Navy Chief
Senior Member
Ready Room to Catapult (and back to Ready Room)
The pre-game ceremonies that lead up to the noisy launch of jets on an aircraft carrier involve many things. The plane that I flew was a bomber, and we never went anywhere alone. Being alone in the cockpit (the plane had one seat and it was MINE) was a true joy; being alone in the air was not. While the A-7 Corsair II was a superb visual and radar bombing platform, it lacked both the design and power to be a successful air-to-air combat ("dog fighting") machine. So, we went places in flights of four, for two important reasons: four bombers put four times the ordnance upon those unfortunate souls whom we chose to visit, and for mutual support - to watch each other’s "six o’clock", or that area behind us from which an intruder way wish to pay a visit to us.
Sorties on the ship lasted 2 hours and 20 minutes. Trains may run late and the airlines don’t always get off on time, but you can bet your life that when the second hand reaches the 12, the first two jets will be leaving the flight deck. The Air Boss wants to get the new sorties airborne as soon as possible so the returning jets overheard, low on fuel (which is LIFE in a jet plane) and manned by tired pilots, can be recovered. When this is complete, the refueling, re-arming, re-everything to prepare for the next launch cycle begins. It goes on for days sometimes, around the clock. You train like you will fight. Wars are not conducted from 9-5. The ship never sleeps.
Two hours before the scheduled launch time, the five pilots will sit and conduct a "briefling". Five pilots attend, and man five planes, even though only four will launch. The jets are complex, and it is not unusual for one in the flight of four to develop a problem with any of the myriad of flight, navigation, or weapons systems that make it go "down" for the sortie. Thus, the "spare" is there to take its place. The briefing takes place in the squadron’s "ready room" right below the flight deck, and covers every detail of the flight. Plus, there is an "emergency of the day" that is briefed. You never know what will happen on any given flight, and the planes are a flying collection of potential problems. Each pilot goes to his plane wearing everything he will need to survive, including a small book of emergency procedures. Many are "immediate action" emergencies, and the procedures are memorized rote. When you have a flame-out (the fire in the engines goes out), or you have an engine fire (the fire in the engine is not confined to the engine only), there is not time to get the book out and go looking for the proper remedy. Fire in the engine is good. When it stops coming out the back end of the plane, or comes out someplace else – that’s bad.
After the briefing, which lasts about an hour, each pilot goes to "maintenance control", which is right outside the door to the ready room and pours over a very comprehensive lists of "squawks" that other pilots who flew the plane noted as conditions that were outside the norm but did not make the plane unsafe to fly. These may be items such as small errors in the bombing system, navigation system error, funky smells, excessive hydraulic fluid leaks, or problems with the air conditioner. This is the problem that saved my life one day. I am certain of it.
Sometimes things happen that give you every confidence in the world that God is in His heaven, and that you are not alone. If ever I was to see this, it would be the day that I strapped myself into Chief 305. The briefing was for a four plane sortie to conduct a bombing training mission over the ocean. Following the brief, we all looked over the "yellow sheets" (i.e. squawks) for our assigned plane. This list of prior complaints was long, but not alarming. After reviewing the complaints for the past couple of weeks, I noted nothing outside the ordinary and signed for the plane. It is short walk up a ladder on the outside of the carrier from the ready room. The ladders are steel grating and you can look below you and see the ocean below, sailing by at a brisk 25 knots. I hold on the handrails REALLY tight. It gives me the willies and I am glad I am wearing my LPA (life preserver). I don’t mind getting shot off the front end of the ship at 5 knots over stall speed in a flying bomb, 60 feet off the water. But looking down and seeing the ocean right below me gives me the creeps. Its even worse at night. I am afraid of heights.
Reaching the flight deck before a launch is always a joy to me. Like a kid in a candy store, I marvel at acres of jets and rockets and bombs and guys doing their thing. All the planes for the launch are chained to the deck and packed tightly into the back of the ship, in the order in which they will launch. A well run flight deck is a delight to see, and these guys are good. They are professionals, and they have been doing this a while. And it shows.
My plane is waiting for me with the canopy up, the inspection doors open and my Plane Captain standing ready to help me stow all my flight data info in the cockpit before I do my walkaround preflight inspection. One of the most unusual, and unfortunately necessary, rituals is called "diving the duct". The A-7 has a huge gaping open mouth under the cockpit for incoming air to feed the jet engine. The engine is packed into the back half of the fuselage and the first stage of the giant turbine is directly under the center of the wing. Everything forward of that is just a tunnel. Unfortunately, on occasion people who do not wish to be in the Navy, and especially in the Navy and on a ship for 7 months, will toss something into the mouth of the plane where it will be gobbled up by the engine and destroy the engine. It doesn’t take much. So, the last thing the pilot does before strapping in is to dive the duct. The Plane Captain gives me a boost if a stool is not handy, and I begin the ritual - looking for a nut, bolt, wrench, piece of safety wire, Remove Before Flight flag, or any number of items that will fit in the plane’s gaping hole of a mouth. It’s a big hole; lots of stuff would fit. I make my way down the tube and inspect the turbine blades. I know it’s not a credible fear, but I always thought the same thing when spinning the blades over by hand: "Oh God, please don’t let this engine start up now!" People have been sucked into the orifice by the engine, and if it were to start, I could not back out fast enough to avoid being spit out the tailpipe as Fredburger.
