Fighter pilots gazed down in disdain on the rest of the world, the military, the rest of aviation. They were the varsity. They flew faster and higher, took greater risks, won more glory than any of the others. They were the hunters and killers. All the others—patrol plane pukes, anti-submarine wienies, transport drivers, and, especially helo pukes—were placed here on earth to support the fighter pilots.
Most fighter pilots, in their secret souls, believed that they were where they were (at the apex of the system), and helo pilots were where they were (pounding sand at the bottom) because of an innate difference in quality. Back in flight training, the top students were rewarded with the first choice of assignments. This was almost always pointy-nosed jets. The bottom ranking students got last choice, which was almost always. . . helicopters.
So there it was. As far as the fighter jocks were concerned, it was a merit game. Winners and losers. Of course, there was always the possibility that a top student—a winner—might actually choose helicopters, but in a way that was even more damning. It meant he had no balls. Can you imagine. . . some turkey getting helos. . . because that’s what he actually wanted?
In the Marine Corps, being a helo pilot was the closest thing to being a grunt—a raggedy-ass, crawling-on-your-belly, snake-eating infantryman with a tin pot on your head and a piece in your hand. Helo pilots actually got out there with the grunts, hauling them—whop, whop, whop, whop—in and out of the field, eating the same gut-rotting rations, sleeping in the same miserable tents, sometimes getting shot by the same goddamned incoming bullets.
Sometimes a helo pilot would look up from his mud-encaked bivouac. He might gaze skyward, and what he would see, way up there above the fray, sublimely removed from the squalor and mud and gore of the battlefield, would be contrails. The lovely thin contrails of the high-flying, oh-so-superior fighter jocks.
And it pissed him off royally. Every helo pilot knew about the contemptuous snobbery of the fighter community. He was well aware of the not-so-subtle class distinctions of the aviation “communities,” and of the low regard the fighter jocks had for the untouchables of the helo community. And though he might never say it out loud around his peers, the helo pilot nursed a private fantasy: I could do that just as well as those assholes up there. I could be a fighter pilot—if they gave me the chance.
One day they gave J. J. Quinn the chance. It was now or never, he thought. You could spend your life looking up at the contrails, being pissed off, wondering if you could have cut it. Or you could go for it.
He was going for it.
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The father of First Lieutenant David “Burner” Bunsen hadn’t been pleased when he heard that his son wanted to be a Marine fighter pilot. The Marines? The kid was supposed to go from Yale on to Biz School, then join one of the good firms, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, something like that. That was the plan, and up until the kid’s last year at Yale, he had been on track.
The son had trashed the whole plan. Here he was, wearing that bristly white-sidewalled Marine haircut that made his cranium look like a fuzzed onion. He had gone through Marine officer training and then signed up for flight training, without any consultation from his father, obligating himself for seven more years. Christ, the kid would be nearly thirty years old before he could even interview with one of the investment firms!
Burner Bunsen was a handsome kid, a six-footer with wide shoulders and a lop-sided grin. He possessed a long, prominent nose and large ears that extended like speedbrakes from his side-walled crew-cut head.
Burner was an anomaly. He didn’t match the profile of strike fighter pilots. For one thing, he didn’t come from the great bluish-white-collar middle class of America like most naval aviation candidates, who went to state universities and military academies on scholarships and who earned their degrees in one of the sciences.
He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where his father was a wealthy developer of shopping malls and who had become wealthier in the free-for-all eighties. As a kid, Burner never had a paper route. He never joined the Boy Scouts. He didn’t go to public schools. He didn’t care a fig whether he won a merit scholarship, and he didn’t want to go to a service academy. And he didn’t like science.
What Burner did like was team sports, particularly crewing. That was what he did at St. Paul’s Academy, a venerable prep school in Concord, New Hampshire attended by kids who were exceedingly bright or exceedingly blessed with wealthy parents. Burner was both.
