Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  On a combat air patrol, the chances of knocking out the enemy at long range with a missile are good. But on a bombing mission, it may be impossible to avoid a dogfight, or even one dogfight after another, as Cunningham and Driscoll learned.

  On every attack where opposition is expected, several of the Hornets will be designated as fighters to protect the planes carrying bombs. If the likelihood of running into enemy fighters is slight, all the planes will carry bombs, but the pilots of several of them will be prepared to jettison their bombs and become fighters if they are jumped.

  A pilot assigned to protect the attacking force must, if he sees an enemy plane that threatens the heavily laden bombers, react to the threat even though he, with a lighter load, might easily avoid a fight. If he can’t drive off the enemy or knock him out with a missile, he may well find himself in a dogfight.

  Even more likely is that the attacking planes will be jumped near the target by enemy fighters, just as Cunningham and Driscoll were. If the defenders can force the Hornets to dump their bombs before they reach the target, that is almost as good as shooting the attacking plane down. And the enemy fighters are likely to be waiting as the bombers come off the target, trying to escape and head back home. If that happens, the pilot of a Hornet has the great advantage of being able to convert his plane into a fighter with that one flick of the switch on his control stick. But he is still in trouble.

  Even if he has already dropped his bombs, he will be carrying at least one fuel tank on the center line, his Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, and a load of ammunition for his gun. All that weight and resistance to the air degrades the plane’s performance. His hope is that the enemy plane, even though it requires less fuel because it is close to home, will also be hampered by the drag of its weapons.

  A Hornet pilot is justified to think that his plane is still markedly superior to any other plane he will meet in combat. He can rightly figure that, as a dogfight begins, the odds in his favor are about seven to one. But he faces not just one enemy—the hostile pilot—but another more insidious enemy, time.

  Each second the fight lasts, the odds drop precipitously, like sand running out of an hourglass. The reason is not only the flow of fuel through the afterburner, but the fact that a dogfight is like a big neon sign drawing attention to itself.

  Picture two planes involved in a dogfight. They fly up and down, around and around, all the time twisting and turning, losing energy and moving slower and slower. As the fight degenerates in this way, the Hornet, with its superior performance at a very high angle of attack, has the advantage. But if the pilot cannot exploit that advantage quickly, he is in deadly trouble. With each twist of the planes, there is a flash of wing, calling attention to the fight. Every enemy pilot within a ten-mile radius—418 square miles—can be there within a minute. By that time, the odds of survival are one to one, at best. If the fight lasts two minutes, the circle of danger expands geometrically to more than 1,800 square miles.

  The first goal of a pilot who finds himself in a dogfight is a quick kill—the quicker the better. But even a quick victory can be dangerous. The fireball of an exploding plane is a more powerful magnet for hostile pilots than the wing-flashing signals from a dogfight. If a fight begins to drag out, even a pilot confident of victory should turn his thoughts to the best way to bug out and go home. If he breaks contact skillfully, he may be able to get away, even if he has to outrun or outmaneuver an air-to-air missile as he escapes.

  The key to a successful bug out, as to everything connected with aerial combat, is a poorly understood quality called “situational awareness,” or SA. Basically, it means the ability of a pilot to carry in his mind a total picture of what is going on around him.

  Imagine how critical it is for a pilot to have a full grasp of the situation when he tries to leave the scene of a dogfight, whether or not he has scored a victory. How much fuel does he have left? How many enemy fighters are in the area and where are they? Are there any friendly planes to provide protection?

  Most basically, he must know the way to the carrier. Before the skilled pilot ever gets into a fight, he will have in his mind the relationship between the position of the sun and the course to the carrier. Thus, if he decides to bug out, he will know generally which way to go without bothering with a compass heading. But he should also have in mind the location of enemy defenses. The long way home may be the safest way to go.

  Successful fighter pilots have this kind of awareness almost as an inborn instinct. No one is quite sure why some men have it and others have it in a lesser degree.

  Robin Olds, an ace in World War II and a near-ace (four MiGs destroyed) in Vietnam, is often cited as an example of a pilot who had an almost uncanny ability to keep track of everything that was happening, even when fighting for his life. In one instance over North Vietnam, Olds was busy hassling with two MiG-17s. Ten thousand feet above them, another American plane made a slashing gun attack on a MiG. Olds calmly radioed congratulations on a nice shot.

  In today’s high-performance planes such as the Hornet, situational awareness is vital not only in combat but in everyday flying. By the mid-1980s, there was growing concern about the loss of SA among otherwise experienced pilots. There had been eleven cases in which F-16 pilots had flown into the ground—and in nine of those cases investigators concluded that the pilot had lost contact with reality: he didn’t know where his plane was or where it was headed. What happened at Patuxent River on 22 October 1986 provided chilling evidence that this was not just a problem for the air force.

  On that hazy afternoon, marine Maj. Rick Shows and his boss, navy Comdr. Keith E. Crawford, each piloting an F/A-18 as part of a test program to check out the plane for use by the Blue Angels aerobatic team, were flying in close formation where the Patuxent enters the Chesapeake Bay.