The blades look good. Some have minor defects, evidence of the work of a skilled engine mechanic with a small file, smoothing out minor nicks. I can live with that. No FOD either (Foreign Object Damage). Good. I back out of the hole and my PC is there to help me down. He is also holding the gear that I must put back on: my survival vest, life vest (floatation). After donning the rest of my Navy Pilot costume, I enter the cockpit and begin the process that will bring life to this enormously complex machine. The deck crew knows that I need electrical power to energize the plane long before the engines start, and soon a sailor plugs a huge umbilical cable into the belly of my plane and gives me the signal that I have power. Instantly, the cockpit goes from being a dark array of gauges, switches and blank screens, to a display of lights that delight the eye. The primary task is to align the plane’s onboard inertial navigation computer with the mother system that is directly under the flight deck of the carrier. Both systems are incredibly accurate. They are so accurate, that I take a map of the flight deck, with MY position marked, and insert MY coordinates into the computer to tell it how far away I am from the ship’s computer. If I can’t see the target and bomb visually, I’ll use this computer to lay them down on instruments, and accuracy counts. It’s that good. It takes a while for the computer to stabilize, and I amuse myself by watching the activities going on around me. Damn, I am proud to be a part of this. The canopy is still up and as planes begin to start engines, the familiar smell of kerosene being burned fills the air. Time to lower the canopy. Down she comes, and I begin my preflight checks in the office. Busy, busy, busy. What a cool job. All these cool "big boy toys" to play with. I can’t believe I get paid to do this.
Carrier based jet planes don’t have internal starter motors, and it takes a huge puff of air to start the turbine to spinning at an RPM that will permit the engine to light off. A large motorized machine that we call the "huffer" comes up to my plane and a sailor jumps off of it and attaches a very large diameter (about the size of a cantaloupe – a big, big cantaloupe) flexible hose to a port in the side of my plane. When I give the signal, the sailor will rev the diesel engine that powers the huffer’s turbine and blow a huge volume of air into my engine and start it spinning. I’ll watch the engine rpm gauge and when it gets up to a certain speed, all I have to do is move the throttle to the start position and wait for the familiar "WHOOMP" as the kerosene ignites and the engine is alive. Once this happens, the huffer disconnects and goes off to service someone else. It happens fast, and these guys are good. Now I settle back and listen to the comforting whine of the massive Rolls Royce TF-41, as the huffer goes to breathe life into my buddies.
I look over the engine gauges, hoping to see everything "in the green". Jets have certain operating parameters, and some of these are very unfamiliar to those whose only experience with machinery is a Chevrolet. Even the Maseratti crowd is clueless. Exhaust Gas Temperature is a biggee. Fuel Flow is another. Engine speed is measured in percent of "military rated thrust", or simply "mil power" instead of a certain number of rpm’s. When in level flight at night, with gear down, flaps down, hook down, to begin your descent to the ship, you simply set the fuel flow to 2,400 pounds per hour then adjust it as needed. Pretty simple, really, but foreign to what we are used to.
If I don’t like everything I am seeing on the instrument panel, and I mean EVERYTHING, I am not going to ride this thing off the pointy end of the boat. But, as usual, it looks good, and the whine of the engine at idle has a comforting familiarity by this time. The check list is complete, so I press the microphone button on the throttle and report to the Air Boss in Primary Flight Control, "Boss, Chief 305’s up" by speaking into my oxygen mask. Somebody up there who was in diapers when I had my first beer reports back, "Roger, 305". I am about to go for a ride. I can’t believe I get paid for this.
Nobody moves an inch on the flight deck unless under the direction of a "yellow shirt", or Taxi Director. It’s just too busy, too congested, too dangerous to taxi and not have someone guide you. You can easily suck someone into the intake or just as easily blow them off the flight deck with your exhaust. The yellow shirts are great. They not only watch out of me but make sure nobody’s life is in jeopardy when I am taxiing. When I get ready to go, the "deck apes" (granted, an uncharitable knickname, but a real one. Without them, and everyone else, the carrier would not work) unchain me and I am holding the brakes. The taxi director makes eye contact with me and gives me a hand signal that he has me now, and I follow his directions explicitly. With his subtle hand gestures, I know exactly how much to turn, how fast to go, and when I am not behaving. Tact is not a prerequisite for being a taxi director. Responsibility is. It is mandatory that the pilot obey the directions given by the taxi director. It may not make sense to me, but he sees the big picture and I don’t. At night this is scary. The pilot sits in the cockpit forward of the nose wheel. At night, on occasions, the taxi directors will have me taxi the airplane right to the edge of the flight deck, then make a hard turn. This is done to conserve deck space and pack the planes in a close as possible. The disconcerting thing about this is, until I make that turn, I can look down and see water, not steel. Chicken skin; goose bumps – call it what you will, but I get ‘em. Oh momma, do I ever. I think they like to do that, just to see if we have the nerve to taxi that close to the edge. And if we trust them. I don’t like it, but I do it. They remember it too. These guys don’t get a lot of pats on the back, and hanging my tightly puckered fanny over the ocean because he told me to reflects my confidence in their skill and dedication. I could say, "thanks, you’re doing a good job", but when he taxis me to the edge and I do it, words are not necessary. He knows.
