Seeing Plug Neidhold the first time, you didn’t need to be told where he got his call sign. He looked like a miniature sumo wrestler, standing about five-five, with a girth like a cement mixer. Plug had a round, cherubic face and an unquenchable passion for carrier aviation.
Plug was one of those kids who grew up never doubting what he would do with his life. He was going to be a fighter pilot. Period. He had been a Navy brat, his father retiring from a career as a naval aviator with the rank of commander. Plug migrated directly from high school to the Naval Academy, to flight training, right into the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat fighter. And after a three-year stint in the Tomcat squadron, based at Oceana and deploying on various carriers to the Mediterranean, he received orders to VFA-106, where he transitioned to the F/A-18 Hornet. Along the way he earned his qualification as a Landing Signal Officer. To Plug Neidhold’s thinking, that was as good as it got in naval aviation.
The VFA-106 CQ briefing room was outfitted just like a squadron ready room aboard a carrier: rows of high-backed, airliner-type chairs, all facing a wall covered with the ubiquitous giant grease board. Pictures of long ago naval aircraft, carriers, and battles covered the walls. The nuggets sat in the high-backed chairs, doodling on their kneeboards while Pearly and Plug delivered their motivational briefings.
There were briefings every day on FCLP (Field Carrier Landing Practice) procedures, on the F/A-18 specialized carrier landing equipment, on the shipboard equipment of an aircraft carrier, on night vision, on night flying procedures at the carrier, on divert procedures in the event they couldn’t land aboard the ship, on instrument-flying techniques in the carrier landing pattern.
There was even a lecture about shipboard etiquette.
“Etiquette?” groaned a nugget.
“For the Marines,” said Plug.
They sat through a two hour lecture on seagoing protocol, both in the air and below decks—the niceties to be observed in the officers’ wardroom, what to wear, whom to salute, how to find your away around the labyrinthine innards of a ninety-thousand-ton warship. Even what to call the parts of the ship. (“Don’t call the floor a floor, stupid. Out there it’s a deck.”)
At the end of the lecture series came, of course, a two hour exam. Everyone passed.
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This was the Big One. The nuggets of 2-95 would meet their last—and biggest—challenge. The final test. They had learned to fly formation, make instrument approaches, fire guns, shoot rockets, launch missiles, drop bombs, refuel in flight, intercept bogeys—all the rudimentary chores performed by fighter pilots around the world.
These were all important skills to a fighter pilot, things you had to know. But if you were a Navy or Marine fighter pilot—one supreme skill outweighed them all. Nothing else counted if you didn’t possess the single supreme qualification: landing aboard the boat.
Only naval aviators, of course, could get away with calling a ninety-thousand-ton ship-of-the-line belonging to the United States Navy a boat. But that was part of the game, speaking flippantly about that which scared the peewilly out of you. Somehow referring to that wallowing, griddle-topped death barge out there in the ocean as a boat made it seem less. . . intimidating.
The idea was to maintain a lively sense of black humor about the whole thing. You joked about becoming a “ramp roast”—referring to the spectacle of a jet sinking below the approach path and fireballing against the carrier’s ramp—the aft end of the flight deck—during a landing attempt. You were supposed to hoo-haw about missing the wires with your jet’s tailhook (what they called a “bolter”) and hurtling off the far edge of the deck, back into the thin air over the ocean.
Sitting there in the ready room, you were even supposed to watch with fascination the video records of carrier landing accidents—jets pranging into the ramp, careening off the edge of the deck, splattering into the ocean after failed catapult shots—like they were replays from Monday night football.
It was a high stakes form of whistling in the dark. If you stared the prospect of violent death in the face, swaggered up and spat in its eye, then the whole terrifying specter seemed less terrifying.
For a naval aviator, landing aboard a carrier was the most essential skill in his repertoire, an ability as basic as breathing. Without it, nothing else mattered. You could be the best dogfighter in fighterdom, the most uncannily accurate dive bomber since Charlton Heston in “The Battle of Midway,” the best formation pilot outside the Blue Angels. None of it counted for zip if you couldn’t catch a wire with your tailhook.
