Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  I had been in Beeville for about a year when I got my wings. My parents came for the occasion (my brother was unable to attend because of his own Navy duties). We lined up in our white dress uniforms for the ceremonial pinning on of our wings. My mother pinned my wings on me, a glowing, proud expression on her face. I remembered the day she had graduated from the police academy, when I got to see her lined up with her classmates in uniform, and the impression that sight had made on me. Now things had come full circle.

  —

  I WAS ASSIGNED to Fighter Squadron 101, the Grim Reapers, and moved to Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, for initial training on the F-14 Tomcat. My roommate and I drove overnight and I started my training almost immediately. Just as I had done with other aircraft, I progressed quickly from familiarization training to formation training to basic intercepts—finding another airplane and locking onto it with the radar. Eventually I began to learn basic air combat maneuvers, and this was when we began to feel like true fighter pilots. I practiced flying against a similar airplane (another F-14), a dissimilar airplane (like the A-4 or F-16, the Navy’s best approximation of the Soviets’ MiG), and flying against different numbers of enemy planes. All of this training would culminate in taking the airplane to the ship, which would be much harder than it had been in the T-2 and the A-4, since the Tomcat had such poor flying qualities and we had to qualify at night.

  There is no training version of the F-14; there is no stick in the backseat, meaning the instructor can’t take over for the student. We did a lot of classroom work first, learning the systems of the airplane, then putting in many hours in the simulator before climbing into the cockpit for the first time.

  My first two flights were with an experienced pilot in the backseat, who was memorable for the chew he had in his mouth at all times, including while flying the jet. He must have just swallowed the spit. After that, I flew only with an instructor RIO (radio intercept officer, like Goose in Top Gun). I found it odd to have someone who wasn’t a pilot grading me on my flying skills.

  We quickly advanced to learning to fly the airplane in combat: air-to-air gunnery, basic intercepts day and night, single- and multiplane air-to-air engagements and low-altitude flight training. Air-to-air gunnery involved a lot of airplanes flying in a pattern around another airplane, which towed a banner the others were trying to shoot at. These exercises were done using real bullets, which seems like a terrible idea, though I never saw anyone get shot by accident. Each of us had bullets painted with a different color so the instructors would be able to tell who had hit the target how many times. Just as with bombing, I wasn’t particularly good at this, but I enjoyed the competitive aspect.

  The night before I tried to land the F-14 for the first time on the USS Enterprise off the coast of Virginia, I lay awake in bed for a long time. Our instructor had told us, “You won’t be able to sleep, so just try to lie still and think about nothing so you get some rest.” This turned out to be good advice and has served me well many times in the years since.

  My first arrested landing was a complete disaster. I landed so low that my tailhook hit the back of the ship. That’s called a hook slap, and it’s not good. Basically, if I’d been any lower I would have crashed, and that would have been the end of me and my RIO. While none of my subsequent approaches were as bad as that hook slap, I didn’t get much better. After a while, the instructors had seen enough and sent me home. I had disqualified.

  I landed back at Naval Air Station Oceana with a weird feeling of disbelief. After my RIO and I jumped out of the plane, he looked at me with concern. I must have appeared as bewildered as I felt.

  “Hey, you’ll figure it out,” he told me with an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Shake it off.”

  I could only mutter in response. There had been so much riding on this, and I had failed. As I went inside and took off my gear piece by piece—helmet, harness, G suit—I couldn’t believe how much I sucked at this. I didn’t know how I could improve if I got another chance, and it was possible I wouldn’t get one.

  I thought about what I might do with my life if I couldn’t fly jets in the Navy. I had once picked up an application to the CIA at a college fair. That might be interesting. I thought about the FBI—that is, assuming the Navy would discharge me rather than send me out to fly a heavy airplane, work on a ship, or, worst of all, fly a desk. I had a couple of weeks to think about what my alternatives were while the Navy deliberated over my fate.