The taxi director brings me into place behind the number 2 catapult on the bow of the ship. There are four catapults, and they are plenty busy. Two of the cats are on the bow and two on the "waist", or the end of the ship’s angle deck, or landing area. The ship can shoot two planes off every minute. Ahead of me, an F-14 Tomcat rolls onto the cat, and the Jet Blast Deflector comes up to keep his engines from blasting the planes waiting behind him. Even with the JBD in place, when he goes to mil power, my plane is buffeted. He is at full power, and requests an afterburner launch. Fighter pilots LOVE afterburner. It is an extra kick in the pants, and it’s just cool. His request in granted and when he goes from mil power to afterburner, there is another giant WHOOMP that I can hear and FEEL in my cockpit. When he gets shot off the ship, I can see the huge flames coming out the tail end of the Tomcat and it is impressive. Real impressive. Typically, his next request is to go suck some gas out of the airborne tanker to make up for what he burned playing with the burners. The Air Boss, being a soft hearted guy, lets him have a few hundred pounds and everybody is happy.
Back to business; the JBD goes down as the steam from the cat is dissipating and my new taxi director steps out of the steam cloud and gives me the signal to taxi onto the catapult. While I am taxiing, I unfold my wings upon his command. Wings fold on Navy carrier jets to conserve precious real estate. The flight deck is four and a half acres, and barely large enough for the job. 90 jet planes can get in each other’s way, but the yellow shirts are good and there is not so much as a dented fender.
My yellow shirt’s directions now are small and precise. I must line a 40,000 lb. machine up within inches. Tiny movements using a 12,500 lb. thrust jet engine takes a little practice, but my yellow shirt is good and gives good directions. I am on the cat and now being hooked up for the launch. I just noticed that I am breathing fast. No wonder. In seconds, a huge steam powered double barrel shotgun under the deck will fling me off the deck of the boat. I will go from zero to 175 mph in about 2 seconds, in about 200 feet of deck run. The acceleration is so intense, we often experience a phenomenon known as "tunnel vision", in which the blood in the eyeball drains to the back of that orb and everything goes black except for a tiny circular field of view directly in front of you. As soon as the cat stroke ends, vision immediately returns bu it’s really scary the first time you experience it. But, you get used to it. You even get used to being scared. Its simply part of the job.
Launching a jet is an elaborate series of events that is a joy to watch when the deck crew is experienced. It is a ballet which precedes an exercise in brute force and unimaginable power. When the plane is in position on the catapult, the pilot is given a hand signal to lower the "launch bar". It is a structural arm that deploys from the top of the nose wheel strut. It mates with a similar member in the deck of the ship. A very small piece of machined steel called a "dog bone", because of its shape, attaches another strut in the planes nose gear to a mating piece in the deck and permits the pilot to go to full power without the plane advancing. Its true name is "holdback fitting". It is strong enough to restrain the plane from moving under full power, but not strong enough to withstand the enormous force of the catapult. Thus, when the cat fires, the hold back fitting is broken and away we go. Once the holdback fitting is in place, you must taxi forward ever so gently to take up the slack in the restraint system. Woe to the pilot who taxis a bit to fast and breaks the fitting. The plane must then be manually pushed backwards, against its own thrust, by everyone on the deck who can be spared. They hate that, and I can’t blame them. It is dangerous, and unnecessary. I have seen it. The deck crew slaps the side of the pilot’s plane and he is rendered many one finger salutes as the broken dogbone goes over the side. On occasion, when I pilot does something that makes unnecessary work for the crew, the broken part, or some of it, winds up in his mailbox. Sailors are so subtle. My mailbox was a scrap yard twice. I got the message both times.
Once in position and firmly attached to the cat, a sailor with a "weight board" shows you what he thinks the weight of your plane is. This is vital; the catapult can launch anything on the ship from the lightest to the heaviest. If the catapult crew below decks doesn’t have the right weight, you can get a "soft" cat shot and not have enough speed to fly. If this happens, your only recourse is to eject from the plane, right off the end of the ship, and your chances of being run over by the boat are better than you would prefer. Too strong a cat shot will rip the launch bar right off of the plane. You won’t go anywhere, but the launch bar will finally hit the water a couple of miles ahead of the ship. When everything works right, the plane leaves the ship at 5 knots over stall speed. Stall speed is the speed at which the plane will not fly. It is therefore critical that the weight of the plane is known. It is calculated during the brief by the pilot and the plane captain also adds up all the numbers and writes the weight on the side of the nose gear doors in big numbers with a grease pencil. It is checked by the pilot for accuracy, and it is this number that the weight checker gives the catapult crew below decks. Being satisfied with the number on the weight board, I give the weight checker a thumbs-up and he goes away.