  Both men were among their services’ most skilled pilots. Shows was a graduate of the Top Gun aerial combat school, a low-altitude tactics instructor and a graduate in the top third of his class at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. Crawford had graduated first in his class at the test pilot school and then served as an instructor of other test pilots.

  Shows, flying lead, did a mild wingover maneuver and headed down toward the water, rolling first to the right and then back to the left, intending to level off at 1,000 feet. He later described what happened next:

  At that instant I was getting ready to do the next maneuver and thinking about what I was going to do next. … I looked in the mirror because I had my mirror set up to watch Keith, and I turned my head to Keith to see if he was still in a good position, the position we had briefed, probably ten feet or so away from my wing. When I glanced back—this is only a number of seconds—I looked at the HUD and I saw 600 feet. I couldn’t believe it. Where did that come from? At the very next instant when I realized that I was at 600 feet and couldn’t understand it, I was in the water. I saw calm water, I saw pieces of wood floating in the water. I was in the water! Instinct took over. I pulled back on the stick and at the same instant the realization hit me that I had a wing man; Keith was on my wing.

  I immediately looked over to the left and Keith was still in perfect formation with me. He had pulled [up] with me. …I realized the horror of everything and what had occurred. I don’t know how I had gotten there. All of a sudden I was in the water, wings level, and I pulled back on the stick. I knew he was there. I immediately looked to my left and Keith was still in position on my wing fifteen feet away or so. His airplane was entering the water and mine wasn’t. … It looked like he may have been five degrees more nose down, pitch attitude than my aircraft. I thought I was a dead man, but he was in the water on my left wing and I saw that I wasn’t.

  A report on the accident included this transcript of Shows’s radio transmissions in the forty-six seconds leading up to the crash:

  “Okay, let’s reverse right coming nose high.

  “A little more G and then roll right.

  “More roll.

 
“A little drive here.

  “Let’s reverse it left.

  “A little more pull.”

  And then, three seconds later: “Oh, my GOD!”

  An eyewitness later told investigators he had seen the first plane hit the water, followed immediately by the second. And then, he said, a third plane flew away from the wreckage. What he saw, of course, was Shows’s plane emerging from the plume of water sent up by his engines and Crawford’s fatal impact with the water.

  Shows later told investigators he had often, in his flying career, been frightened and even thought of dying. But in this case, his situational awareness badly awry, he felt none of those fears: “I thought everything was perfect, everything was fine, everything was going good.”

  Once a pilot in a plane like the Hornet loses situational awareness, he may be only moments from death. If a pilot flying at more than 400 miles an hour, as Shows and Crawford were, at a supposedly safe 10,000 feet, inadvertently heads toward the earth, he has less than twenty seconds to realize his error and pull out.

  In many ways, the “glass cockpit” of the F/A-18 is an enormous advantage to the pilot in helping him to keep totally aware of the situation around him. At the flick of a switch, his radar can search near or far, high or low, in a broad area or in a narrow beam. The heads up display permits him to follow up the clues from his radar so he will see other planes as they come in view. This is especially important if air crews are required, as they were in Vietnam, to identify a potentially hostile plane visually before firing a weapon. In the case of most MiG-type targets, this involves coming within about two miles of the other plane—a few seconds apart. Unfortunately, the glass cockpit may also detract from situational awareness at critical moments. In the accident in which Crawford was killed, Shows apparently misread the information on his HUD. He might have had a clearer picture of his situation with the old-fashioned instruments, in which a large ball in the middle of his panel showed him which way his wings were tilted, and the needle of the altimeter, spinning counterclockwise, alerting him to the closeness of the ground.

  A navy study done two years before that accident called attention to possible confusion resulting from use of the HUD as the primary flight instrument. It also noted that the F/A-18 flies so smoothly that the pilot is even less able than in other planes to “fly by the seat of his pants,” sensing what the plane is doing. The result is that he may experience large, sudden changes in airspeed, altitude, or attitude and not be aware of them. These factors, the study concluded, “make this airplane particularly susceptible to pilot’s loss of situational awareness and subsequent CWG.” In the navy, which has an acronym for everything, CWG equals “collision with ground.”

  Fortunately, younger pilots who have grown up with computers and video games seem to be much more comfortable with the glass cockpit, with its digital displays and symbols, than pilots who learned to fly with the old steam gauges.

  The loss of situational awareness is not the only problem faced by those who fly the F/A-18 and other very high performance planes, and it is probably not the most severe or dangerous problem. The Hornet is capable of taking the pilot right up to the edges of human endurance, and perhaps a little beyond.

  Probably the most insidious problem—one that has cost the lives of a number of pilots—is the sudden loss of consciousness caused when the force of gravity prevents sufficient blood from reaching the brain.

  In the past, a pilot might experience as much as nine Gs if he put his plane in a steep dive and then pulled back on the stick as hard as he could. Such a maneuver gave his body time to adjust to the pressure. But in the Hornet, a pilot can subject himself and his plane to more than seven Gs simply by turning sharply.