  In the end, they decided to give me a second chance. I started all over in the carrier qualification phase, where I was paired up with a RIO who had been given the call sign “Scrote” because some unkind squadron mates had decided his face looked like a scrotum. Scrote had a good reputation for helping pilots who were having trouble behind the boat like me.

  “You know, you can fly the airplane okay, but you’re not flying it all the time,” he told me. “You’re on altitude and airspeed, but you’re not on top of it.” I had been trained to keep my altitude within a two-hundred-foot range, so I didn’t worry if I was ten feet off the precise altitude, or twenty, or fifty. But Scrote pointed out that this imprecision in the end would lead me far from where I needed to wind up, and fixing it would take a lot of my attention. I had to always be making small, constant corrections if I wanted to make the situation better. He was right. My flying got better, and I’ve been able to apply what I learned from him to a lot of other areas of life as well.

  My second attempt to qualify was on a black night with no moonlight. As I got within a couple of miles of the ship, I felt the pressure of what I was about to do. I started peeking out from my scan of the instruments inside the cockpit to see whether I could spot the ship. It was disorienting to see the faint lights of the carrier in an ocean of black. At three-quarters of a mile, the air traffic controller told me to “call the ball,” to start flying the approach visually (rather than using the aircraft’s instruments). My first thought was, Oh, shit, but I flew as I had been trained to, made small corrections to power and lineup. The glow of the flight deck that had looked so dim from the air became brighter until it was an all-encompassing yellow haze, and the next thing I knew I felt the tug of the arresting cable. I felt I had arrived on some alien planet, a new landscape that looked absolutely surreal. I had landed safely and successfully on that dark night.

  The day you qualify to land on an aircraft carrier is a big deal, and when you do it at night, it’s an even bigger one. As with many things that were a big deal in my squadron, it was traditional to have a party to celebrate it. This party was at my house, a three-story condo a few blocks from the beach that I shared with two other guys. To prepare for the party, we bought a ton of beer, some chips, and some Jell-O for making Jell-O shots.

  My roommate’s girlfriend had brought a friend to the party—Leslie Yandell. I remember seeing Leslie sitting on my couch talking with her friends and drinking a beer. She was cute, with a bright smile and curly blond hair. I decided to talk to her for a bit and found out that she had grown up in Georgia but lived nearby. Her stepfather was a dentist, and she worked as a receptionist in his dental practice. She was easy to talk with, and I liked her laugh, so I asked her out for the next weekend. She said yes.

  In the Navy at that time, there was an idea that a single officer generally didn’t advance as quickly as a married one. This wasn’t a written rule—maybe it was even nonsense, but everyone believed it. Being a family man was supposedly an indicator of a certain kind of stability and maturity. I knew that all of the original Mercury astronauts Tom Wolfe wrote about were married, with at least two children. I wanted a family, and now that I was twenty-six and advancing in my career, it was starting to seem like the time was right. My brother was already married, and that added to the feeling that I should be ready for this stage of my life.

  Leslie and I dated regularly for most of that year. I enjoyed going to her mother and stepfather’s for dinner every Sunday. (He
had been a commander in the Navy Reserve.) I soon became close with Leslie’s brother and sister-in-law as well. It seemed like a logical next step to officially become part of their family. I asked Leslie to marry me over a bottle of wine sitting on a park bench on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, and she said yes.

  —

  IN SEPTEMBER 1990, I was assigned to a real fighter squadron, VF=145, nicknamed The World Famous Pukin’ Dogs. They were based at the hangar right next door at Naval Air Station Oceana, so I didn’t have to move. The squadron was deployed in the Persian Gulf on the USS Eisenhower; since we were in the middle of Operation Desert Shield, I would join them when they returned.

