“With little more than a hundred hours in the AD Skyraider, I got orders to an AD squadron on the west coast. After I got there I wanted some additional cross-country time so a friend and I flew our Skyraiders up the coast to NAS Alameda near Oakland. While over Los Angeles that night I felt very uneasy because everywhere I looked all I could see was a sea of lights. Over Los Angeles is not the place to lose an engine in a single-engine airplane. There was no place to set down if the engine quit. For several long minutes we flew along over that huge city with me thinking that if the engine quit I would have to ride that free-falling anvil into any unlighted patch I could find. I didn’t want to drop an AD into a house. There were no black holes to be seen.”
—Paul Ludwig, former U.S. Navy attack pilot
A friendly game of cards in a U.S. carrier during wartime.
LEARNING CURVE
A vital part of the fundamental training at NAS Pensacola is survival in the sea. Coming down on water is an experience relished by few naval aviators, but one that must be anticipated and prepared for by all.
THEIR TRAINING STANDARDS ARE AMONG the highest in the world. They have to be. Naval aviators must be capable of operating safely and efficiently in the most adverse circumstances. When the pilots of a carrier air wing come out to the boat for a refresher carrier qualification (part of the ship’s work-up prior to a six-month deployment) they normally practice their landing approaches when the ship is within a reasonably short distance of the beach. They know that if they have to, chances are that they will be able to divert and land safely on a nearby airfield. The practice is good for perfecting their skills and helps build their confidence for doing what is probably the most important and demanding part of the job: bringing their multi-million dollar airplanes, and themselves, safely back aboard the carrier. Once deployed, however, they can no longer rely on that safe proximity to a friendly airfield ashore should they need it.
For them it’s the boat or nothing. They need to have worked out any kinks in their approach and landing technique before they can perform safely and confidently in the blue water environment, out of reach of the beach. A pilot who gets too many bolters, or has a tendency to be a bit low in the approach, for example, must cure himself of such habits and achieve consistency in his traps, both day and night, to become truly blue water-competent. Key in the final weeks of the pre-deployment work-up is the identification of any such flaws. If these habits cannot be overcome, both mechanically and psychologically, the pilot will be deemed not up to scratch and unsuitable for operational deployment.
Who are these men and women who fly the warplanes of the Navy? Where do they come from, these pilots and aircrew who carefully don flight suits, g-suits, survival gear, helmets, oxygen masks, and more, and shoehorn themselves into tight-fitting cockpits so they can sling-shot from the relative security of their carrier to whatever may await them on their assigned mission? How did they get to the fleet, these people who, in all weathers and the blackest of nights, must return from their missions and somehow locate their ship, often with no visual cues, and come aboard, no matter what, because there is no other place to land? They are the best of the best, drawn, like moths to light, to the greatest challenge in aviation.
Jeff Mulkey flew with Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 8 aboard the USS John C. Stennis. A 1993 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, he describes the path taken by those who want to fly with the U.S. Navy. “A typical American naval aviator comes to NAS Pensacola, Florida, the cradle of naval aviation, from either the Naval Academy or a college ROTC program, or from Officer Candidate School. It all starts in Pensacola with Aviation Preflight Indoctrination, API, which lasts for about six weeks. Then you go on to a Primary Flight Training squadron, known as a VT, at either Pensacola or Corpus Christi, Texas. All naval aviators, regardless of whether they become jet pilots, fixed-wing propeller pilots, helicopter pilots, or Naval Flight Officers—start Primary training in fixed-wing, flying the T-34 Charlie, a single-engine, turboprop sporty model. Everybody learns to fly fixed-wing and the basic training is all the same no matter what type of aviator you are in the Navy.
