“Coming back to the ship is very well controlled. We have a certain time to be landing on deck. In the initial brief we will know what time we are landing on board; it’s called a charlie time and it is given to us by the ship to fit in with the rest of the ship’s programs. Once airborne we are managing our fuel, both to achieve the mission aims, do our training or whatever, and also so that we can arrive back in the vicinity of the ship with the correct amount of fuel, so we are not too heavy for the vertical landing. You have to be quite critical and careful about how you manage your fuel. If you are going to start dumping it, which you have to do on most sorties to make your weight back at the boat, you need to dump down at the correct time, generally about fifteen minutes before your recovery so you can properly slot into the boat.
“Assuming it’s a nice day, it’s then up to us to come back to the boat on our own. We might get some assistance from the air directors in the ops room who can pick us up on radar and give us steers back to the overhead. We then set up a holding pattern 1,000 feet over the ship. The pattern is about two and a half minutes long. You go round in a circle above the ship and, two and a half minutes prior to your landing, or Charlie time, you fly past the ship at 600 feet and slightly on the starboard side of it. That’s called the slot, and once you have slotted, you then turn in front of the boat so that you are effectively on a cross-wind leg and you roll out going down-wind … the opposite way to the boat. As you approach the back of the boat, with all your checks complete and your landing gear down, you tip into the finals turn and it’s around that turn that you start to wash off your speed by using some of the nozzles. You take about 40° of nozzle around the finals turn, maintaining it flat initially and then using about 90 percent power, monitoring the engine temperature so you don’t trip off the water injection system. You use the nozzles around the final turn. You are playing the nozzles to keep your speed and your angle of attack under control around the turn. As you approach, you roll out behind the boat and start in towards it. You then judge when to take the hover stop, to move the nozzles all the way downward to allow the aircraft to hover. Obviously, this means that there is no thrust going out the back of the aircraft, so it starts to slow down a bit more rapidly. The idea is to arrive alongside the boat in a steady hover next to the landing area you have been allocated for that particular landing, at about eighty feet or so above the sea level and just off to the left side of the boat so you are not quite over the deck but fairly close to it.
“Once you have steadied yourself into a nice position and you’re happy with your references next to the boat, you do a transition across by moving sideways about thirty feet to line up just over the mark that you have picked. You reduce power just a bit and the aircraft starts to sink. It’s quite a firm landing because on a wet or pitching deck, if the wheels don’t make a good contact, it would be easy to slide about.
“You think about the danger, although not all the time. You’re very aware that the Sea Harrier is a difficult machine to fly; that if you don’t keep on top of it, if you don’t concentrate during decelerations and accelerations into and out of the hover, it can go wrong very quickly. There is a higher chance in this airplane that you may have an accident or crash or have to eject, or even be killed. It’s something that you do think about periodically. I don’t think about it when I strap into an airplane, when I go flying. The training you get is very good, and there is no way they are going to send someone out to fly the airplane if they don’t think they can do it. You think about the danger when you have the aircraft systems failures or when you have a problem with the aircraft … when you are just that little step closer to maybe having to eject. Fortunately, they are rare. When something happens to someone you know, that brings it home to you. Yes, it is a dangerous occupation, and yes, you do have to stay on top of the airplane at all times, but I don’t think it would ever make me so scared that I wouldn’t want to do it.”