  Being in an F-14 squadron in the 1990s was like a cross between playing a professional sport and being in a rock-and-roll band. The movie Top Gun didn’t quite capture the arrogance and bravado of it all. The level of drunkenness and debauchery was unbelievable (and is, thankfully, no longer the standard). There were strippers in the Officers’ Club every Wednesday and Friday night, and it was a big party every time. On my first day, a senior officer in the squadron told me in no uncertain terms, “This squadron is about three things: flying, fighting, and fucking, and not necessarily in that order.” I told him I understood, and I did, at least about flying and fucking (sort of). But I was confused about the fighting part—I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the Soviets or some other enemy combatant, or something else. In fact, it meant going to bars on the weekends with the intention of getting into bar fights. At the annual conference for naval aviators, known as Tailhook, the debauchery reached new levels. For example, some pilots decided to make their adjacent rooms into a suite by using a chainsaw to cut through the wall. Soon after, events at a Tailhook conference would create a sexual harassment scandal that made national news and resulted in a chain reaction of investigations, firings, and policy changes. Though I had never witnessed anything as extreme as the behavior that led to the scandal, I had witnessed behavior that crossed the line, and I always wondered how this could be acceptable in the military. I didn’t participate in it, but I hadn’t done anything to try to stop it, either. In the long term, the policy changes have been for the better. As a result of the shake-ups caused by the scandal, women were soon allowed to fly in combat for the first time. This created a much more even playing field and advanced the careers of a few talented women pilots, some of whom would later become my astronaut colleagues. Over the course of twenty years, many more would follow.

  I continued to train over the course of the next year and flew to other air stations in Key West and Nevada to practice and continue acquiring new skills. I was with the squadron when it left for its next cruise on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (we called it Ike for short), in September 1991. We were headed to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the fjords of Norway. I would be gone for six months, during which I would fly the F-14 nearly every other day, on combat air patrol. The Soviet Union fell apart while we were at sea, and we didn’t know yet what that would mean.

  One black night only a few weeks into the cruise, my RIO Ward Carroll (whom we called Mooch) and I launched in the Arabian Sea without a hitch and took up our combat air patrol position over the carrier. Our official duty was to protect our aircraft carrier’s battle group from airborne threats. In other words, we were there to shoot down any bombers or fighters that might be getting anywhere near us. We also used this time to do some training. When our hour-and-a-half sortie was over and it was time to head back, I heard Mooch say, “There’s land between us and the ship.”

  “Land?”

  I was pretty sure we hadn’t flown over any land. There wasn’t any bad weather forecast for that day, but the horizon had completely disappeared. Then I realized that the “land” we were seeing on our radar was sand—a haboob in Arabic, a giant sandstorm. It had completely engulfed the region, and it was likely going to make it a very tough night behind the boat.

  As we got closer to the ship and leveled off to start our final approach, visibility was awful. I heard the air traffic controller say, “Salty Dog One Oh Three, three-quarters of a mile, call the ball.” He wanted me to confirm I could see the visual landing aids that would allow me to line up for landing. I looked outside and saw absolutely nothing. Then I heard the landing signal officer, who stands on the back of the ship to guide us in, say, “Paddles contact, keep it coming,” meaning he could see us even if we couldn’t see him. We continued our descent toward the ship.

  When we were less than a quarter mile away, I could finally see the carrier. At 150 miles per hour, I had about five seconds to make corrections to line up the airplane with the centerline and adjust our altitude and speed to land in the right spot on the flight deck, right before the third arresting cable. We touched down. As usual, I went to full power, always necessary in case the landing wasn’t successful and I would have to take off again instantly. I expected to feel the comforting pull of the arresting wire bringing us to a stop—but it never came.

  “Bolter, bolter, bolter…hook skip,” called the landing signal officer, the LSO. To bolter means to fail to catch the arresting wire with the airplane’s tailhook. We had to immediately accelerate at full throttle in order to take off again and circle around for another attempt. Off we went back into the sandy darkness of the sky. I was frustrated because I hadn’t done anything wrong—I was just unlucky. The hook had skipped over the wires. We came in again, only to experience another bolter. We came around again. Another bolter. We came around again. Now we got a wave-off, meaning our approach was so ugly they wouldn’t let me try to land for fear I’d crash. Now I was seriously getting angry with myself and nervous.

