“Did you know that in the French Navy, there are only six pilots—total—who are qualified to land aboard a carrier at night?”
They didn’t know that either.
Plug and Pearly were wearing their own gray-green flight suits. They showed the visitors the equipment: the LSO shack with the big glass windows from which they would control the landing jets; the Fresnel Lens, the big optical “ball” mounted at the edge of the runway behind the LSO shack. They flashed the wave off lights for them. They explained how the jets would come roaring overhead, just as they would next week when they went out to the real carrier, and “break” to the left, one by one, to join the traffic pattern.
Both the McCormacks’ wives were there, standing apart. Peggy McCormack was the senior of the two McCormack wives, having met Rick back when the twins were in Kingsville going through advanced training. She was vivacious, dark-haired and petite. She had a son from an earlier marriage, and now she and Rick had added a son of their own.
The newest Mrs. McCormack, bride of Russ, had been a family member only four months now. Tracy McCormack was a pretty girl, youngish-looking in her short skirt and auburn hair. She was from Jacksonville, and had met Russ only a few months ago when he checked into the F/A-18 RAG. In keeping with the spirit of the Heckle-Jeckle duality, she, too, had a three-year-old son from another marriage.
J. J. Quinn’s wife, Dorothy, was there. She was a tall, gracious woman who had already endured plenty of these Navy and Marine Corps class performances. Dorothy looked like she would be happy when this whole show—not just today’s performance but the whole strike fighter training program—was finished. Then she could settle down again to being a Marine Corps wife in a more or less permanent house up in Beaufort, South Carolina where J. J. would be assigned when he finished.
Pearly Gates’s new girl friend came out for the show. She was a leggy blonde in tight jeans. Her name was Ivy, and Pearly was taking the greatest pleasure in showing her off.
The best looking of them all, though, was Greta, the girl friend of Burner Bunsen, to whom she had now been engaged for one week. Greta had long blond hair and a happy smile. She listened carefully, seeming to be genuinely interested in what the LSOs were telling them.
Also there to watch the action was a trim, gray-haired man in designer jeans and polo shirt. Pearly and Plug had seen many such fathers out there at Whitehouse. Every class, it seemed, had one. This one was the father of Burner Bunsen.
There was a certain smugness to him. He had that master-of-the-universe countenance that let everyone know he was being a hell of good sport by taking the time out of his busy career to come out here for this little show. He was wearing all the distinguishing insignia of a successful career: Gucci loafers on sockless feet, tortoise shell sunglasses, sixty-dollar Manhattan haircut. Accompanying him was the current wife, a lithesome trophy twenty years younger than he.
You could tell by the expression, by the questions he asked, that Burner’s father wasn’t thrilled about his kid’s choice of professions. It was easy to imagine the shock when he heard that his son wanted to be, of all things, a goddamned fighter pilot! Now, look, son, I know it probably seems glamorous and cool and all that, but damn! Think about your future. Why do you want to waste all that expensive education. . . I mean, hell, you ought to be in business school this very minute. I can get you into the firm at. . .
No, Burner’s father definitely wasn’t happy about all this. It was hard for him to contain his disappointment. Why, for Christ’s sake, the military? Wearing that bristle-headed hair cut, tearing around in those jet-propelled scooters like some kind of speed freak.
But here he was, doing his fatherly duty, standing out there with the wives and kids and girl friends in the weed patch at Whitehouse Field, waiting and watching the afternoon sky where it touched the Florida pine trees.
Then the jets came. From over the pine trees appeared the first flight of three Hornet fighters, in echelon formation, stacked to the right. They made a circling pass around the field, then came boring straight down the runway at six hundred feet. They looked like killer angels swooping down on the spectators.
A fan of wrinkles appeared at each of the father’s eyes as he squinted into the sun. He was staring intently at the jets swooping down the runway. One of them was Burner, his kid. Burner? That was the call sign he’d acquired. Where the hell did they get these names, anyway? Why couldn’t they use real names?