Sailors are scampering all around my plane, making sure all is ready for launch. And it is happening fast. This is their job. It’s damn dangerous, but they are good. They know what to look for and they do it fast and get out of the way. Wings down and locked. No huge hydraulic leaks. Launch bar and hold back fitting secure. Safing wires on all the bombs. Covers off the Sidewinder noses. They are crawling around under a living, breathing, angry machine that weighs 21,500 lbs. empty. It has over 5 tons of jet fuel in it’s wings, another ton in a drop tank under one wing. There are twelve 500 lb. high explosive bombs on racks under the wings, 300 rounds of 20 mm cannon shells in a magazine right behind my head, and two Sidewinder missiles on the sides of the fuselage. I am 28 years old, and I am about to go play in one of the most lethal devices every devised by mankind. I can’t help but remember a sign I saw while a student in jet school in Meridian, MS: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For I am the most dangerous *** in the valley". I can dish it out anyway you want it: rockets, bombs, cannon fire, mines, missiles. Even the unthinkable is an option. IF it were on the ship. "We will neither confirm nor deny the existence of……….." Karl Malden’s credit card ad comes to mind: "Don’t leave home without it." We didn’t. The Marines are on board to run the jail. They are also there to guard other assets. They have funny haircuts, but I like having them around.
When the crew is satisfied that everything is secure, they give the Catapult Officer a thumbs-up and now I am his. The Cat Officer is a pilot just like me, who is serving a tour as part of the ship’s company, or crew. He knows what I am thinking, what I am doing, and how much faith I have in his every signal. He does not fire the catapult, but is the final authority as to when the button is pushed that sends me on the ride of my life. This is the part where your butt really puckers. He stands off to one side of the plane and gives me the signal to go to full power. I have prepared the plane for this. The T bar has been extended. It is a steel bar shaped like a capital T that I extend from the left console right in front of the massive throttle. I wrap my hand around it, and the throttle when I go to mil power so the throttle will not be retarded accidentally due to the acceleration. I advance the throttle to pull power, lock it, wrap my hand around it and the T bar and fixate on the gauges. The plane is struggling mightily to move but the hold back fitting is doing its thing. My feet are flat on the floor. Left hand clutching the throttle, right hand over my crotch, not holding the control stick as is typical of the A-7 launch. It will come back into my hand by the time I reach the end of the deck. It always does. For all the input I have into the launch, I could be a sack of rice and nothing would change. I am a passenger until we get over water, then I take what they gave me for end speed and become the pilot again.
I am just about to salute the Cat Officer which means I am ready to fly, when the unexpected happens. My cockpit is immediately filled with smoke that makes it nearly impossible to see the instruments and outside the cockpit. It is coming from the air conditioning ducts, and is so thick, it creeps into my oxygen mask and is burning my lungs and stinging my nose and mouth and eye. Immediately, I key the mic and say, "Suspend, suspend, suspend". This is an alarm that the pilot can issue at any moment up to the point of the catapult being fired. It is my last resort at preventing being shot off the ship, and when this command is given, the Air Boss or one of his subordinates immediately pushes a huge mushroom shaped switch in their place on the island that renders all of the catapults on the ship inoperable. It effectively shuts down the aircraft carrier. The Air Boss and the Captain of the ship don’t get to play with their boat or airplanes anymore. Any pilot who shuts down the airport better be in fear of his life. I was.
Now, this is a very dicey situation, and there is a procedure in place to handle it. My plane is still at full power, and I am still hooked up to the catapult. Yet, I don’t dare retard the throttles for fear that the cat will fire. At this point, the catapult office must make sure the cats will not fire before he gives me the signal to idle the engine. When he is certain that it is safe to go to idle, he does something which he is required to do before I will reduce the power to idle. What he does shows me that he is fully confident that my plane will not be fired off the deck: he stands directly in the path of the catapult and gives me the signal to retard power. From where he is standing, if the cat fires, he is the first to go.
At this point I am still at full power, but the smoke is no longer coming out of the ac ducts. How odd. Nevertheless, something is amiss and I don’t want to go flying in this bird. I reduce the throttle to idle and am handed over to the taxi director to clear the catapult. He gives me a direction and the "come ahead" signal and as I advance the throttle, nothing happens. I cannot control the engine speed. Something has broken. At this point, I key the mic and tell the Air Boss of my situation. A tug is sent to tow me to a safe position and once there, I shut down the plane using the emergency fuel shutoff and it’s over for the day. My eyes are still stinging and watering. The spare is delighted; he gets to go fly. I get to go to see the doc and to a debriefing. But, I am alive.
