by Orr Kelly
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 The Battle of the Admirals
Chapter 2 Wings Over the Ocean
Chapter 3 “Holy Moly! We Are in Trouble!”
Chapter 4 One Plane, One Man
Chapter 5 “Excess Energy” To Fly and Fight
Chapter 6 When Weird Things Happen
Chapter 7 “A Tremendous Amount of Grief”
Chapter 8 “A Deep-Seated Drive to Kill”
Chapter 9 “It Starts Raining F/A-18s on You”
Appendices
I. F/A-18 Vital Statistics
II. The Author Learns to Fly Back Seat
Image Gallery
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Throughout my reporting and research on this book, I had a good deal of help both from the navy and from the companies that manufacture the plane or provide major components.
They provided their assistance freely although they had no way of knowing whether the book, in its final form, would reflect favorably on the navy and its contractors, which it does, or whether it would highlight serious faults, which it also does.
Rear Adm. Jimmie Finkelstein, an old friend who was then the navy’s chief of information, got me started. Vice Adm. Robert F. Dunn, deputy chief of naval operations for air warfare, suggested a number of people to interview and bases to visit and okayed my request for a flight in the F/A-18.
In Finkelstein’s office, Lt. Comdr. Sheila Graham, Lt. Bruce Cole, Lt. Frank Thorp, and Lt. Robert Fallon helped me to make appointments and gather information from naval sources. Bob Fallon became my personal guide through the bureaucratic labyrinth, time after time making the impossible become possible. Also helpful were Denny Kline and Grace Green of the Naval Air Systems Command’s public affairs staff.
At Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Bill Frierson, the public affairs officer, was both helpful and sympathetic as I went through the ordeal of the flight physical and the physiological training described in the Appendix.
At Cecil Field, Florida, the East Coast training base for Hornet pilots, Nick Young, a veteran navy public affairs officer, put me in the hands of Lt. Casey Albert, who introduced me to many of the instructor pilots and then arranged for me to spend several hours in the simulators so I could gain some appreciation of what it is like to land on a carrier at night, what it is like to attack targets on the surface, and what it is like to come up against a skilled foe in a dogfight.
During my visit to Lemoore Naval Air Station, California, where I flew in the F/A-18, Dennis McGrath, the air station’s public affairs officer, put me in touch with the pilots in VFA-125, the first Hornet training squadron.
At the Fallon Naval Air Station, Comdr. William Shepherd, the Strike University’s executive officer, found time in his schedule to fill me in on how entire air wings are trained there before they are deployed and how senior officers go through an intensive course to prepare them for war at sea.
When I visited the Coral Sea, during training exercises in the Atlantic north of Puerto Rico, Lt. Robert Rivera and JOC(SW) James P. McKane III ran me up and down ladders from the top of the ship to the deepest engine rooms to help me understand how the Hornet operates aboard a carrier. At Norfolk, Lt. Comdr. Mike John helped arrange for my visit to the ship.
At the Top Gun school at Miramar, Lt. Jim McAloon, an F-14 backseater—a naval flight officer and not a pilot—not only described the training in aerial combat but helped me to understand how air crews are learning to use the Tomcat and the Hornet together to take advantage of their unique capabilities.
My visits to the factories where the Hornet, its radar, and its engines are made began at the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis, where Timothy J. Beecher, director of communications, and his assistant, Thomas J. Downey, arranged for me to interview a parade of engineers, managers, and test pilots who had been involved in designing, manufacturing, and testing the plane—and who had suffered through the difficult days when everything seemed to go wrong.
From St. Louis, I went on to southern California. At Northrop, Tony Cantafio and Gregory A. Waskul, of the company’s public affairs staff, filled me in on Northrop’s role in development of the F/A-18 at the corporate headquarters in Century City. Then I went to the plant in nearby Hawthorne for a tour of the plant under the guidance of Terry Clawson and visits with officials involved in development and production of the plane.