Abruptly the lead jet banked hard to the left and pulled away from the formation, entering the carrier traffic pattern. Three seconds later, the number two jet broke to the left, then number three. From the weed patch the relatives could see them flying downwind now, opposite the landing direction, extending their landing gear and wing flaps.
“Burner’s in the lead jet,” called out Plug.
The father nodded. His son would be the first to land. He watched the first jet bank toward the runway, skimming the pine trees. Two plumes of gray trailed from the Hornet’s engines.
The noise of the engines swelled as the jet approached. It came closer, growing in size until it was big. . . a hell of a lot bigger than when they first saw it whistling through the distant sky at six hundred feet. Now he could see the long pointed snout of the fighter, the sleek wings and strakes, the sinister missile racks at each wing tip. And the noise! Jesus, the engine noise was swelling, rising in pitch and volume, approaching the threshold of pain, even with the foam earplugs they had been given. The spectators, all in unison, covered their ears with their hands.
The father’s mouth was open. The master-of-the-universe expression was fading. . . replaced by a perplexed expression. . . something he was trying to figure out. . .
The jet crossed the threshold. It swept down on the landing zone marked on the concrete, thirty yards away from the weed patch where the relatives stood holding their hands over their ears. Kaaploooom! The fighter’s tires screeched onto the concrete. In the next instant the pilot shoved both throttles to the stops, and the jet’s afterburners kicked in.
Baaaroooom! Flame belched from each engine’s tailpipe. The fighter leaped back into the air, trailing a twenty-foot inferno behind the engine tailpipes. Dirt and grass and concrete dust and rubber and jet exhaust revolved in a whirlwind behind the fighter.
The thunder rattled the windows of the LSO shack. The earth beneath the spectators’ feet shook. Heat waves shimmered through the dirt and debris on the runway. Back into the sky the jet roared, thrusting upward like a hurled spear.
And out there in the weed patch the spectators stared. They had expected to see some action, hear some jet noise, be a little impressed, but this. . . Christ! This was awesome.. . .
Something had happened to the father in the designer clothes and expensive haircut. He was standing transfixed. His jaw hung open. He looked like he had been walloped with a mallet.
From his lips came a single utterance: Ho-leeee shit!
You could tell that he was struggling to understand what the fuck was going on. Here was his kid, his bright and good and sometimes-misdirected kid, who had always needed his help with tough tasks. Here was the kid whom he had raised and whom he thought—until this very moment—he was still raising. Here was his kid commanding that goddamned earth-shaking fire-breathing behemoth, doing a job that he, with his money and success and experience, would never—could never—dream of doing.
It was beyond his comprehension.
Something peculiar had happened. Gone was the smugness. Gone was the father’s disappointment, at least for the moment. When the Hornet fighter slammed down out there at Whitehouse Field, then roared like a rocket back into the Florida sky—the father’s relationship with his son had changed forever. His kid was no longer a kid. He was his own man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
RUNWAY ONE-ONE
One more FCLP period and the nuggets would be ready for the ship. It was a Friday afternoon, and they were in the pattern again at Whitehouse.
&nbs
p; Deedle deedle deedle.
Burner looked inside his cockpit. The aural warning again.
Terrific, thought Burner. Now what?
Deedle deedle deedle. And then the “deedle” was followed by another warning, this one a woman’s recorded voice. “Flight Control,” said the synthesized voice. She repeated the message: “Flight control.”
Burner was in the daytime FCLP pattern at Whitehouse. He was on the downwind leg for runway one-one, flying at the carrier landing pattern altitude of six hundred feet over the ground.
He checked all his systems displays. In the lower left corner of the left DDI was the yellow-lettered, illuminated message: FCS, and on the line beneath. RUD OFF.