Jason Phillips, an Observer Instructor and Warfare Instructor in Sea King helicopters with 820 Squadron, Royal Navy aboard HMS Illustrious recalled: “Our primary role on the squadron was to hunt submarines. We used sonar and had two sonars on board. The active sonar is like a big microphone, a long bit of electric string that we’d lower into the water. We’d press a button and it sent out a pulse of noise. If anything was out there, the pulse bounced off it, came back, and was displayed on the computer’s green waterfall display. Because we put out a ‘ping’ when using active sonar, that let the submariner know that we were there. Ideally, we’d like to sneak up on him to give our weapon the best chance. We also used a passive sonar: a smaller microphone on a thinner bit of electric string. It went down in the water to just listen. It floated to the surface and had a little radio antenna. Everything it heard uplinked to the aircraft and displayed on the same screens. No noise, no pings. It just listened. A trained aircrewman with supersensitive hearing would pick out the contact and pass the information across to the observer, who is the tactical coordinator. We would be the tactical nerve center when we got a contact with a submarine. I would then take over as the scene-of-action commander. No matter the seniority of the ships in the area, we could tell them to move out of the way while we dealt with the submarine. We controlled the weapons and carried up to four torpedos on board. The weapon we used was the Stingray, a highly intelligent weapon. Another bit of equipment we had, the MAD or magnetic anomoly detector, detected magnetic disruptions in the earth’s field. It’s a big bar magnet and if we flew over something like a submarine—a big lump of metal—it caused a disturbance. We had a sensor which a crewman operated and the contact was also then painted on an old-fashioned chart recorder. If we believed there was a target down there, we would fly over it to corroborate our information.”
Pre-flight instruction in the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, the primary piston-engined training aircraft of the U.S. Navy in 2000.
Ed Copeland, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot: “In the Navy Pre-flight school that I went through, half of the time was spent on such relevant subjects as aircraft recognition, navigation, and naval traditions and customs. The other half was devoted to body contact athletics. Football was rough enough. We played basketball with ten men on a side, and the referee was there solely to break up the fist fights. We played water polo in the deep end of the pool and the instructor cracked the knuckles of anyone caught hanging onto the side. Pushball was another form of mayhem designed to inflict bodily harm on the other guy. In hand-to-hand combat we learned how to knife-fight and how to break a man’s neck, go for the jugular, dislocate a shoulder, apply a knee to the groin, and so on.
“Physical fitness training, where competitiveness was stretched one step further to combativeness, was re-emphasized each step of the way in the flight training program, which lasted about ten months in 1942. I think it is fair to say that we came out of the cadet program with a certain killer instinct and an aggressive approach to survival. When it came time for me to go into combat against the Japanese, the issue was uncomplicated. They were out to kill me and I was determined to do unto them before they did unto me.”
Once told by his Navy flying instructor, “You will never solo. You are the dumbest cadet I have ever laid eyes on,” U.S. Marine night-fighter ace Bruce Porter became one of the great fighter pilots of the Second World War. “As I stood watching my first night carrier ops, the feeling that crept over me was as eerie as any I had ever had. All I could hear was two high-performance engines. All I could see was two sets of landing lights. There was absolutely no moon to light the wake or give a hint of the ship’s whereabouts. There was a slight breeze over the bow.
“Suddenly one set of lights was over the wake. The approach was textbook perfect, right up the wake at precisely the correct speed, attitude, and altitude. I heard the engine drone lower as the pilot took the cut and I watched the outline of the night-fighter arrest on the first or second wire. As the first Hellcat taxied forward to just beneath my perch, the second one set down in a textbo
ok landing.
“For all the hours of training and instruction I had received, I had not really believed it possible before seeing it with my own eyes. We gathered around the two Navy veterans and asked a set of rapid-fire questions. Then someone with a bullhorn blared: ‘Fly One, Marines, man your airplanes.’
“It had been decided that only one of us would launch and recover at a time, until everyone had completed one landing. I was the senior one in the group, so I would launch first. I did my best to hide my terror, and I think the only reason I was not found out was that everyone else was too deeply involved in masking their own fright to notice mine. My flight gear was still in the cockpit of my Grumman, so I climbed aboard and quickly snapped snaps and pulled straps. I recalled my first real moment of truth in an airplane, my qualifying solo at the elimination base at Long Beach, California, in 1940. Wow! I had come so far. I had been eager to fly then and had remained eager as I passed every milestone to this moment, when I found myself unforgivably apprehensive for the first time in my flying career. The prospect of first combat had not come as close to terrorizing me as this flight. I turned up the engine and allowed myself to be guided to the catapult.