It occurred to me as I was leaving the plane just how close I came to a very, very bad situation. Had the AC unit not malfunctioned, I would have had the throttle break in the air, and I would have been stuck with whatever power setting it was at when it broke. Landing on the ship would have been impossible, and the only alternative would be to shut down the plane over the ocean, and eject. I am not sure I can imagine something I fear more. Ejection is only an option when death is inevitable, and ejections have often proven fatal in and of themselves. I didn’t want to try it.
As it turns out, I had neglected to read the note in the yellow sheets about taking the cat shot with the AC turned off. This was a recurring problem in this plane, and once the plane was airborne, the AC unit could be turned on without the smoke. The smoke was due to a leaking seal somewhere in the system. Had I read this note, and done the right thing, I could have been faced with the unthinkable, to me anyway, alternative. My negligence may have saved my life and also the plane. I got chewed out by the XO for not reading the yellow sheets all the way through, but it was a gentle chewing. An obligatory chewing. He’s the XO; he likes to chew. Next year, when he takes over as Commanding Officer, he will transform into the beloved "old man" and another ass chewer will come on board. But this day, I left the tongue lashing with most of my butt intact, alive, with the plane on the deck. Neither it nor I was in the water, and I was glad of that. So was the XO.
I was touched by the hand of God on that day. The heavens opened, and a tired, scared child of God was given another chance. This is not the only time that happened, but those other stories are for another day.
The pre-game ceremonies that lead up to the noisy launch of jets on an aircraft carrier involve many things. The plane that I flew was a bomber, and we never went anywhere alone. Being alone in the cockpit (the plane had one seat and it was MINE) was a true joy; being alone in the air was not. While the A-7 Corsair II was a superb visual and radar bombing platform, it lacked both the design and power to be a successful air-to-air combat ("dog fighting") machine. So, we went places in flights of four, for two important reasons: four bombers put four times the ordnance upon those unfortunate souls whom we chose to visit, and for mutual support - to watch each other’s "six o’clock", or that area behind us from which an intruder way wish to pay a visit to us.
Sorties on the ship lasted 2 hours and 20 minutes. Trains may run late and the airlines don’t always get off on time, but you can bet your life that when the second hand reaches the 12, the first two jets will be leaving the flight deck. The Air Boss wants to get the new sorties airborne as soon as possible so the returning jets overheard, low on fuel (which is LIFE in a jet plane) and manned by tired pilots, can be recovered. When this is complete, the refueling, re-arming, re-everything to prepare for the next launch cycle begins. It goes on for days sometimes, around the clock. You train like you will fight. Wars are not conducted from 9-5. The ship never sleeps.
Two hours before the scheduled launch time, the five pilots will sit and conduct a "briefling". Five pilots attend, and man five planes, even though only four will launch. The jets are complex, and it is not unusual for one in the flight of four to develop a problem with any of the myriad of flight, navigation, or weapons systems that make it go "down" for the sortie. Thus, the "spare" is there to take its place. The briefing takes place in the squadron’s "ready room" right below the flight deck, and covers every detail of the flight. Plus, there is an "emergency of the day" that is briefed. You never know what will happen on any given flight, and the planes are a flying collection of potential problems. Each pilot goes to his plane wearing everything he will need to survive, including a small book of emergency procedures. Many are "immediate action" emergencies, and the procedures are memorized rote. When you have a flame-out (the fire in the engines goes out), or you have an engine fire (the fire in the engine is not confined to the engine only), there is not time to get the book out and go looking for the proper remedy. Fire in the engine is good. When it stops coming out the back end of the plane, or comes out someplace else – that’s bad.
After the briefing, which lasts about an hour, each pilot goes to "maintenance control", which is right outside the door to the ready room and pours over a very comprehensive lists of "squawks" that other pilots who flew the plane noted as conditions that were outside the norm but did not make the plane unsafe to fly. These may be items such as small errors in the bombing system, navigation system error, funky smells, excessive hydraulic fluid leaks, or problems with the air conditioner. This is the problem that saved my life one day. I am certain of it.
Sometimes things happen that give you every confidence in the world that God is in His heaven, and that you are not alone. If ever I was to see this, it would be the day that I strapped myself into Chief 305. The briefing was for a four plane sortie to conduct a bombing training mission over the ocean. Following the brief, we all looked over the "yellow sheets" (i.e. squawks) for our assigned plane. This list of prior complaints was long, but not alarming. After reviewing the complaints for the past couple of weeks, I noted nothing outside the ordinary and signed for the plane. It is short walk up a ladder on the outside of the carrier from the ready room. The ladders are steel grating and you can look below you and see the ocean below, sailing by at a brisk 25 knots. I hold on the handrails REALLY tight. It gives me the willies and I am glad I am wearing my LPA (life preserver). I don’t mind getting shot off the front end of the ship at 5 knots over stall speed in a flying bomb, 60 feet off the water. But looking down and seeing the ocean right below me gives me the creeps. Its even worse at night. I am afraid of heights.