A short distance away, at Hughes Aircraft’s Radar Systems Group, Kearney Bothwell, director of public relations, introduced me to three of the executives involved in development and production of the radar and then took me on a tour through the plant.
Later, on the East Coast, I spent two days at the General Electric jet engine plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, where the engines for the F/A-18 are made. My guide there was Kent Schubert, an independent public relations consultant who works under contract for G.E.
Much of my preliminary research for the book was carried out at the Pentagon library, the library of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, and the Montgomery County library branch in Bethesda. The files of the Current News, the Pentagon’s daily summary of newspaper and magazine articles, were an important source of background information. Earlier, when I was an associate editor and Pentagon correspondent for U.S. News & World Report magazine, I did some research on the history of the F/A-18 with the help of members of the magazine’s library staff.
My reporting on the history of the F/A-18 provided a fascinating opportunity to see a major Pentagon weapons procurement program whole—from the early debates over whether the navy needed a new plane and what kind it should be to the plane’s first use in combat. Robert Tate, my editor at Presidio Press, patiently helped me to organize this complex story, covering a period of nearly two decades and involving politics, billions of dollars, high technology, tactics, and strategy. Because it is a complex story, the reader may benefit from a brief guide to the way the book is put together.
The first chapter covers the early controversy over the kind of plane that was needed. The second provides some perspective with a review of the history of military and, especially, naval aviation. The third picks up again with the development of the plane and the early decisions on what it should be expected to do.
The next four chapters describe the technology that makes the Hornet the unique plane that it is. Chapter 4 covers the all-important radar, the computers, the cockpit, and the controls. Chapter 5 covers the development of the engine. Chapter 6 brings these elements together with the airframe to make an airplane. Chapter 7 is devoted to the largely untold story of the critical problems associated with the tall vertical tails and how the manufacturers and the navy struggled to fix them.
The final two chapters cover the training of the pilots and ground crews and the first use of the plane by the marines and navy, including an account of the Hornet’s first use in combat in the 1986 raid against Libya. The book ends with a description of how the F/A-18 would be used in the ultimate test: a major war with the Soviet Union.
The reader may be puzzled to find that every fighter pilot has a nickname, often an exotic one. The reason is that each pilot is given a distinctive call sign by his squadron mates to help avoid confusion during aerial operations, and many pilots are known better by their nicknames than by the names their mothers gave them.
When the manuscript was complete, John M. Elliott of the aviation branch of the Naval Historical Center and Dr. Robert Goulard, an aeronautical engineer and professor of engineering at George Washington University, were kind enough to read it for technical accuracy. I owe them both a debt of gratitude for helping to protect me from error, although any remaining errors are, of course, my responsibility.
Throughout the research and writing of Hornet I enjoyed the patient encouragement and support of my wife, Mary.
CHAPTER ONE
The Battle of the Admirals
In July 1970, an American Big Bird sat
ellite passed silently over the Soviet Union, as it did routinely every hour and a half. Through superb lenses capable of photographing an item the size of a tennis ball, cameras aboard the satellite recorded the scene 120 miles below.
A short time later, as Big Bird crossed the Pacific, a trapdoor opened and a canister of exposed film plummeted downward. As it entered the lower atmosphere, a parachute deployed automatically and the canister drifted toward the sea near Hawaii, a radio beacon signalling its position. Before it hit the waves, an airplane with a large boom extended behind it snagged the parachute, and the canister was quickly reeled in.
For photo analysts examining miles of film, the challenge was to find change: anything that wasn’t there yesterday or the week before; anything that was there before, but was gone today.
What caught the eyes of the analysts on this particular day was a new shape, the shape of an airplane they had never seen before. It was spotted at an airfield near the city of Kazan, at the confluence of the Kama and Volga rivers, about 400 miles east of Moscow. For years, there had been speculation that the Soviet Union was working on a new bomber, and in the previous year, rumors about such a bomber had become more frequent. Now, the speculation ended. Here was a picture of the bomber.
