the ship. They were way too high. He needed to get lower. Dammit, how had they gotten so high on the approach?

  “Juan, aft cyclic.”

  “Point one mile.” They were almost there.

  Juan said, “Radalt hold off.”

  Victoria reached down and depressed the button that would turn off the radar altimeter, an autopilot function. She must have only taken her eyes off what Juan was doing for a split second.

  “Power, power, power!” came the call from the rear.

  The helicopter was descending behind the ship. Juan looked in horror at his airspeed—now reading zero.

  Airspeed was life. His vertical speed indicator, which told him how fast he was descending, was below five hundred feet per minute. He gritted his teeth and pulled power, pushing the nose forward. The altitude warning was going off in his helmet with a series of loud beeps. They were below fifty feet, and he was staring at the stern of the destroyer growing larger in the window.

  “I have the controls,” said Victoria calmly, but loud enough that everyone was sure to hear.

  He didn’t let go, but he could feel her forcing the correct inputs through her controls. She immediately pulled in a lot more power, gained altitude, then adjusted the attitude of the helicopter so that it floated neatly over the center of the flight deck.

  “Deck, 471 waving off,” Victoria said.

  Juan felt ashamed. He had nearly put them in the water.

  Victoria climbed and accelerated, turning in a racetrack pattern to reset for another approach. She said, “Juan, shake it off. You alright?”

  “Yes, boss. I…I think I just felt a little dizzy.”

  She said, “Do you have vertigo?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Alright, you’ve got to say something if you start feeling that way, okay? We do not play ‘I have a secret’ up here. If something is wrong or doesn’t feel right, speak up. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He wanted to crawl into a hole.

  Victoria turned the helicopter again and lined it up behind the ship. “On final.”

  “Roger.”

  Her approach was flawless. She hit every number—altitude, airspeed, distance.

  Once over the flight deck, she smoothly hovered the center of the aircraft over the steel square known as “the trap.”

  AWR1 called, “Over the trap.”

  Then a sudden drop, and the twenty-thousand-pound, thirty-five-million-dollar aircraft sunk onto the flight deck, its robust suspension and thick tires cushioning the impact.

  “471, Deck, you’re in the trap. Nice one, ma’am.”

  “Chocks and chains,” called Victoria.

  Juan wasn’t moving. He was too embarrassed and horrified that he had almost just put the aircraft into the water…or into the stern of the ship…to comprehend that he was supposed to do something.

  “Juan, chocks and chains.”

  He snapped out of it and grabbed his green flashlight from the calf pocket of his flight suit. He turned the light on and moved it in a side-to-side motion. The plane captain, the enlisted man who stood outside in front of them on the flight deck, made a series of motions with two glowing wands. Then several more enlisted men were running with their heads down under the rotor arc, placing the chocks and chains on the aircraft.

  “Air Boss, Deck.”

  “Go.”

  “Ma’am, the captain’s been asking for you. He requests you to swing by as soon as you’re done.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she double-clicked her radio to acknowledge the request.

  She flipped up her goggles. “Keep with me, Juan. Are you alright to do the engine wash?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He knew he had really screwed up. That was a truly awful approach. Thank God she was a good pilot.

  “Alright. Let’s shut down and then you’ve got it.”

  A few minutes later, Victoria Manning approached the door to the captain’s cabin. She stunk, and was sweaty from the flight. Her hair was a mess. Not that she cared how she looked right now. She would have liked to grab a shower, though. But if she showered first, she wouldn’t have an excuse to leave the captain’s cabin. She hated these nightly sessions.

  Each night the captain called his XO, the air boss—Victoria—and the ship’s master chief into his room and had them sit there while he regaled them with stories about his past, and complained about how hard his current assignment was. No ship captain should do either of those things, in her opinion. Leadership was about others, not self.

  Victoria’s opinion of the ship’s captain had not improved over the last year that she’d been assigned to his command. Now she stood outside the captain’s cabin door, eyes closed momentarily, summoning the patience to put up with this bullshit for another night. She could hear the voices inside. She opened her eyes and saw that the red light was on. Like a traffic light, the captain had a light installed outside his door that would switch between green and red, to signify when it was acceptable for ship’s personnel to enter. He always kept it red.

  The silly part of that was that he couldn’t bring himself to delegate. He demanded that his personnel update him constantly. He had standing orders to be informed of every minute detail of the ship’s activities, wanting to make as many decisions as possible. As a result, his officers grew used to not making decisions themselves, and the captain almost never slept more than an hour at a time and was perpetually in a bad mood.

  Dealing with this ship’s captain was part of the job, however. She took a breath and knocked on the door.

  “Sir, it’s the air boss.”

  “Enter.”

  She walked in to see the captain slouched in his chair behind his desk. He wore his khaki uniform. His cheeks drooped, and when he looked at you, his neck hunched down at an angle, so that his eyes were looking up. He rarely left this spot. Victoria had heard some refer to him as the ghost captain. He rarely ventured out to the many parts of the ship, preferring instead to be at the comfort o
f his desk in the captain’s cabin.

  The XO and the master chief sat next to each other on an ugly grey couch. She nodded to them and they nodded back. Polite, respectful smiles. She liked them both.

  The XO was reasonable, and sharp. A good listener, he knew what he didn’t know. He was constantly asking Victoria questions about helicopter operations, wanting to make sure that the ship operations ran smoothly while seamlessly integrating the required flight operations.

  The captain said, “Well, nice of you to join us, Air Boss. You have fun flying?” He turned to the couch with his forced sidekicks. “XO, I bet you’d like to get off the ship tonight, but we surface warriors actually have to work on deployment, right?”

  The XO forced an awkward smile.

  The captain said, “Air Boss, it looked like your landing got a little tricky out there tonight.”

  She looked up at the small black-and-white TV screen situated in the corner ceiling of the small room. It showed the helicopter, strapped to the flight deck. Her young copilot was shutting down the engines, the routine postflight wash complete.

  The captain watched all of their landings. Partly for entertainment, she suspected, and partly out of worry. Flight operations were one of the riskiest evolutions conducted on Navy ships. An aviation mishap could ruin the career of a ship captain. And he wasn’t about to let that happen. The most important thing to him, she knew, was his career.

  She gave a courteous smile, careful never to give away her utter distaste for the man, “Well, sir, it was a bit of a rough approach, but it was a dark night. Good training for my 2P.”

  “Hmph. I’ve certainly trained my share of junior officers how to drive ships in bad weather. Some people just don’t have the skill like you and I do, huh, Air Boss?” He grinned.

  “I guess so, sir.”

  The phone rang. “Captain,” he answered. “Well, alright. Thank you, CS1. Yes, send them right up. Coffee too. Yes.” He looked up at the XO. “XO, how are you feeling about our preps for this weekend?”

  “I think the ship’s ready, sir. We’ve been drilling hard. Two GQs a day.” The XO had assumed that the captain was talking about the anti-submarine warfare exercise with the Colombians. They were sending one of their diesel subs out here to partake in the training. The group of international ships would play cat and mouse, trying to find the Colombian submarine before it could get close enough to “shoot” them.