“From Primary training it branches out, based on the needs of the Navy in the week that you are graduated. The grades that you receive during that training also affect the Navy’s decision about which aircraft community you will be sent to. It will send you to one of several pipelines, the biggest ones being Propeller, in which you would end up flying P3s, C-130s, or some other prop type; Helicopter, which can branch out to any of the types of helicopters we fly; and Jets, which could be F/A-18 Hornets, E/A-18 Growlers, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, and F-35 Lightning IIs. If you go into the helicopter pipeline, you stay there at Pensacola and train in the TH-57 up at Whiting Field. The pipelines then branch out to Advanced Training. For Advanced in jets, you go on to either Meridian, Mississippi, or Kingsville, Texas; for Advanced propeller, it’s Corpus Christi, Texas. At the completion of Advanced training, pilots are ‘winged’ and officially become naval aviators at that point. Then you go to the Fleet Replacement Squadron (FRS), also known as the RAG or Replacement Air Group. At the FRS or RAG, you learn to fly the particular type of aircraft that you will fly permanently in the fleet. That is where a jet pilot may become an F-18 pilot, or a helicopter pilot may become an HH-60 pilot. There you are sent to your community within the communities at the FRS.
“In terms of elapsed time before you get to the fleet, it depends on the particular pipeline and how smoothly things are running for you, but if all goes well, you can get to the FRS in a year and a half to two years. At completion of the FRS, you head to your first sea tour or fleet squadron. The flow of the pipelines works pretty much the same for all naval aviators, whether helicopter, jet, or prop. On average, the total process these days takes you about three years to get to your first fleet squadron—a pretty long time. But they are making an effort to weed out some of the ‘pools’ that have built up in the past, and the demand at the turn of the century was certainly high for pilots in the Navy, so they began to move more quickly through the pipelines. The primary reason for the increased demand was the number of mid-grade pilots that were electing to leave … that were not staying in the service. The Navy was losing a lot more of the senior folks; the mid-career officers who had finished their initial commitments and opted to get out and pursue other interests, whether those were commercial aviation or some other type of job. The senior leadership was still there The new guys were still coming in, but the middle was eroding a bit. It was the same across the board … fixed-wing, rotary, and jets.
Shannon Callahan trained to become a Naval Flight Officer at NAS Pensacola. A Naval Academy graduate and the granddaughter of a U.S. Navy enlisted man who served on the USS Gambier Bay, an escort carrier that was sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Second World War, she completed the NFO course in March 2000 and was selected for the EA-6B Prowler community.
Seen here finishing her water survival instruction, Naval Flight Officer candidate Shannon Callahan moves efficiently through the requirements and demands of the Navy’s thorough training regimen.
“Everyone in naval aviation is aware of their obligation. No one enters into it without realizing how much time they’re gonna owe. But life changes. Most people are not married and do not have children when they start flight training. If you do get married and have children, suddenly you are five years into it and your outlook may be quite a bit different from what it was when your were single. It’s talked about—separation—but until you have actually done it, until you have gone through a carrier work-up cycle, until you have been away from home for six months or more and gone through a cruise and experienced what it’s like, only then can you know. Everyone thinks at the outset that they are ready to accept the life and the obligation, but they don’t really know until they’ve been there. The Navy sets the commitment that both it and the individual agree to and accept. It’s a contract and all sides understand that. You know what the
Navy expects and everyone honors that. Certain people deal with it better than others, but the contract is always honored, whether for personal reasons, or because the Navy says you will, or out of a sense of honor and obligation, or because of monetary reasons. A whole lot of money is spent training a person to do what we do and the Navy has every right to expect to get our services for a number of years, for training us to do this.”
Early in the twenty-first century Dale Dean was director of the Aviation Training School at NAS Pensacola: “We give you a test to see how smart you are and how good you are at problem-solving. If I were to define the perfect person for us, it would be someone who scored well on the test and is about five feet eight inches tall. That’s important because we have anthropometric concerns. When you are sitting in the aircraft, you have to be able to see over the glare shield, to reach all the switches, to fully throw the controls in out-of-control flight, maybe negative g, and you have to be able to reach the rudder pedals, and, if you have to eject, not tear your legs off. If you are five feet two inches tall and have little T-Rex arms, you’re probably not going to qualify. If you are six feet seven inches tall and your legs go under the glare shield, you are probably not going to qualify, at least not for jets. We want that academic profile and we’re looking for a fairly athletic, medium-build person. And then there is the part that is hard to define … motivation. You have to really want to be here. You’re not just coming to get your ticket punched, spend a couple of years flying here and then go on to the airlines. How badly do you want to be here? Are you willing to gut it out and put up with the inconveniences to get to fly?