The learning experience in the U.S. Navy’s North American T-2 Buckeye jet trainer.
“Before giving the catapult officer the ‘ready signal,’ I nervously checked and rechecked my harness, pulling the straps again for good measure. Then I ran through my pre-flight checklist; screw the men in the island who were moaning about how long I was taking: canopy back and locked, engine at full rpm, prop at full low pitch, flaps all the way down for maximum lift, right foot hovering above the right rudder pedal ready to overcome the left torque of the spinning prop, stick held loosely in my right hand, throttle grasped loosely in my left hand, head resting against the headrest to take up the shock of the catapult.
“I looked to my left and saluted. Ready! In response a dimly-perceived deckhand standing over the catapult crew’s catwalk whirled a flashlight. Go! I turned my eyes front, loosened my grip on the stick, set my jaw and leaned back into my seat.
“WHACK. My conscious mind was aeons behind my senses, as it had been on all previous catapult launches. I had a very busy couple of seconds as I kicked the right rudder pedal and yanked the stick into the pit of my stomach. I had no time to dwell on how dark it was out there.
“My equilibrium returned. The Hellcat was climbing away to the left. I got the wheels and flaps up in one motion. I had that familiar short sinking sensation as the flaps went up and the Hellcat dropped slightly. Then my mind kicked in: ‘Needle—ball—airspeed, you dumb cluck.’
“A destroyer passed beneath my low left wing. I had just enough time to notice two blinking navigation lights before the inky black of the perfectly dark night enfolded me.
“All my training and experience saw me through a climb to 3,000 feet. While my mind reeled off a thousand facts about my flying, my voice talked to the ship in calm tones, reporting on routine matters the air officer would want to hear about. I was neither here nor there.
“I was cleared to land, which was of both relief and concern. I wanted to get down but first I had to find the carrier.
“I coaxed the Hellcat into one full circuit of the area in which I was pretty sure I had left the Tripoli and her escorts. I saw the two navigation lights on the forward destroyer I had overflown after launch. Then I saw two more which had to be the plane guard destroyer deployed a few thousand yards directly astern of the carrier, to pick up downed ‘zoomies,’ as we carrier pilots were known.
“Now I knew exactly where the flight deck lay. I also knew that, in the event of extreme danger, the carrier flight deck lights would be flicked on to help me find a safe roost. But that would mean failure, and there were too many people watching to let that happen.
“After reassuring myself that I was flying on a heading opposite that of the ship, I flew down the carrier’s port side and approached the plane guard from ahead, keeping it just off my port wing. I could not help ruminating about how useless a night search for a bilged aviator must be.
“I flicked on my radio altimeter, a brand new instrument that had been installed in my cockpit just before we left San Diego. I had set it for 150 feet. If I flew above that altitude, I’d get a white signal light. If I flew below 150 feet, I’d get a red danger light, and if I was flying right at 150 feet, I’d get a comforting green light. The light was green when I turned on the altimeter.
“I flew upwind the length of the tiny destroyer and sighted her deck lights, which could only be seen from the air. This was the only concession to a pilot’s natural tendency to become disoriented across even the briefest interval of night space.
“I had been timing my flight ever since passing the carrier and spotting the plane guard’s lights. At what I judged to be the best moment, I turned 90° port, dropped my wheels and flaps, enriched the fuel mixture, partly opened the cowl flaps, put the prop in low pitch, and turned another 90° to arrive at a downwind position dead astern of the carrier.
“My night vision was, by then, as good as it would become. I had been training myself to find dim objects with my peripheral vision, which was the preferred method. Thus, I was able to pick out the dim shape of the totally darkened carrier as I floated up the wake.
