Nothing jumped out at them. J. J. Quinn was not a ticking bomb.
Even his family life was prosaic. For eleven years he had been happily married. He had three kids, stair-stepped in ages two through six. J. J. had no stressors from home.
Each of J. J.’s instructors in VFA-106 made a written statement about his prospects. The statements all finished with a similar thought:
“Captain Quinn has given 100% effort throughout his training and definitely has the capability to complete the syllabus.”
“Although slightly slower than average, Capt. Quinn honestly assesses his shortcomings and expends the extra effort to become proficient in all phases of flight.”
“His integrity as a Marine officer is unquestionable. This quality will make him an asset to any fleet F/A-18 squadron.”
“He has heart. He can complete the syllabus and graduate to the fleet.”
“A hard worker who may not catch on quite as fast as others, but once he learns, he doesn’t forget.”
The evaluation board didn’t deliberate for long. In the time it took each of the four members to sign their findings, J. J.’s case was decided.
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The nuggets of Class 2-95 got the word in the ready room as they were briefing for an FCLP period. Sniper’s back!
And he was. His heels clicked on the hard deck as he strode down the passageway. A grin as broad as Pennsylvania covered his face. To everyone he saw, he flashed the same succinct message: thumbs up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A MINOR GLITCH
One morning a notice appeared on the ready room bulletin board:
Memorial Service: for Lt. Glen Kersgeiter. 1300 hours, Base chapel, Lemoore Naval Air Station.
“Did you know him?”
“No. Some of the instructors did.”
“What happened?”
“Nobody knows for sure. It happened during a catapult shot off the Lincoln. He went into a roll to the right, ejected too late, nearly inverted. Some kind of a control problem.”
The discussion was followed by a brooding silence. Some kind of a control problem. . .
It was not the kind of thing fighter pilots liked to hear. When a jet crashed they wanted to know, Who screwed up? What egregious blunder did the guy commit that caused him to crash? It was one thing when a fighter pilot made the ultimate mistake and bought the farm. At least that was understandable. You could learn from it and tell yourself that you, in the same situation, would do something different. But a control problem. . . that was a different matter. Now you were talking about the airplane doing something malevolent. This was getting close to the thing with Hal, the smartass rogue computer in the movie 2001, who acquired sentience and then took it in his cyber-brain to kill the spaceship’s crew.
The F/A-18 was one very smart jet, with its inertial guidance navigation and mission control computer and fly-by-wire flight control system. In all previous generations of flying machinery, the pilot had direct control over the aircraft’s control surfaces. You moved the stick, and an aileron or elevator responded in exact proportion to your input. The surfaces were mechanically linked to the pilot’s controls by cables or pushrods or hydraulic actuators.
No more. The F/A-18 Hornet had fly-by-wire controls, wherein the direct mechanical connection was replaced by electric circuitry. Computers interpreted the pilot’s inputs and decided for him how much control deflection the airplane really ought to have. Never mind that the pilot wanted this much elevator or that much aileron deflection; the smartass computer knew better. Okay, pal, I know you feel like whonking this jet into a gut-busting nine-G turn, but that’s too much. I’m only gonna let you have, oh. . . about seven Gs. So the pilot got a seven-G turn, no more, regardless of how hard he hauled back on the stick.
The computer, of course, was right. It was programmed to keep the pilot’s control inputs within the jet’s allowable parameters. By monitoring and limiting control deflections, it prevented the pilot from overstressing the airplane.
It did more than that. Watching an F/A-18 on take off or in landing configuration, you could see the tail surfaces—the horizontal “stabilators” and the V-shaped vertical stabilizers—moving left, right, up, down, in myriad combinations, flapping like the wings of a headless chicken. It was doing all this control-flapping independent of the pilot’s actual stick movements. The flight control computer was interpreting the pilot’s stick inputs and issuing its own digital signals to the jet’s control surfaces. Okay, I know what you really want. . .
During a catapult launch in the Hornet, the pilot wasn’t even supposed to touch the control stick. He sat there with his right hand up on the canopy bow, removed from the controls. The idea was that during the acceleration of the catapult launch the pilot’s hand would only get in the way. The flight control computer was already programmed to impart the exact amount of elevator deflection when the jet roared off the end of the flight deck. Any input from the pilot would only confuse the computer and disrupt the jet’s smooth transition to a flying attitude.
Such a surrender of authority amounted to a huge leap of faith. Letting yourself be hooked up to a merciless, steam-driven catapult, being flung off the front end of a carrier like a stone in a slingshot—with your hands off the controls—would at one time have been unthinkable. In the older jets, the pilot’s hand would be fastened on the control stick like a vise. Now they were supposed to do it hands off! Fighter pilots were betting their lives on a computer program written, most of them figured, by some pony-tailed geek in Silicon Valley.
It was enough to make them wonder: Weren’t computer programs, like any other item of technology, subject to flaws? The Hornet’s flight control software, just like applications for desktop computers, received frequent revisions, which were supposedly enhancements and improvements. Pilots couldn’t help thinking: Did my flight control software have a “bug?” Were flight control computers, just like home PCs, subject to fatal viruses?