Long before it became the icon of the Navy’s greatest public relations disaster, the tailhook was an indispensable item of hardware in naval aviation. Appended to the aft belly of Navy airplanes, the tailhook was the singular feature distinguishing Navy fighters pilots from those of any other military force in the world. When the jet was configured for landing—gear and flaps down—the hook was extended, looking like the stinger on a hornet.
On most fighters jets the shaft of the tailhook was about four feet long, round, and had a barbed flange—a “hook”—on the end. When the jet plunked down on the carrier deck, the tailhook scraped along the deck and snared one of the four arresting wires stretched like banjo strings across the flight deck. The fast-moving jet was yanked to a stop like a tethered dog hitting the end of its leash. The tailhook was an immensely strong item of hardware, which it had to be to arrest the flight of a thirty-five-thousand pound hunk of machinery traveling a hundred-fifty-miles-per-hour.
The idea was to fly an unwavering path, at a constant glide path angle, right down to the flight deck landing area, skimming low over the ramp of the deck.. They called it “flying the ball” because that’s what it looked like from the pilot’s view: a little “ball,” a shimmering yellowish blob on an eight-foot square panel called a Fresnel Lens at the left edge of the flight deck landing area. Midway at each side of the lens was a row of green datum lights. The ball appeared to move up and down on the lens, indicating to the pilot where he was in relation to the correct glide path.
If the landing jet was on the correct glide path to the carrier deck, the pilot would see the ball in the middle of the lens, exactly between the rows of green datum lights. If the ball was high, above the green lights, it meant the jet was high on the glide path. The most horrific vision for a carrier pilot was to see the ball sinking off the bottom of the lens. It meant that he was going low—settling toward fiery oblivion on the ramp.
The ramp was the implacable, unyielding butt end of the boat, the edge of the flight deck that hung out over the ship’s fantail. The ramp represented instant, violent death. Every pass you made at the deck was a flirtation with the ramp. Too high over the ramp and you “boltered”—missed the wires and went hurtling off the end of the ship, back into the sky. Too low—and you became one with the ramp. End of game.
It was the “ball”—that shimmering yellow blob down there on the Fresnel Lens at the port edge of the flight deck—that kept you off the ramp. The ball was life itself. It was the optical glide path that guided you at precisely the right descent angle. If you kept the ball exactly in the middle of the lens, between the datums, you sailed over the ramp with a clearance of about fifteen feet.
The ball was impersonal. It didn’t care who was out there in the groove, striving to bring his jet aboard the carrier. The ball would settle off the bottom for anyone, nugget or Air Group Commander, who screwed up and let his jet go low on the glide path. If the ball was low, you were low. If you were real low, you hit the ramp. If you hit the ramp, no matter who you were, you were dead.
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Flying the ball could be maddeningly difficult. It was one of those elusive skills that seemed to reside at a subliminal level, beneath conscious thinking. Some days, the more you focused on it, the harder you tried to analyze your actions, the slippier the damn ball became. Why is the ball going up, off the scale? You were just sitting there, working the throttles, keeping everything in the middle—and th
ere it went. Or worse: Oh, Christ, it’s going low, turning red! You cram on the power just as the LSO frantically hits the wave off lights.
Some days were like that.
On other days, the ball seemed cemented in the middle. It never moved. Your left hand twiddled the throttles, making fine adjustments to the power setting, seemingly directed by some higher intelligence. You were focused, yes, but the conscious brain was letting some other facet of its cognitive machinery call the shots.
Days like that were magic. It was like finding the “sweet spot” in a golf shot or a tennis stroke. “An Okay pass,” the LSO would say in the debriefing. That was all. No other comment. “Okay” was the ultimate grade, with no niggling little qualifiers like, “a little low start, a little high at the ramp.”
Okay with no comment. End of critique. That was as good as it got.
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On a brisk spring afternoon, the seven remaining members of Class 2-95 took off, individually, headed for the traffic pattern at Whitehouse Field, five miles north of Cecil. Waiting at the edge of the runway in the dilapidated LSO shack were Plug and Pearly, radiophone in hand.