“So, it’s a three-part requirement. You have to be able to do the job, fit in the plane, and really want to be here. The people who do best as Naval Flight Officers are not necessarily the ones who have engineering degrees; it’s the ones who really want to fly, they just want to fly. They are really smart, have good eyesight, good hand-eye coordination, a quick mind, able to grasp detail. In general, most successful naval pilots or NFOs are successful naval officers as well. They do pretty well with their ground jobs, are multi-faceted and able to handle more than one detail at a time. A lot of it is attitude. You have to want to be here. You have to enjoy it. You have to want to be in charge, to take control of the situation. That’s where success comes from.”
What sort of person flies the F/A-18 Hornet front-line fighter in the U.S. Navy? One example is David Tarry who spoke with the author in 2000 aboard the USS John C. Stennis: “I’ve been flying the F-18 for about fourteen months—ten months getting through the initial training and four months with the squadron. The primary purpose of the airplane is to cover both the fighter and attack roles. We have different master modes for our computer that let us fight our way in, drop our ordnance and then fight our way out, without dedicated fighter support. The Navy is moving toward a multi-role airplane and away from the dedicated fighter and the dedicated attack plane. The F-14 will be phased out, and the Super Hornet wil be our next line, followed eventually by the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The Super Hornet will also take over tanking, which the A-6 used to do, and will be the future of naval aviation until we can get the JSF on line. We’re supposed to start training pilots for the Super Hornet in 2001. It will have a dual-seat configuration. Right now, the Marines fly a dual-seat variant of the F-18—land-based—for doing forward air control and high-task-loading issues.
“When we launch from the cat, the F-18 pilot grabs the ‘towel rack,’ a grab handle on the canopy frame, prior to and during the launch. The aircraft rotates on its own with the trim that we set, but right after you come off the front end, you grab the stick immediately. They just don’t want you to put in any stick control because it would disturb the trim. You can do the same taking off at the field. It’s pretty much hands off. As you get the air speed and wind over the wing, it just naturally rotates and takes off. It’s a very user-friendly plane. The computer systems we have allow us to go from a two-seat cockpit, like the F-14 or the A-6, dedicated fighter or dedicated attack, to where we can do all of that with a single-seat plane because it is so user-friendly, with the hands-on throttle and stick system (HOTAS). You can run your computer and all your displays, and almost never take your hands off the stick and throttle. It takes most of the work out of flying and actually lets you concentrate on working the weapons systems and flying the plane as a weapon. Higher level guys who have at least a few hundred hours in the plane are very comfortable working their way in and working their way out, and not having a backseater to help them. The computer is really your backseater, taking care of a lot of the administrative tasks.
“To land an F-18 on a carrier, you are coming in at somewhere between 130 and 140 knots and trying to hit that little piece of ground and stop that quick. Lots of my friends can’t believe I do it. They can’t see how you can do something that precise. But really, with the training you have, you just start off and everything is baby steps. They never have you take a big step. You start out in a small turboprop, just learning basic flying and how to land at the field. You go to an intermediate jet trainer where you start working with higher speed maneuvers, but still just working at the field. You get into Advanced training and start learning more tactical things. You start doing some bombing, some air-to-air fighting. Then you do a long period of field carrier qualifications, using the lens to land at the field. They work you up and work you up, and then you go to the boat in Advanced training during the day. Then you go to the FRS, the RAG, where you learn how to fly the F-18, or whatever you happen to be flying. You learn how to do the bombing, the air-to-air fighting, and then you do day and night field carrier work and, eventually, carrier qualification. But everything is done in baby steps. By the time you get to the fleet, it’s not an unfamiliar environment. That’s a big step. Seeing the sight picture; looking down from 16,000 feet while holding overhead and thinking, ‘I’m gonna land on that postage stamp down there,’ sure gets your heart rate going. But they baby-step you along so much that it’s really not a huge leap of faith to be able to do it.