Reaching the flight deck before a launch is always a joy to me. Like a kid in a candy store, I marvel at acres of jets and rockets and bombs and guys doing their thing. All the planes for the launch are chained to the deck and packed tightly into the back of the ship, in the order in which they will launch. A well run flight deck is a delight to see, and these guys are good. They are professionals, and they have been doing this a while. And it shows.
My plane is waiting for me with the canopy up, the inspection doors open and my Plane Captain standing ready to help me stow all my flight data info in the cockpit before I do my walkaround preflight inspection. One of the most unusual, and unfortunately necessary, rituals is called "diving the duct". The A-7 has a huge gaping open mouth under the cockpit for incoming air to feed the jet engine. The engine is packed into the back half of the fuselage and the first stage of the giant turbine is directly under the center of the wing. Everything forward of that is just a tunnel. Unfortunately, on occasion people who do not wish to be in the Navy, and especially in the Navy and on a ship for 7 months, will toss something into the mouth of the plane where it will be gobbled up by the engine and destroy the engine. It doesn’t take much. So, the last thing the pilot does before strapping in is to dive the duct. The Plane Captain gives me a boost if a stool is not handy, and I begin the ritual - looking for a nut, bolt, wrench, piece of safety wire, Remove Before Flight flag, or any number of items that will fit in the plane’s gaping hole of a mouth. It’s a big hole; lots of stuff would fit. I make my way down the tube and inspect the turbine blades. I know it’s not a credible fear, but I always thought the same thing when spinning the blades over by hand: "Oh God, please don’t let this engine start up now!" People have been sucked into the orifice by the engine, and if it were to start, I could not back out fast enough to avoid being spit out the tailpipe as Fredburger.
The blades look good. Some have minor defects, evidence of the work of a skilled engine mechanic with a small file, smoothing out minor nicks. I can live with that. No FOD either (Foreign Object Damage). Good. I back out of the hole and my PC is there to help me down. He is also holding the gear that I must put back on: my survival vest, life vest (floatation). After donning the rest of my Navy Pilot costume, I enter the cockpit and begin the process that will bring life to this enormously complex machine. The deck crew knows that I need electrical power to energize the plane long before the engines start, and soon a sailor plugs a huge umbilical cable into the belly of my plane and gives me the signal that I have power. Instantly, the cockpit goes from being a dark array of gauges, switches and blank screens, to a display of lights that delight the eye. The primary task is to align the plane’s onboard inertial navigation computer with the mother system that is directly under the flight deck of the carrier. Both systems are incredibly accurate. They are so accurate, that I take a map of the flight deck, with MY position marked, and insert MY coordinates into the computer to tell it how far away I am from the ship’s computer. If I can’t see the target and bomb visually, I’ll use this computer to lay them down on instruments, and accuracy counts. It’s that good. It takes a while for the computer to stabilize, and I amuse myself by watching the activities going on around me. Damn, I am proud to be a part of this. The canopy is still up and as planes begin to start engines, the familiar smell of kerosene being burned fills the air. Time to lower the canopy. Down she comes, and I begin my preflight checks in the office. Busy, busy, busy. What a cool job. All these cool "big boy toys" to play with. I can’t believe I get paid to do this.
Carrier based jet planes don’t have internal starter motors, and it takes a huge puff of air to start the turbine to spinning at an RPM that will permit the engine to light off. A large motorized machine that we call the "huffer" comes up to my plane and a sailor jumps off of it and attaches a very large diameter (about the size of a cantaloupe – a big, big cantaloupe) flexible hose to a port in the side of my plane. When I give the signal, the sailor will rev the diesel engine that powers the huffer’s turbine and blow a huge volume of air into my engine and start it spinning. I’ll watch the engine rpm gauge and when it gets up to a certain speed, all I have to do is move the throttle to the start position and wait for the familiar "WHOOMP" as the kerosene ignites and the engine is alive. Once this happens, the huffer disconnects and goes off to service someone else. It happens fast, and these guys are good. Now I settle back and listen to the comforting whine of the massive Rolls Royce TF-41, as the huffer goes to breathe life into my buddies.
I look over the engine gauges, hoping to see everything "in the green". Jets have certain operating parameters, and some of these are very unfamiliar to those whose only experience with machinery is a Chevrolet. Even the Maseratti crowd is clueless. Exhaust Gas Temperature is a biggee. Fuel Flow is another. Engine speed is measured in percent of "military rated thrust", or simply "mil power" instead of a certain number of rpm’s. When in level flight at night, with gear down, flaps down, hook down, to begin your descent to the ship, you simply set the fuel flow to 2,400 pounds per hour then adjust it as needed. Pretty simple, really, but foreign to what we are used to.
If I don’t like everything I am seeing on the instrument panel, and I mean EVERYTHING, I am not going to ride this thing off the pointy end of the boat. But, as usual, it looks good, and the whine of the engine at idle has a comforting familiarity by this time. The check list is complete, so I press the microphone button on the throttle and report to the Air Boss in Primary Flight Control, "Boss, Chief 305’s up" by speaking into my oxygen mask. Somebody up there who was in diapers when I had my first beer reports back, "Roger, 305". I am about to go for a ride. I can’t believe I get paid for this.