FCS was a general warning that meant “Flight Control System.” Since all the Hornet’s flight controls were “fly-by-wire,” it meant that one of the computer-directed control surfaces on the fighter was not getting the correct input. RUD OFF was a more specific warning identifying the affected surface: A rudder was “off.” One of the Hornet’s two rudders was not working.
Sure enough. On the flight control display, Burner saw that the right “Rudder” presentation, a pair of boxes, showed “X”s in each box instead of the normal blank spaces.
“Roman Three-twelve has an FCS caution. I’m gonna go up and do a reset.”
“Roger Three-twelve. Take the delta pattern overhead,” replied the Whitehouse tower controller.
The “delta pattern” was a holding pattern at two thousand feet over the airport, above the normal FCLP traffic.
Burner eased the throttles forward, selected the landing gear handle to the “UP” position, and then raised the landing flaps. At two thousand feet, he leveled the fighter off and started a shallow left-hand orbit over Whitehouse.
A “reset” was a simple procedure. Like all the nuggets, Burner had memorized the steps:
1. MENU FCS—IDENTIFY FAILURE
2. FCS—RESET
If no reset and second failure exists, land as soon as possible.
No problem, thought Burner. Let’s get this thing reset and get on with the period.
This afternoon’s session was the next to last FCLP period for Class 2-95 before going out to the carrier. Any make-up periods would have to be done over the weekend in order to complete the FCLP syllabus. And that was something Burner definitely did not want to happen. He had some serious plans this weekend.
In fact, Burner had some serious plans for the rest of his life. He had now been engaged for exactly ten day and one-half days. Until he met Greta, he had expected that he would be a carefree bachelor fighter pilot for years to come, probably until he was really old. Maybe even beyond age thirty.
All that had changed. Burner was in love, and it was tough enough just to keep from thinking about her all the time, let alone while he was out here in the FCLP pattern.
But he had to. At the moment he had to deal with this damned FCS nuisance, so he could get back in the FCLP pattern and finish up this period so he could get home and spend the weekend with his girl. . .
The reset switch was on the lower left cockpit quadrant, just behind the throttles. Burner found the switch and—Voila!—just as advertised: the “X”s went out in the little squares on the rudder display. Both the FCS and the RUD OFF messages extinguished on the flight controls display screen.
Back in business. Things were looking good for the weekend.
“Whitehouse tower, Roman Three-twelve has a reset and I’m on a three-mile initial to rejoin the pattern.”
“Roger, Roman Three-twelve. Your interval in the pattern is just lifting off. You’ll be number six.”
<>
Lieutenant Roger “Fudd” Elmore, flying the number five Hornet in the pattern at Whitehouse, was going through a domestic crisis. His wife, a cute brunette to whom he had been married since his last year at Colgate, had been having these horrible visions. The realization had struck her like a thunderclap that what her husband did for a living just happened to be very, very dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that she was having these anxiety attacks. She had seen enough news reports about Navy fighter pilots getting killed. And the prospect that it might happen to her husband—leaving her and their young daughter alone—was making her crazy with fear.
When her husband had gone into naval aviation straight out of college, she hadn’t thought much about it. She didn’t even know what naval aviation meant.
And then she found out. It was something that got people killed. By now several classmates of Roger’s had already been killed in accidents. Now she hated the whole grisly business.
It was becoming a serious problem for Fudd Elmore, trying to keep his wife from flipping out. Every time she heard about a Navy jet going down somewhere, she would go into a neurotic fit, becoming convinced that if it wasn’t her husband who had made that particular smoking hole in the ground, then he would surely be smack in the middle of the next one. Morale at the Elmore household had dropped off the scale.
Not all of her pessimism was unfounded. Fudd Elmore was having problems. He was the nugget who, only a month before, had completed RAG training in the F/A-18 and reported to his fleet squadron, which was about to deploy aboard the U. S. S. George Washington. But during the squadron’s pre-deployment work-up training—the carrier landing exercise every squadron goes through—Elmore had scared the hell out of his new squadron commanding officer and the squadron LSO by flying several very ugly passes out there on the Washington, getting waved off and finally being sent back to the beach.