Skilled photo interpreters with a background in aeronautical engineering can reach some remarkably accurate conclusions about the probable performance of a plane by studying a photo, without ever seeing the plane itself or watching it fly. The length of the wings and the dimensions of the fuselage tell a good deal about a plane’s range and payload. The engine inlets and exhaust ports provide clues to engine performance and thus tell something about speed and altitude.
In this case, as more information came in, it was clear that the shape seen on the ground at Kazan was indeed something quite new. The West gave the plane the code-name of Backfire. The Soviets, it was later learned, called it the Tu-26, a product of the Tupolev design bureau.
This is what it looked like: With its wings capable of moving backward and forward in flight, its appearance was much like that of the American F-111 fighter-bomber that had been in service for several years. But it was bigger and it carried a crew of four, rather than the two in the F-111. Its wings, swung full forward, as they would be for landing or takeoff, spread nearly 113 feet and it was almost 130 feet long. With a weapon load of 26,450 pounds, its maximum takeoff weight was 286,600 pounds. Its two engines, originally developed for the Soviets’ abortive effort to build a supersonic transport plane, hurled it through the air at better than twice the speed of sound at high altitude and just under the speed of sound on the deck.
As word of this new bomber spread from the intelligence community to the Pentagon, the White House, and Capitol Hill, one question dominated all others. Did the Backfire have the range to attack targets in the U.S. and return home again? If it did, then it might be a dangerous new strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, requiring large amounts of money to be spent on air defenses. As more information about range came in, the answers to the questions about the purpose of this new plane were ambiguous. With an unrefueled combat radius of 2,485 miles, a Backfire attacking under U.S. radar would have to be refueled coming and going. Perhaps it could go on to land in Cuba or—and this was not entirely unthinkable in a nuclear war—it might be used in one-way suicide attacks.
Through most of the 1970s, the Backfire was at the center of a continuing debate between those who considered the plane both a new threat to the U.S. and proof of ill-will on the part of the Soviet Union, and those who argued that its relatively limited range ruled it out as a strategic bomber.
This was the issue that was debated in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon and, increasingly, in public. But the navy’s top admirals, in their offices on the outermost ring of the Pentagon’s fourth floor, looked at the Backfire and saw something quite different and much less ambiguous. They didn’t at all like what they saw.
For years, the admirals had worried about massed bomber attacks on their ships, especially the big aircraft carriers. Those worries, based on their experience in the great naval war with Japan, had been largely hypothetical. The Soviets had never put together a naval bombing force capable of a knockout blow. But the Backfire could change all that. Whether or not the new plane threatened the continental U.S., it could, in sufficient numbers, inflict major damage on the American fleet.
If a war with the Soviet Union broke out in Europe, the existence of a regiment or two of Backfires could vastly complicate what was seen then as the navy’s primary job of keeping open the sea lanes between the U.S. and European ports.
The navy’s strategy has evolved since that time, but this is how such a conflict might have unfolded in the early 1970s:
With the opening of hostilities, much of the Atlantic Fleet would move quickly toward the line that stretches from Greenland to Iceland, to the Faeroe Islands, and on to the United Kingdom—the G-I-UK Gap, as it is called. Destroyers and submarines would form a picket line to prevent Soviet submarines and surface raiders from sailing down into the North Atlantic. Carriers would move into place to provide air cover and aid in the search for submarines. In effect, the plan was to bottle up the Soviet Navy north of the Gap, in the Norwegian Sea.
The Red Navy already outnumbered the U.S. in submarines. Add to this a new threat from the air, and even strong defenders of the navy strategy began to wonder if it would work.
Each Backfire could carry two big AS-4 Kitchen missiles under its wings. Taking off from bases in the northern Soviet Union near Murmansk, the bombers would fly high over Finland, Sweden, and Norway, passing out to sea above the Arctic Circle. Then, to avoid radar detection, they would swoop down close to the waves and aim toward the American carriers at just below the speed of sound. At about 200 miles out, they would pop up, launch their missiles (doubling the number of targets the Americans would have to contend with), and then turn for home.