  Computers in both the Hornet and F-16 Falcon automatically limit the amount of gravity the pilot can impose on the plane—seven and a half Gs in the F/A-18, nine Gs in the F-16. While these limits protect the plane from damage, they also leave the pilot free to push himself to the limit or beyond, and to do it quickly and often. In either plane, it is possible to go from the normal one unit of gravity to the plane’s limit in less than half a second, with the pressure of gravity increasing at the rate of fifteen or sixteen Gs per second. A Hornet pilot who weighs 150 pounds one moment will weigh 1,125 pounds the next. The poorly understood effects of repeated instances of the sudden increase of gravitational force has flight surgeons and aircraft designers deeply worried.

  All pilots of high-performance combat planes now routinely wear a tight-fitting garment called a G suit. As the force of gravity increases, the suit automatically fills with air and pushes blood upward toward the head. Without the G suit, a normal person will begin to black out shortly after the pressures exceed four times the force of gravity. With the G suit, an experienced pilot in good condition can withstand about nine Gs for a minute or so.

  Under such pressures, the first faculty to go is eyesight. The pilot is still conscious, and he can hear and think, but he seems to be peering through a gray tunnel. Then, without any warning, consciousness may go, and the pilot has blacked out.

  Losing consciousness while flying a plane is extremely dangerous. Blacking out in a dogfight means death.

  Al Frazier, the McDonnell Douglas test pilot who has specialized in studying the effects of gravity, tells what it is like to black out:

  “I was in the back seat of a T-38 on takeoff, when the pilot did a real fast climb. When I woke up, I looked around and I couldn’t believe it. I’m in an airplane! I had no realization of where I was, what I was doing. Then, after a few seconds, I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I flying? Am I the pilot?’ It takes thirty to forty-five seconds after a pilot wakes up to gain his senses back enough to fly the plane. If you’re pointed at the ground, you don’t have thirty to forty-five seconds. That’s why we’re losing airplanes.”

  The G suit is no longer adequate to protect pilots of today’s combat aircraft. Even if it keeps the pilot conscious, it does not protect his bones from the type of stresses to which they are subjected when he does a high G turn while straining to look over his shoulder. All the aircraft manufacturers are working to develop better suits, but they seem to be reluctant to spend the money to go into production for fear that something better will come along quickly. In the meantime, the emphasis is on training pilots to protect themselves from blacking out.

  One of the best protections is provided by nature. The short, stocky person, with a short, thick neck and a tendency toward high blood pressure has a much better chance of remaining conscious than the tall, thin pilot who has to pump blood a longer distance from heart to eyes and brain. Pilots are being warned to avoid long-distance running and, instead, to spend time in the weight room developing strong abdominal muscles. One air force pilot who ignored his flight surgeon’s advice and continued to run marathons later blacked out and crashed.

  When pilots pull Gs, they are taught to strain and grunt to push blood upward, almost like a little boy straining to make his face turn red. Air force fighter pilots and all test pilots actually practice this maneuver in a centrifuge, but the navy does not yet require centrifuge training for its pilots.

  Since there is no way to eliminate the possibility of blackouts, McDonnell Douglas is testing a system for the Hornet that will recognize when the pilot blacks out and releases his pressure on the controls, sense where and how far away the ground is, and instruct the automatic pilot to level the plane off and fly it until the pilot recovers. The system could be a life-saver in peacetime but not much help in a dogfight.

  Whether routinely pulling Gs, especially now that the sudden onset of Gs has become so common, will have any effect on the long-term health of pilots is still unknown, because the planes capable of such stresses have not been around long enough for pilots to spend a career pulling high Gs and then to grow old. One predictable effect is hemorrhoids—a near-universal affliction of fighter pilots. There is also a folk belief among pilots that those who frequently experience high G loads tend to
father girls.

  Far from worrying, along with the flight surgeons and the designers, about the effects of gravity, pilots learning to master the Hornet at Lemoore seemed to revel in their ability to survive these enormous pressures and to do things few other mortals have the chance to do. They even purported to find it pleasurable to pull Gs. The truth is probably closer to the experience of Mike Tkach. He told friends that it was not until he stopped flying as a McDonnell Douglas test pilot that he realized how much he hurt all the time.

  As the initial group of instructor-pilots finished their own training at Lemoore and were followed into the Hornet’s cockpits by the first marine squadron and then the first two navy squadrons, there was suddenly a vast flow of information about how this new strike-fighter behaved in the hands of the fliers who would actually take it to sea for the first time. They flew far more hours, in a greater variety of missions, than the test pilots in their precisely monitored test programs. And they were far freer to experiment and improvise than the pilots of VX-4 and VX-5 in their operational evaluations.

  One crucial discovery was that the Hornet lends itself to new ways of bombing with a much higher chance of survival than the methods used by the A-6 and A-7. These new tactics were refined in a 1,500-square-mile instrumented range east of Fallon Naval Air Station in the Nevada desert.

  Standard tactics in the past had called for a thirty-second separation between attacking planes. This permitted time for the fragments of the bombs dropped by the first plane to reach their zenith and fall back to earth before the next plane attacked. If he came in any sooner, the second pilot would fly through the “frag envelope” of the first plane’s bombs and run the risk of being shot down by debris from a “friendly” bomb. But the thirty-second separation gave gunners on the ground time to aim and shoot at the follow-on attackers.