Nobody moves an inch on the flight deck unless under the direction of a "yellow shirt", or Taxi Director. It’s just too busy, too congested, too dangerous to taxi and not have someone guide you. You can easily suck someone into the intake or just as easily blow them off the flight deck with your exhaust. The yellow shirts are great. They not only watch out of me but make sure nobody’s life is in jeopardy when I am taxiing. When I get ready to go, the "deck apes" (granted, an uncharitable knickname, but a real one. Without them, and everyone else, the carrier would not work) unchain me and I am holding the brakes. The taxi director makes eye contact with me and gives me a hand signal that he has me now, and I follow his directions explicitly. With his subtle hand gestures, I know exactly how much to turn, how fast to go, and when I am not behaving. Tact is not a prerequisite for being a taxi director. Responsibility is. It is mandatory that the pilot obey the directions given by the taxi director. It may not make sense to me, but he sees the big picture and I don’t. At night this is scary. The pilot sits in the cockpit forward of the nose wheel. At night, on occasions, the taxi directors will have me taxi the airplane right to the edge of the flight deck, then make a hard turn. This is done to conserve deck space and pack the planes in a close as possible. The disconcerting thing about this is, until I make that turn, I can look down and see water, not steel. Chicken skin; goose bumps – call it what you will, but I get ‘em. Oh momma, do I ever. I think they like to do that, just to see if we have the nerve to taxi that close to the edge. And if we trust them. I don’t like it, but I do it. They remember it too. These guys don’t get a lot of pats on the back, and hanging my tightly puckered fanny over the ocean because he told me to reflects my confidence in their skill and dedication. I could say, "thanks, you’re doing a good job", but when he taxis me to the edge and I do it, words are not necessary. He knows.
The taxi director brings me into place behind the number 2 catapult on the bow of the ship. There are four catapults, and they are plenty busy. Two of the cats are on the bow and two on the "waist", or the end of the ship’s angle deck, or landing area. The ship can shoot two planes off every minute. Ahead of me, an F-14 Tomcat rolls onto the cat, and the Jet Blast Deflector comes up to keep his engines from blasting the planes waiting behind him. Even with the JBD in place, when he goes to mil power, my plane is buffeted. He is at full power, and requests an afterburner launch. Fighter pilots LOVE afterburner. It is an extra kick in the pants, and it’s just cool. His request in granted and when he goes from mil power to afterburner, there is another giant WHOOMP that I can hear and FEEL in my cockpit. When he gets shot off the ship, I can see the huge flames coming out the tail end of the Tomcat and it is impressive. Real impressive. Typically, his next request is to go suck some gas out of the airborne tanker to make up for what he burned playing with the burners. The Air Boss, being a soft hearted guy, lets him have a few hundred pounds and everybody is happy.
Back to business; the JBD goes down as the steam from the cat is dissipating and my new taxi director steps out of the steam cloud and gives me the signal to taxi onto the catapult. While I am taxiing, I unfold my wings upon his command. Wings fold on Navy carrier jets to conserve precious real estate. The flight deck is four and a half acres, and barely large enough for the job. 90 jet planes can get in each other’s way, but the yellow shirts are good and there is not so much as a dented fender.
My yellow shirt’s directions now are small and precise. I must line a 40,000 lb. machine up within inches. Tiny movements using a 12,500 lb. thrust jet engine takes a little practice, but my yellow shirt is good and gives good directions. I am on the cat and now being hooked up for the launch. I just noticed that I am breathing fast. No wonder. In seconds, a huge steam powered double barrel shotgun under the deck will fling me off the deck of the boat. I will go from zero to 175 mph in about 2 seconds, in about 200 feet of deck run. The acceleration is so intense, we often experience a phenomenon known as "tunnel vision", in which the blood in the eyeball drains to the back of that orb and everything goes black except for a tiny circular field of view directly in front of you. As soon as the cat stroke ends, vision immediately returns bu it’s really scary the first time you experience it. But, you get used to it. You even get used to being scared. Its simply part of the job.
Launching a jet is an elaborate series of events that is a joy to watch when the deck crew is experienced. It is a ballet which precedes an exercise in brute force and unimaginable power. When the plane is in position on the catapult, the pilot is given a hand signal to lower the "launch bar". It is a structural arm that deploys from the top of the nose wheel strut. It mates with a similar member in the deck of the ship. A very small piece of machined steel called a "dog bone", because of its shape, attaches another strut in the planes nose gear to a mating piece in the deck and permits the pilot to go to full power without the plane advancing. Its true name is "holdback fitting". It is strong enough to restrain the plane from moving under full power, but not strong enough to withstand the enormous force of the catapult. Thus, when the cat fires, the hold back fitting is broken and away we go. Once the holdback fitting is in place, you must taxi forward ever so gently to take up the slack in the restraint system. Woe to the pilot who taxis a bit to fast and breaks the fitting. The plane must then be manually pushed backwards, against its own thrust, by everyone on the deck who can be spared. They hate that, and I can’t blame them. It is dangerous, and unnecessary. I have seen it. The deck crew slaps the side of the pilot’s plane and he is rendered many one finger salutes as the broken dogbone goes over the side. On occasion, when I pilot does something that makes unnecessary work for the crew, the broken part, or some of it, winds up in his mailbox. Sailors are so subtle. My mailbox was a scrap yard twice. I got the message both times.