So the commanding officer sent Fudd Elmore back whence he came: the F/A-18 RAG, to repeat the carrier qualification phase. “I’m running a strike fighter squadron, not a training unit,” said the commanding officer. “Either get this guy qualified—or he’s yours to keep.”
So here was Fudd Elmore, going through the whole drill again, droning around the pattern at Whitehouse, qualifying all over again with the nuggets of Class 2-95.
And this time around, he was doing okay. Elmore was making acceptable passes on the ball. Things were looking good. It was even beginning to look as though his commanding officer might be pleased to have him back.
And then Elmore had an idea: His wife thought this business was dangerous, right? But that was because she’d never seen it close up. She’d never actually seen what he did.
He had a word with the LSO, and permission was obtained for Debbie to drive out to Whitehouse that afternoon and watch the FCLP period from the LSO shack. Just like they did on family day with all the new classes. The closeness to the jets out there on the runway would make it all seem less scary to her. She would see that it was actually quite routine. Not at all dangerous like she’d been imagining. She’d see that it was all in her head.
<>
“Roman Three-twelve, Hornet ball, two-point-four, Bunsen.”
“Roger ball,” acknowledged Pearly Gates, the LSO.
Burner nudged the throttles back, squeezing off a tiny bit of power, as he started down the glide slope. He could see the yellowish blob of the ball centered between the two rows of green datum lights. Exactly where it was supposed to be.
It was a bright spring afternoon. The wildflowers were in bloom in the meadow around the approach path to the runway. A gentle westerly breeze was stirring the tops of the piney woods along the north edge of the field. High overhead, the Florida sky was dotted with puffs of cumulus.
Burner had a good pass going. “The easiest way to fly a good pass is to fly a good start,” Pearly Gates always said. If you started down the glide slope with the ball already locked in the center, with your jet on the correct speed and attitude, lined up with the center line of the deck, the rest was easy.
And Burner had gotten a good start. Everything locked in place. Ball in the center. On the runway center line. He hoped that he could do as well out there on the ship next week. . .
Deedle deedle deedle.
There it was again. Damn! An FCS caution.
What the hell was
it? The rudder again? Maybe he could get a quick reset, fix the problem and. . .
“Flight controls,” said the electronic woman’s voice. “Flight controls.”
Yeah, yeah, I know, thought Burner. Go away. I know what to do.
Then he felt it. The jet was decelerating.
And yawing to the right.
He pushed the throttles up.
“Power,” called the LSO, who could see the jet settling.
Burner pushed the throttles up some more.
The jet was yawing more. And rolling to the right.
“Wave off! Wave off!” the LSO called. The red lights on the lens were flashing.
Burner obeyed. He shoved the throttles to full power and nudged the nose upward. He felt the power come up on the jet.
But something wasn’t right. . . the jet wasn’t responding like it should. . . and now it was really yawing to the right. . .
And rolling. Rolling right.
Nothing was working. Burner fought the airplane. He had the stick all the way to the left, against the stop.
And it was still rolling.
<>
They looked so graceful.
Debbie Elmore stood there by her mini-van in the little parking lot at Whitehouse Field and watched the jets in the traffic pattern. Her two-and-a-half-year-old, Stacey, clutched her hand.
Seen from this perspective, she thought, the F/A-18 fighters didn’t look menacing at all. They looked like great, gray swans out there, flying along one behind the other, taking turns alighting on the field and then lifting off again.
They weren’t even flying very fast.
Already she was feeling better about the whole thing. Probably, she thought, she had been exaggerating the hazards of her husband’s job. This was obviously a very ordered, structured, disciplined business. And it certainly looked safe enough.
This was going to be fun, she decided. She was glad she had agreed to come out here to Whitehouse and watch them practice. And to think that Roger, her husband, was out there, this very minute, flying one of those jets.
Bogeys and Bandits Page 26