“I was committed to the approach. All my attention was focused on sighting the LSO’s luminous paddles. I momentarily panicked and said, or thought I might have said, ‘Where the hell are you?’
“First I sensed the colored paddles; then I knew I saw them. The LSO’s arms were both out straight. Roger! My ragged confidence was restored, though I was a good deal less cocky. I checked my airspeed, which was down to the required 90 knots. Before I knew it, I saw the cut. The tailhook caught a wire and I was stopped.
“I taxied past the barrier, came to a rest beside the island and cut my engine. As had been the case after my first combat mission, my flight suit was reeking with sweat.
“During the rest of the night, my eight fellow fledglings each made one night landing. My subordinates accounted for more than a few waveoffs, but that was partly my doing. I had asked the LSO to be particularly unforgiving of minor gaffes. We all knew how important it was to get this exercise 100 percent perfect.”
Paul Ludwig, former U.S. Navy attack pilot: “It has been said that those who stand and wait also serve. I didn’t fly combat because there was no war. Like countless others, I was there if they needed me. I had to be content with peacetime operations, and I was. It excited me to fly the meatball or make paddles passes, to launch from a deck run over the bow or, once in a while, get a cat shot, and fly the downwind leg, judge the 180° turn in a stiff tailwind and come aboard smartly in a prop-tailwheel type aircraft, like my heroes in F6Fs and F4Us did in World War Two. I was a kid hoping to follow in their footsteps if there had been a war. Few are eager for a war, yet every kid joining the fleet thinks he is bullet-proof and that, if war comes, he’ll just follow his leader and do whatever he does.
“Everyone remembers his solo flight, his first emergency, his first girl, first car, and so on. I ate up six months of peacetime carrier flying as though nothing else in the world mattered. In some ways, nothing has ever topped that, other than the love of a wife and the births of healthy children. Thank God there wasn’t a war on when I served, but when you’re in uniform, you serve. I am damned proud of what I did.”
Jack Kleiss, former U.S. Navy pilot: “I first met AMM3/c Peter Gaido as I was preparing to make my first carrier landing. He asked, ‘Can I go with you?’ I replied, ‘This is my first carrier landing and I am supposed to have only sandbags.’ He said, ‘You got wings, ain’tcha?’ and replaced the sandbags with his stout frame. With that supreme vote of confidence, I made half a dozen perfect landings.
“Peter later displayed his character as he observed a Japanese bombing plane attempting to crash into the Enterprise. He jumped into an empty SBD, fired the machine-gun at the approaching plane and continued fi
ring at it as it sheared off the tail of his SBD. He continued firing as the Japanese plane moved in the opposite direction until it hit the ocean. He tried to remain anonymous in this action, but Vice Admiral Halsey finally found him and promoted him on the spot to AMM1/c.
“He flew with Ensign O’Flaherty during the Battle of Midway. They dropped their bombs on the Japanese carriers but later had to make a crash-landing. They were picked up from their rubber boat, rescued by the Japanese, interrogated, murdered, their bodies thrown into the sea. Peter Gaido was the bravest man I ever met.”
Physical training supplements classroom activity aboard HMS Illustrious.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
—from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad
BRING ME IN
A U.S. Navy Landing Signal Officer on the job during Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, early 1991.
THE LANDING SIGNAL OFFICER (LSO), OR Batsman in the Royal Navy, is the person who, for much of the time that aircraft carriers have been in use, has been responsible for guiding pilots onto the flight deck to a safe landing or “trap.” Each squadron on today’s U.S. Navy carriers has its own landing signal officer who assists his fellow aviators down the approach, confining his communications to a minimum if the pilot is doing it right. If he isn’t, the LSO will signal corrections to the pilot, and / or talk him down with “candy calls” until he makes the necessary adjustments. If he fails to properly correct, the LSO will give him a wave-off, a signal which must be obeyed, sending him around to rejoin the pattern and try again.
The Bird Farm Page 15