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The crash of the Hornet off the Lincoln’s catapult was not the first such accident. Exactly a year earlier, a Cecil-based pilot from VFA-83 was lost in nearly identical circumstances: a catapult launch, an uncontrollable roll, a too-late ejection.
Why?
It was spooky. What made it spookier was the explanation: “A flight control anomaly.” That was aeronautical techno-speak, which meant that. . . nobody really knew. It was just something that happened.
The nuggets of 2-95, still learning to fly the Hornet, couldn’t help wondering: If the accidents were unexplained, and if there really was a flaw in the flight control system, then wasn’t such an accident likely to happen again?
Yes, they concluded. It was.
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Peggy McCormack, Rick’s wife, kept having this dreadful vision. She could see these three grim-looking Navy officers in starched whites coming up the sidewalk, marching right up to the front door at their little house in Jacksonville. Rick was away somewhere.
Oh, Christ, it’s them! The three starched-white bearers of grimness. That was the way they delivered the news, if you were a fighter pilot’s wife and your husband had just made a smoking hole in the earth somewhere. The doorbell would ring. One of the three, usually the senior officer, would clear his throat and utter the bad tidings: “Ummm, good afternoon, Ma’am, aaahhh. . . we’re awfully sorry to have to tell you that. . .”
It was all imaginary, of course. A nervous wife’s daydream. But she wasn’t alone. Most of the young wives had the same dreadful vision from time to time. For some, it was a recurring nightmare. They dreaded seeing anyone, particularly anyone in uniform, looking grim-faced and walking up their sidewalk.
The best way to handle the awful visions and dreams, they learned, was to talk about it. So that’s what they did: They would get together for lunch or drinks or tennis and laugh about the whole thing, make light of their fears, giggle about the silliness of their runaway imaginations. Being with the other young wives with the same anxi
eties and dreadful visions made it all seem somehow less frightening.
It was not a subject the nuggets liked to chat about with their spouses. Death? The casketless funeral. . . the missing man formation fly by. . . the folded flag. . .? The subject was too grim. Such discussions always danced around the same old throat-catching question: What if. . .?
For Fine Meshers still in their twenties, newly married, in the rude bloom of perfect health and with a universe of unlimited opportunities waiting out there for them, the whole dismal topic just seemed. . . far-fetched. Who, me? No way. . .
Sure, you signed up for life insurance, and you filled out all the emergency notification forms the military gave you, and, of course, you made a will. But, hell, man, a sudden smoking-hole-in-the-dirt finale was not a possibility you let yourself dwell on, or you’d be thinking about it every time you went out there and strapped into a jet. You’d turn into some kind of quavering, psyched-out mushwit. Every flight would be an exercise in terror. You’d eventually turn in your wings and become a ground-pounder.
They all knew aviators who had done that. Some did it because they couldn’t push out of their minds the specter of the smoking hole. Others did it for family reasons. The stress at home just became too much. Too many casketless funerals, too many bad dreams and visions of widowhood, and a young wife would freak out. The next thing that would happen would be the clunk of a set of gold wings dropping on the commanding officer’s desk. The aviator would be quietly reassigned to a ground job, usually to another station where he wouldn’t have to confront the quizzical stares of his former squadronmates.
Early in his career, Road Ammons received a piece of advice from his astronaut mentor, Colonel Bolden. Bolden was a Marine Corps aviator who had been around long enough to know something about the “What if” subject. “Whatever you do,” Bolden told Road, “be honest. Tell your wife everything about your job, the good and the bad. Tell her what the risks are. Don’t skate around the hard truth. In the long run, that will make it easier for you both.”
So that’s what Road did: He told Lowanda everything. He kept her informed even when he was away. Wherever he was, at the squadron, away on a training detachment, he checked in by phone at least once a day.
It seemed to be working. Lowanda knew what Road was doing, why they were there, where he was going. It was fine with her.
Dorothy Quinn was another wife who had no illusions about her husband’s job. During their thirteen years in the Marine Corps she and J. J. had attended their share of funerals and missing man formations. And though she hadn’t become so hard-shelled that the prospect of death and widowhood never crossed her mind, she refused to dwell on the subject. For the Quinns, the Marine Corps was like a marriage. They were in it for the long haul. For better or worse.
Russ and Tracy McCormack had their own way of dealing with the “What if.” In the first weeks of their marriage, they had made a pact: If they had a spat, they would patch it up before Rick went on his next flight. They would never separate while they were angry over something. Just in case.
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Deedle deedle deedle. It sounded like one of those electronic alarm clocks.
Burner Bunsen glanced down inside his cockpit. What he heard was an aural warning to the F/A-18 pilot that something wasn’t right. It was a general alert, not necessarily a life-threatening emergency, but some sort of problem that the pilot ought to take care of before things went to hell.
Burner was on take off roll on Cecil’s runway nine-left, already accelerating through a hundred knots. In a couple more seconds, he’d be lifting the Hornet’s nose and barreling into the sky.
Deedle deedle deedle. There it was again, like the sound effect in a computer game.