The first one in the pattern was Burner.
“Three-One-oh-six, Hornet ball, seven-point-five, Bunsen,” Burner said into his microphone.
That was the standard script. When the pilot rolled into the groove—turned his jet onto final approach—he was supposed to transmit a long string of information to the LSO: his aircraft number (Three-one-oh-six), confirmation that he saw the glide slope “ball,” his fuel remaining (seventy-five-hundred pounds), and his name. The carrier landing pattern was an exception to the standard use of call signs. The ship’s air bosses wanted to match pilots up with their correct names.
“Roger ball,” answered the LSO, Lieutenant Pearly Gates. With that acknowledgment—Roger ball—Pearly was sealing the “contract” between the LSO and the pilot in the groove. The pilot was flying the ball, while the LSO kept him under his very personal, positive control.
One by one, at sixty second intervals, they made the same call:
“Three-One-twelve, Hornet ball, six-point-eight, Quinn.”
“Roger ball.”
“Three-One-oh-two, Hornet ball, eight-point-zero, Van Doren.”
“Roger ball.”
“Three-One-oh-niner, Hornet ball, seven-point-five, Morales.”
“Roger ball.”
All six seven nuggets, one after the other. Down they came, flying the ball to a tooth-cracking arrival on the concrete “carrier” deck, then jamming the throttles up to take off again and repeat the whole process.
Their ball-flying passes were rough, which was standard for the first official FCLP session.
“A little power,” Pearly transmitted to Sniper. “More power!” And then, not liking J. J.’s response to the call for power, “Wave off! Wave off!” A Wave Off was a command to break off the approach and go around. It was an indisputable signal: Push up the throttles and get the hell out of there.
“Right for line up,” Pearly said to Angie. She responded by dipping her right wing, changing the direction of the jet a couple of degrees to the right.
Pearly would issue “test” commands to everyone, checking their response time. Everyone got a “Line up” call to the left or right. Everyone got an unexpected “Wave off” command. It was part of the training, to execute the LSO’s command—without question or hesitation— whether or not they agreed. Do it now, talk about it later.
“Three-oh-niner, after this pass, your signal is Bingo,” Pearly radioed.
“Three-oh-nine, roger,” Angie Morales replied.
“Three-twelve, your signal is bingo”
“Three-twelve roger,” answered J. J. Quinn.
“Bingo” meant divert. Go home. When each jet had completed his required number of passes and had reached the pre-determined minimum fuel quantity, the LSO issued the “Bingo” command. One by one, they “cleaned up”—retracted the landing gear and flaps—and pointed their jets southward to Cecil Field.
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The best part was the debriefing. They usually did it away from the squadron, at the LSO’s favorite pub. Pearly’s favorite pub was Hop’s, in Orange Park. Here he would hold court at a back table. Like a priest at confession, Pearly would go over each pass made by every nugget that day at Whitehouse.
“A high start, Rick. A little low in the middle, slow at the ramp. Fair pass.”
Rick McCormack nodded.
“Next pass, same thing. High start, then going low and slow in the middle. Get a better start, Rick, work it down sooner, and it’s gonna be easier for us both. Y’ got that?”
McCormack got it. “Yes, sir.”
Pearly worked his way through all six seven nuggets, debriefing each one individually. The barmaid came by with fresh pitchers of beer. To her, the bunch at the table looked just like anyone else. They were just another bunch of kids having a good time.
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The second FCLP period was different. The sun had set two hours before, and the Florida landscape had turned as black as the inside of a manatee.
The biggest problem with flying at night at Whitehouse turned out to be finding Whitehouse. In the daytime, you could see runway 11/29, the nice long eight-thousand-foot-long strip of concrete at Whitehouse, from miles away. All you had to do was fly right down the runway at six hundred feet, turn downwind, and enter the traffic pattern. A piece of cake.