At Yale, instead of earning a degree in aero engineering or computer science like most would-be warriors, Burner had studied, of all limp-wristed, unwarrior-like subjects, philosophy! By ready room definition, Bunsen was a pointy-headed Ivy League elitist.
It was during his last year at Yale that some rebellious chromosome caused Bunsen to start thinking about the military. The idea had rooted itself in his brain that he ought to belong to some kind of elite combat unit. Why? “Camaraderie,” he said. “I liked the team spirit I’d seen in school sports. Crewing—everybody pulling together. I started looking for that kind of esprit outside of school.”
One summer he interned at an investment bank in New York. It was there he made a discovery: There was no camaraderie among investment bankers. There was no team, no esprit. It was every man for himself. Forget esprit.
He considered joining the SEALS—the Navy’s “Mission Impossible” specialists—guys who blackened their faces and parachuted and scuba dived and slit throats. That was the part that appealed to him—the crawling-on-the belly and throat-slitting. Then he took a hard look at the Marine Corps, and liked what he saw even better. Now here was camaraderie! Two hundred-plus years of it—esprit de corps and ample opportunity for throat-slitting and belly crawling.
After Burner had signed up for the Marine’s platoon leader course, which would lead to his commissioning as a second lieutenant, he became aware of an even more appealing job: He could be a fighter pilot.
That was when it all came together for him, like a neatly assembled mosaic. Suddenly he knew what he wanted, where he belonged. Being a Marine, wearing the uniform, flying a multi-million dollar, high tech killing machine—it all had an elegant logic.
And after he had made the commitment, earned his commission in the Marine Corps, then entered the arduous training to become a naval aviator, he discovered another essential truth about himself: He loved flying. And he was good at it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FAM
They were like kids on their first day of school. In fact, this bright, cold January morning in 1995 was the first day of school for the nuggets of Class 2-95.
They showed up early that morning, wearing their gray-green flight suits, bright orange new Gladiators (the official emblem of the RAG) patch on the breast. Their frustration level had peaked out over the holidays—waiting, waiting, interminably waiting for their appointed time to come, for them to be allowed to claim the prize they had earned—strike fighter training.
A few, like Angie Morales and Chip Van Doren, had been “stashed” for three or four months before receiving a class date. Being a stash meant you were on hold with nothing to do, waiting for your slot in the training pipeline. In the Incredible Shrinking Navy, it had become a common assignment. Assets and slots were insufficient for the number of bodies to be trained. Stashes were given odd jobs, makework assignments, gofer tasks for the squadron officers. “We’re about as useful,” said a stashed Marine first lieutenant, “as fur on a frog.”
Most of the stashes at Cecil Field spent their time hanging around the RAG, running errands, answering the phones, bumming back seat rides with instructors just to feel what it was going to be like to fly the F/A-18. They felt like kids with their noses pressed to the candy store window.
Some jobs were better than others. Angie Morales had been stashed as the “writer” for the squadron Landing Signal Officer (LSO). The LSO watched and graded every practice carrier landing made by his class of students. And while he stood ou
t there at the runway, or on the LSO platform when they went aboard the carrier, he barked his comments to the writer—Morales—to be recorded and used in the debriefing. Morales thought it was fun.
Now the stashing was over. Here it was, day one of their new careers. From this morning forward, until they walked out of the RAG as qualified strike fighter pilots, they’d be working their collective butts off.
On this, the first morning of their new careers, the nuggets of 2-95 could afford to feel a certain. . . smugness. They were feeling the sweet contentment of having arrived. They were going to be fighter pilots!
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Before they let you fly a fighter—any new fighter—you had to learn the airplane. Whether you were a fighter pilot, airline driver, or astronaut, you went through the same ritual. Before you climbed in and took off in any new flying machine, you first had to acquire an intimacy with every detail and nuance of the beast’s peculiar personality. You stared glassy eyed at electrical system schematics, at multi-hued diagrams of fuel and hydraulic systems, sat through mind-numbing lectures about maximum hydraulic psi (pounds per square inch), minimum fuel pressure from the engine-driven pumps, limits of exhaust gas temperature and fuel flow and oil pressure. This phase of training was as much fun as a root canal.