“When you learn to land at night on a carrier, it’s basically the same pattern that you fly during the day. So when you make the transition to night, you’re basically doing the same thing you do in the day. You just don’t have the visual reference, but if you do everything at night the way you are supposed to do it during the day, you should roll out in exactly the same spot. Again, it’s a little step. Take away the visual reference. But you do it enough at the field, and you start flying extended patterns, or holding in a marshal stack and then flying straight in to pick up the Instrument Landing System (ILS) or the Automatic Carrier Landing System. I find that night landing is actually a little easier, because you are doing a straight-in. You aren’t doing the approach, hitting specific numbers and having to roll out. Rolling out, making the transition from the turn to wings level, is a pretty big power correction. With the small, stubby wing that we have, you’re pretty high up on the power in that approach turn, so when you roll out you get all that lift back under your wings. You’ve got to come quite a bit off the power, keep the rate of descent, and then get back on the power so you can find the middle ground again. You’re really fighting to find the middle happy place. But if you are coming in on a straight-in approach, you are three miles out and making the transition from straight and level flight to about three degrees glide slope down, a little power off, a little power back on, establish yourself on glide slope and then, for three miles you’re just fine-tuning. By the time you are flying the ball, it’s just little corrections and maybe a little power on as you fly through the burble, depending on how the winds are across the deck.
“Once you get used to flying at night, and get over the mental aspect, which is really what the problem with night … it’s more of a mental thing … that you don’t have the horizon and the visual reference, but once you get over that it’s really not bad at all. You use the same rules that the Landing Signal Officers (LSO) teach
us all the time. If you’re a little high, lead it and step it down. If you’re low, get it back up where it’s supposed to be. There is no life below the datums. You don’t want to be down there, so get it back up. Ball flying is ball flying, whether it’s dark or light out. You do so much of it at the field that it becomes more muscle-memory than anything. ‘OK, the ball is down. I’ve got to get it back up.’ It becomes subconscious. They talk about the zen of ball flying. It’s an art, it’s a religion to have that touch, that feel. I don’t know that I have it yet. I’m still working on it.
U.S. Marine Corps nightfighter pilot Bruce Porter became one of naval aviation’s greatest fighter aces of the Second World War.
Naval Air Service ladies at Pensacola in 1918.
“The F-18 is fun to fly. It’s the greatest job in the world. Every day I fly, I can’t believe that I’m doing it. I can’t believe that anybody would let somebody do it. We’re no different from anybody else; there’s nothing that sets us apart from everybody else except, maybe, that we have the eyesight to get in. That’s the big thing with carrier aviation. It keeps out a huge percentage of people who would love to do this and are more than smart enough to be able to go through the training and do it. But the Navy has such rigorous eyesight standards, mostly because of night landing. You have to have really good eyesight. The Hornet is a great airplane; a great ball-flying airplane. It’s easy to put the ball where you want it, easier than the F-14 or the Prowler whose systems are more manual and take a lot more work to fly. The F-18 has a great system that helps us to be safe and get aboard safely. The LSOs are always pushing: ‘Just be safe.’ You don’t want to be low on approach because it’s not safe. If you are high you can always go around and try again. If you do that four times and you have to tank, we have tankers. Go get some more gas, but always be safe. Never drag the ball in low just to get aboard, taking the risk of settling right at the back end of the boat. Our bosses tell us that our job is to go downtown and drop bombs, or fight our way, or defend the strike package that’s going in. Getting back on the boat is just admin, but it’s one of the prime spots where you can get in trouble.”
The Bird Farm Page 13