What the hell? Burner tore his eyes from the HUD in the windscreen, and glanced inside the cockpit. On the left DDI—digital display indicator—was a message: CHECK TRIM FUNCTION.
And then Burner felt it—a distinct yawing of the jet’s nose to the left. He jammed in the right rudder pedal to counteract the yaw. He was already at take off speed. It was decision time: Either go flying, or snatch the throttles back and try to stop the thing on the runway before he ran off the end. High speed aborted take offs were a dangerous proposition. They usually ended up in a fireball off the end of a runway.
Burner decided to go flying. He eased the nose of the Hornet upward.
Which only aggravated the yaw problem. Now the jet really wanted to slew off to the left side.
Whoa! What was going on here? Another glance inside. He saw the problem.
The Hornet had two rudders—the two big nearly-vertical tail surfaces that provided the jet’s directional guidance. For take off, both on a runway or from an aircraft carrier catapult, the rudders were computer-programmed to “toe in”—to deflect inward by thirty degrees to provide additional downward push on the jet’s tail, which helped rotate the nose upward to a flying attitude. After the Hornet was airborne and accelerating, the rudders were programmed to “fair”—return to their normal streamlined, undeflected position.
On his display indicator, Burner saw the positions of his two rudders. The left rudder was deflected thirty degrees inward, like it was supposed to be. The right rudder showed zero degrees. No deflection.
The rudders were asymmetrical. Only one, the left rudder, was working, which had the effect of slewing the fighter’s nose around to the left.
Burner had his right rudder pedal jammed nearly all the way in. The Hornet was responding. The nose slewed back to the center, to the straight-ahead direction.
The jet was airborne, accelerating like a drag racer. With his left hand Burner reached for the gear handle and snatched it up. He could feel the jet trying to pull off to the left, like a dog yanking against its leash. Burner had the rudder pedal shoved nearly to its limit. The Hornet was responding; the nose was pointed straight ahead.
Speed was solving the problem. As the Hornet accelerated—a hundred-eighty knots, two hundred, two-twenty—the left rudder return to the faired position. Just like it was supposed to. Burner glanced again at the display indicator. Now both rudders were streamlined. Zero degrees deflection.
Back to normal.
For the next hour-and-a-half Burner concentrated on the mission—a BFM (basic fighter maneuvering) exercise. All the flight control systems on his jet performed perfectly. No problems.
By the time he landed back at Cecil, Burner had almost forgotten the problem on take off. Standing there at the maintenance desk, trying to describe the circumstances on the maintenance write-up page, Burner wasn’t even sure it had been a problem. He didn’t want to sound like one of those alarmists who are always finding something wrong with their airplane. It just one of those minor little flight control glitches that come and go. Hell, that’s the way it was with computerized, fly-by-wire airplanes like the Hornet. No big deal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HIS OWN MAN
The nuggets of 2-95 were nearly ready for the ship. Three more FCLP periods, and they would be finished with Whitehouse.
J. J. was back, and he was feeling good about it. During a four-day holiday weekend and a couple of bad weather days, J. J. received some pump-up training in the OFT (simulator) practicing carrier passes. Then he went out to Whitehouse with an instructor in the “trunk” (the rear seat of a tandem-seat F/A-18D model), where he practiced the real thing while an instructor coached him.
It was working. J. J.’s confidence returned. He was flying acceptable passes on the ball, and even more amazingly—he was enjoying it. Gone, at least for the moment, was the habit of sinking below the glide slope while on short final, scaring hell out of himself and the LSO. Gone was the necessity for the flashing red lights and screams of “Wave off! Wave off!” from the hyperventilating LSO and the inevitable afterburner wave off to keep J. J. out of the weeds.
The seven nuggets were not alone in the pattern. Now they were joined by other students from another class. These were experience
d fighter pilots who had been away from the business and were there to re-qualify in carrier landings.
One was Commander Jim Hillan, a former Tomcat pilot and a test pilot who had been detached from carrier duty for the past three years serving as an exchange pilot with the U. S. Air Force. As soon as he had requalified, Hillan would take command of his own F/A-18 squadron. Another old hand was Lieutenant Commander “Smoke” Morgan, a former F/A-18 pilot who had been off in Washington for the past three years at a desk job.
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With only a few more periods out there at Whitehouse before going to the ship, it was time for an old ritual.
They called it “U. S. S. Whitehouse.” It was one of the rare occasions when the pilots could invite their dependents—wives, girl friends, kids, relatives of every stripe—out to see what they really did there.
It was a gorgeous spring Sunday afternoon. They all trooped out to the piney woods at Whitehouse Field, to stand there in the weeds by the LSO shack at the end of runway 11. They came to watch their sons, husbands, boy friends, and, in the case of David Yeates, his wife, Angie Morales, show them what they had been practicing these past three weeks.
Pearly Gates and Plug Neidhold, the LSOs in charge of Class 2-95, were like tour guides at the Smithsonian. Plug loved dispensing arcane facts about carrier flying. “Did you know,” he was saying to a couple of wives, “that your husbands belong to a group of only about two thousand aviators in the whole world?”
“Really? What group is that?”
“Those who are qualified to land aboard aircraft carriers.”
They didn’t know that.
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