Each student sat in his own little booth with his own computer. It was called CAI—computer assisted instruction—and it was supposed to be “interactive,” meaning the computer presented the material, then tested the student’s knowledge of the subject, advancing him to the next phase or re-drilling him on a weak area.
This was old stuff to the nuggets. By now they had been through years of such training, from their engineering and math courses in college, all the way through two years of flight training where they’d learned the plumbing of at least three new jets.
But it was tedious. All day long they sat there with the earphones clamped to their heads, listening to some guy with a voice like a twenty-eight volt motor go on about electrical schematics and hydraulic pressures and asking questions just to see if they were paying attention. It was like listening to an unending Sunday sermon.
They wanted to fly. It was tough, sitting there at their computers, punching the keyboard, listening to the twenty eight volt voice, being forced to hear the incessant jet noises from out there on Cecil Field’s long runways: Kaawhoom! —afterburners kicking in, fighters hurtling down the runways.
Interspersed with CAI sessions were lectures. Some of the lectures were worse than the twenty-eight volt voice. The nuggets endured lectures on naval aviation maintenance procedures, on the military justice system, on AIDS prevention, on community harmony, on radio protocol, on race relations, on alternate life style “sensitivity.” They were happy to get back to the computers.
Of all the class, Chip Van Doren was most at home in CAI. Every morning Van Doren would plop his knapsack in the corner of the booth and sit down at the teaching terminal. A look of sweet contentment would settle on his face as he began to stroke the computer keyboard. For a true techno-nerd like Van Doren, it was heaven. It was as though the F/A-18, with its mission control computers and fly-by-wire flight controls and electronic flight data displays, was just made for someone like him.
For everyone else, it was a dry grind. Every morning they showed up at seven-thirty and sat there like gnomes hunched over their keyboards until five-thirty. And sometimes later.
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In the old days, before computer aided instruction, airplane systems were taught in traditional classrooms. The schematic diagrams would cover an entire wall, and a stand-up instructor with a pointer in his hand and a monotone voice would torture his pupils: “. . .and this valve opens and lets the pressure go to the accumulator over there, and when the pressure gets up to. . .” It was an ordeal of boredom.
That part of training hadn’t changed. It was still an ordeal. Now it was a computer-aided ordeal.
Sometimes, especially in the afternoon, the whole dry business simply became too much. From a CAI booth would come a Zzzzzzzzzzz--snort-chuff as a fighter pilot trainee lost the struggle to maintain consciousness.
Road Ammons learned how to lean his head on the wall of the booth, his eyes aimed more or less at the computer screen, and become comatose.
The bristly head of Burner Bunsen would tilt back, mouth agape, and emit noises like a fleet of chainsaws.
Sally Hopkins would get up and clomp around the room like a roused bear, slap herself on the cheeks, then plunge back into the course with grim determination.
Chip Van Doren, being a computer nerd, was the only one who seemed to enjoy CAI. Van Doren would annoy his classmates by finishing up the course work early, then amuse himself by playing with the computer.
After two weeks of computer tedium, they were finally allowed to see something that looked like a Hornet cockpit. It was a simulated Hornet cockpit—an operational flight trainer (OFT)—in which they could exercise all their newly won knowledge about the inner organs of an F/A-18.
The OFT simulator didn’t move. It was planted firmly in the concrete floor, unlike the advanced hydraulic-powered simulators in the building next door that moved on three axes and transmitted all the sensations of flight to the pilot. But here in the OFT all the instruments and flight data displays worked. All the knobs, switches, dials produced the correct effects. A visual display in the windscreen presented a pilot’s view of the airport and countryside. And best of all, the OFT simulator hummed and throbbed just like a real jet.