The Kitchen missile, first seen in the early 1960s, looks like a little airplane, with stubby wings and a cross-shaped tail. Its rocket motor propels it faster than the speed of sound and its own radar set guides it to the target. In its nose it carries either a nuclear or conventional warhead. Even the 2,200 pounds of ordinary high explosive is enough to sink a merchant ship or a destroyer. A hit from even one Kitchen would be powerful enough to cause serious damage to a carrier, at least disrupting flight operations for a number of hours.
If a combined bomber-submarine assault succeeded in breaking the American barrier at the Gap, then the whole Western strategy for the defense of Europe might quickly unravel. Submarine packs would be free to swing down into the mid-Atlantic or gather off ports in the U.S. and Europe. Backfire bombers and older Soviet Bears and Badgers—perhaps already operating out of bases in Norway—could wreak havoc with shipping. While the pilot of a Backfire would be foolhardy to come close to the warplanes of a carrier, he could freely attack cargo and troop ships with his twelve 1,100-pound bombs once the threat from fighters and interceptors had been removed.
It is against this background that two admirals emerge, representing conflicting views on the nature of the threat from Backfire and on what to do about it. The planes that fill the decks of America’s carriers in the 1990s are what they are because of the decisions made while these two men—Vice Adm. William Houser and Vice Adm. Kent Lee—held the two top posts in naval aviation in the mid-1970s.
Houser, a fighter pilot who had commanded carriers and entire carrier divisions, became deputy chief of naval operations [DCNO] for air warfare in August 1972. That made him the navy’s senior aviator, responsible for advising the chief of naval operations [CNO] on all matters relating to aviation: pilots, airplanes, weapons, training, carriers and bases. In effect, he was the representative in the Pentagon of the carrier navy.
His chief rival in the battle to shape the future of carrier aviation was Kent Lee, who had shot down one Japanese plane as a World War II fighter pilot and later served as commander of a
n attack squadron. In the late 1960s, while serving as commander of the nuclear-powered carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, Lee became deeply discouraged with the quality of the planes the navy was flying. He had two maintenance crews working twelve-hour shifts, and they still couldn’t keep up with the workload. It was not unusual for the crews to put in forty or fifty manhours for every hour a plane spent in the air.
Lee made a deliberate decision to spend the rest of his career in the nuts and bolts world, trying to change this situation. This was an unusual career decision. Normally a captain who had achieved command of a carrier would look forward to promotion to rear admiral and to flying his flag at sea as commander of a group of carriers. Lee’s decision, some of his colleagues felt, had been influenced by a tragic accident aboard the Enterprise. On 14 January 1969, while Lee was the skipper, an explosion aboard the ship set off a chain reaction in which rockets, bombs, and ammunition went off, tearing three large holes in the deck, destroying fifteen planes and killing twenty-four sailors. Instead of seeking a command at sea, Lee set as his goal the job of commander of the Naval Air Systems Command [NAVAIR], responsible for designing and building the navy’s airplanes and aerial weapons.
Although little known to the public, or even to many in the navy, the Air Systems Command, which was formed in 1921 as the Bureau of Aeronautics, should probably be considered the world’s most successful weapons design bureau. Together with the navy’s weapons laboratory at China Lake, California, NAVAIR has been responsible for the development of most of the aerial missiles in use by the U.S. Navy and Air Force and many of their allies: the Sidewinder, Sparrow, Phoenix, and Walleye, as well as the cruise missile. It was also responsible for a series of successful airplanes, many of them used by the U.S. Air Force and other nations. They include the F-4, the A-7, and the E-2C airborne battle station. Lee couldn’t have chosen a position with better leverage from which to try to make the changes he thought were needed. In January 1973, five months after Houser had become DCNO for air warfare, Lee reached his goal and settled into his office at NAVAIR, in the new Crystal City complex about a mile down the Potomac from the Pentagon. Houser and Lee had once been good friends. But for the next three years they became locked in a bitter debate over the future of naval aviation.