  The visibility was not improving, and we were running out of gas. We went around a number of times more, which only resulted in more bolters—wave-offs because we were too close to the airplane in front of us and wave-offs for performance (in other words, shitty flying on my part). Eventually we were “trick or treat,” which means we either had to land this time or go get more gas. I boltered again. We were off to the tanker.

  The tanker was an A-6 Intruder configured with external fuel tanks that circles overhead at three thousand feet, ready to refuel airplanes. Finding the tanker was a challenge in itself, because we were still engulfed in the sandstorm. We did a radar-only rendezvous, which was very risky, with Mooch calling out range, bearing, and closure as we approached. Once I was within twenty-five feet or so, I was able to see the tanker and join up on its wing. I extended my refueling probe, but the bumpiness of the air and the fact that I had gone around so many times in attempts to land on the ship had me thoroughly unsettled. It took me multiple attempts to make contact, during which I tried not to think about what would happen if we couldn’t refuel: we would have to eject or take our chances with the barricade (a net rigged on the deck to catch the airplane), both very dangerous. Once I finally did make contact with the tanker and refueled, I headed back toward the ship.

  Then I boltered, and boltered again. I am going to do this for the rest of my life, I thought. Eventually I put the airplane down on the deck in the right spot and felt the relief of the arresting cable’s tug as we came to an abrupt stop. As I taxied forward to be chained down, I noticed that my right leg was shaking uncontrollably from the adrenaline surging through my system after all those attempts and close calls. Mooch and I made our way off the flight deck, down the dimly lit corridors smelling of jet fuel, down the ladder, and into our brightly lit ready room. The pilots burst into applause when we walked in. They’d been watching our misadventures on a monitor the whole time.

  “Welcome back to Ike. We never thought we were going to see you fellas again.”

  It had been my first real “night in the barrel,” and I had survived it. (There’s an expression among naval aviators based on a bawdy old joke about a pilot finding sexual relief via a barrel, only to discover that his turn in the barrel was coming up.)

  I laughed and accepted their congratulations.

  “Th
ere are those who have,” I said, “and those who will.”

  —

  MY SECOND MEMORABLE bad night flying was in the Persian Gulf, on a night that was brilliantly clear at first. The moon was bright, what we called a commander’s moon because the air wing’s commanding officers would take advantage of it to log their night landings under easier conditions. My RIO Chuck Woodard (call sign “Gunny”) and I launched that night to protect Ike and its battlegroup from the Iranian air force. After about an hour, the carrier’s air traffic control told us we could return to the ship early. We had plenty of fuel, since we were coming back sooner than planned, so for fun, and to expedite our return, I lit the afterburner and we went supersonic. We were approaching the marshal point, an imaginary point twenty miles behind the ship where supersonic speed was not recommended. Normally I wouldn’t have been going that fast, but it was such a clear night it seemed safe.

  I immediately sensed I was getting behind the airplane. Even though it was clear at altitude, a layer of fog had rolled in below us, and by the time we descended through five thousand feet above the water, I was having a hard time keeping up. I started feeling rattled, sweating with my heart pounding. I was having a “helmet fire.” Everything was happening too fast. I felt completely overwhelmed.

  My altimeter alarm went off to warn me we were passing below five thousand feet; then it went off again to warn me we were getting even lower. It was a distraction, so I made the almost-fatal error of turning it off.

  The next thing I heard was Gunny shouting, “Pull up!” Without thinking, I immediately pulled back hard on the stick, simultaneously looking over at the altimeter and vertical speed indicator. We were at eight hundred feet, dropping at four thousand feet per minute. About twelve seconds later, we would have flown into the water, becoming one of the many planes that never return to the ship. No one would have had a clue as to what had gone wrong.