Sitting there with the canopy closed, hearing the engines thrumming and purring, looking out at the lights of Cecil Field’s runway 36 left, they thought: Maybe this isn’t really flying. But it’s getting close.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FIRST TIME
It was one of those events you always remembered, like a first kiss. The first day of school. First solo. First heartbreak.
A new relationship with an airplane was like a love affair. It developed in stages, beginning with flirtation, the getting acquainted ritual, infatuation, then love. The whole process was a tumult of joy and discovery. If you were lucky, not until later would come disillusionment, the realization of the flaws and foibles.
So it was with the F/A-18. The airplane was a joy to fly, light and responsive on the controls. The Hornet had no bad traits—none, at least, of the insidious variety that could get you snuffed in a heartbeat if you weren’t watching at all times. The Hornet was honest, everyone said.
Not all pilots loved the Hornet. Some thought it was a bitch. They regarded it as a highly complex, computer-driven machine—a smart, demanding bitch of an airplane—that sometimes made pilots wonder who was in charge. It could be a mini-version of the malevolent rogue computer “Hal” in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
They called the new generation of computerized flight management systems “glass cockpits” because most of the traditional flight data instruments—the round, mechanical gyros and pitot/static airspeed and altitude gauges—were replaced with CRT screens (cathode ray tubes, as in computer monitors). They looked like Nintendo games. Glass cockpits changed the whole pilot-to-machine interface. Now the airplane, receiving information from its computers, was doing things and going places without the direct, hands-on participation of the pilots. Or so it seemed. Perplexed pilots would stare at their flight displays in total bewilderment.
It was a joke, but one containing truth: The single most common utterance heard in a glass cockpit was: WHAT THE FUCK IS IT DOING?
The original versions of the F/A-18 Hornet were designed as single-pilot fighter/attack aircraft. That meant one guy—or girl—did everything, instead of the two that crewed the previous front-line fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, and its predecessor, the F-4 Phantom. Even the ancient A-6 Intruder, an all-weather, low-level attack airplane, was flown by a pilot and a bombardier/navigator. Those were the old days, when a pilot flew the airplane and somebody else handled the mission specifics.
Now the Hornet pilot
did it all. He flew the airplane and attended to all the other details with the aid of the fighter’s highly sophisticated mission control computer and an array of six DDIs (digital display indicators)—monitor screens with a keyboard by which he could select multiple data routes and subroutes for every phase of flight or weapon he carried.
But sometimes it just got to be too much. Someone (in the Pacific fleet, it was said) invented the expressions “helmet fires” and “finger fires.” When a novitiate Hornet pilot would start flipping through the modes on the DDIs like a channel surfer looking for MTV, pulling up the wrong page, then another, taking a wrong route and then another wrong sub-route, burying himself in a miasma of confusion with a figurative cloud of smoke billowing from his skull—the poor freaked-out bugger was said to be having a helmet fire.
A related problem was the finger fire. Almost all the Hornet’s flight and fire control commands were issued through the HOTAS—Hands On Throttle And Stick. The control stick in the pilot’s right hand, and the throttles in his left hand bristled with buttons and switches. There were sixty-some combinations of button and switch commands by which the Hornet pilot did everything—from transmitting on a radio to steering the nose wheel to firing a missile to engaging the autopilot. HOTAS was what allowed a single pilot in the Hornet to perform all the tasks that were once done by multiple-pilot crews.
But the multitude of HOTAS switch and button selections, in the heat of a tense moment, could congeal to a fuzzy blob in an overloaded pilot’s brain. A harried pilot would start punching wrong buttons, thumbs and fingers flying, deploying a speed brake when he meant to engage an autopilot, turning off his lights when he intended to designate a target, firing his guns instead of releasing a bomb. He was having a classic finger fire.
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