But not at night. Out there on their very first night FCLP period, the nuggets discovered a discomforting truth: At night, you couldn’t see the freaking runway! The reason you couldn’t see the freaking runway was because someone had turned off the runway lights that ran down each side of the eight-thousand-foot runway. All you were allowed to see at Whitehouse was a little pattern of lights arranged just like the lights on a carrier deck, which, of course, was what they were supposed to be practicing for.
But, holy shit! That miserable little cluster of lights was indistinguishable from the trailer parks and fish camps and convenience stores and chicken farms that sprouted like swamp cabbage out there in the scruffy woods outside Jacksonville.
So here they came, groping through the dark, all of them peering inside their cockpits at the navigation displays on their instrument consoles, trying to aim their jets at the darkened little air field out there in the piney woods.
They succeeded. Five Hornet jets arrived more or less simultaneously, zipping across the field from all directions like incoming Scuds.
“Three-oh-eight, two mile initial—hey, who’s that on downwind?”
“No one’s downwind!” called the LSO. “You’re coming crossfield. Break it off and re-enter on a one-one-zero bearing.”
“Three-fourteen, downwind for, uh. . . oh, hell, sorry about that. . .”
“Three-oh-two, I’m in the break --- I think. . .”
“Yeah, you’re in the break. But you’re never gonna see the runway from that angle, Three-oh-two. Break right and exit the pattern.”
It was chaos. For ten minutes the LSO played air traffic controller, getting his charges aligned with the correct runway. Finally he had them all in the pattern, more or less sequenced in the right order.
Then the fun really began.
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J. J. Quinn was seeing about what he had expected: the “carrier” deck lights, the shimmering little yellow ball out there at the left deck edge. In his HUD (Head Up Display) on the windscreen, he saw his angle of attack, which was optimum, and his airspeed, one-thirty-four, and his altitude, five-hundred-fifty and decreasing. The little illuminated “velocity vector”—the computer-generated image on the HUD that showed where the airplane was actually aimed, was superimposed right over the landing area.
He had it wired.
Except for the ball, which was slipping to the low side. A little power. . . oops, don’t yank the nose up. . . fly the ball. . . fly the ball with the power. . . don’t hike the nose up and down like that. It skews th
e angle of attack, destabilizes the approach. . .
J. J was working hard. The ball was a damned slippery thing, sliding up and down like an eel in a jar. The LSO was not saying much, letting J. J. solve his little self-induced problems.
Closer, crossing the threshold of the darkened runway, J. J. forced himself to stay locked on to the ball. . . Don’t let it move, keep it in the middle. . .
BaWhonk! The jet landed squarely in the middle of the tiny landing area. J. J. shoved the throttles up. He watched the lights flashing past.
And then. . . nothing. Darkness.
Instant darkness. Darkness so dark, J. J. blinked, thinking he must have gone blind.
One instant he had been looking outside, peering through his HUD, focused on the slippery yellow ball, watching in his peripheral vision the little pattern of lights that delineated the center line and the edges of the landing area. In the next instant the lights had flashed by and were gone. There was nothing more to see.
Darkness. Black, impenetrable, evil darkness. But J. J. was still looking outside, trying to see something.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed on the radio.
“Say again?” said the LSO.
J. J. didn’t say it again. He was too busy trying to find something to look at.
It was a normal transition, of course, switching your eyes from a lighted deck to the blackness beyond the deck. The A pilot had to force his eyes back inside the cockpit and fly his jet by instruments. Otherwise, he would be like J. J. Quinn, flying blind, gazing off into black, empty space, with no idea where his fighter was going. It was a potentially deadly scenario—one that had been killing aviators since the first wobbling night flights.
J. J. caught himself. He locked his gaze back on his instruments and reverted to basics: Wings level, nose above the horizon, positive rate of climb, airspeed steady, altitude increasing.
“You okay, Sniper?” Pearly called on the radio.
“I’m okay,” J. J. said, his pulse whanging away at a hundred eighty beats a minute.
“You owe a round of beer for that ‘Holy shit’ on the radio. Pay up at the debriefing.”
Bogeys and Bandits Page 23