Once in position and firmly attached to the cat, a sailor with a "weight board" shows you what he thinks the weight of your plane is. This is vital; the catapult can launch anything on the ship from the lightest to the heaviest. If the catapult crew below decks doesn’t have the right weight, you can get a "soft" cat shot and not have enough speed to fly. If this happens, your only recourse is to eject from the plane, right off the end of the ship, and your chances of being run over by the boat are better than you would prefer. Too strong a cat shot will rip the launch bar right off of the plane. You won’t go anywhere, but the launch bar will finally hit the water a couple of miles ahead of the ship. When everything works right, the plane leaves the ship at 5 knots over stall speed. Stall speed is the speed at which the plane will not fly. It is therefore critical that the weight of the plane is known. It is calculated during the brief by the pilot and the plane captain also adds up all the numbers and writes the weight on the side of the nose gear doors in big numbers with a grease pencil. It is checked by the pilot for accuracy, and it is this number that the weight checker gives the catapult crew below decks. Being satisfied with the number on the weight board, I give the weight checker a thumbs-up and he goes away.
Sailors are scampering all around my plane, making sure all is ready for launch. And it is happening fast. This is their job. It’s damn dangerous, but they are good. They know what to look for and they do it fast and get out of the way. Wings down and locked. No huge hydraulic leaks. Launch bar and hold back fitting secure. Safing wires on all the bombs. Covers off the Sidewinder noses. They are crawling around under a living, breathing, angry machine that weighs 21,500 lbs. empty. It has over 5 tons of jet fuel in it’s wings, another ton in a drop tank under one wing. There are twelve 500 lb. high explosive bombs on racks under the wings, 300 rounds of 20 mm cannon shells in a magazine right behind my head, and two Sidewinder missiles on the sides of the fuselage. I am 28 years old, and I am about to go play in one of the most lethal devices every devised by mankind. I can’t help but remember a sign I saw while a student in jet school in Meridian, MS: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For I am the most dangerous *** in the valley". I can dish it out anyway you want it: rockets, bombs, cannon fire, mines, missiles. Even the unthinkable is an option. IF it were on the ship. "We will neither confirm nor deny the existence of……….." Karl Malden’s credit card ad comes to mind: "Don’t leave home without it." We didn’t. The Marines are on board to run the jail. They are also there to guard other assets. They have funny haircuts, but I like having them around.
When the crew is satisfied that everything is secure, they give the Catapult Officer a thumbs-up and now I am his. The Cat Officer is a pilot just like me, who is serving a tour as part of the ship’s company, or crew. He knows what I am thinking, what I am doing, and how much faith I have in his every signal. He does not fire the catapult, but is the final authority as to when the button is pushed that sends me on the ride of my life. This is the part where your butt really puckers. He stands off to one side of the plane and gives me the signal to go to full power. I have prepared the plane for this. The T bar has been extended. It is a steel bar shaped like a capital T that I extend from the left console right in front of the massive throttle. I wrap my hand around it, and the throttle when I go to mil power so the throttle will not be retarded accidentally due to the acceleration. I advance the throttle to pull power, lock it, wrap my hand around it and the T bar and fixate on the gauges. The plane is struggling mightily to move but the hold back fitting is doing its thing. My feet are flat on the floor. Left hand clutching the throttle, right hand over my crotch, not holding the control stick as is typical of the A-7 launch. It will come back into my hand by the time I reach the end of the deck. It always does. For all the input I have into the launch, I could be a sack of rice and nothing would change. I am a passenger until we get over water, then I take what they gave me for end speed and become the pilot again.
I am just about to salute the Cat Officer which means I am ready to fly, when the unexpected happens. My cockpit is immediately filled with smoke that makes it nearly impossible to see the instruments and outside the cockpit. It is coming from the air conditioning ducts, and is so thick, it creeps into my oxygen mask and is burning my lungs and stinging my nose and mouth and eye. Immediately, I key the mic and say, "Suspend, suspend, suspend". This is an alarm that the pilot can issue at any moment up to the point of the catapult being fired. It is my last resort at preventing being shot off the ship, and when this command is given, the Air Boss or one of his subordinates immediately pushes a huge mushroom shaped switch in their place on the island that renders all of the catapults on the ship inoperable. It effectively shuts down the aircraft carrier. The Air Boss and the Captain of the ship don’t get to play with their boat or airplanes anymore. Any pilot who shuts down the airport better be in fear of his life. I was.
Now, this is a very dicey situation, and there is a procedure in place to handle it. My plane is still at full power, and I am still hooked up to the catapult. Yet, I don’t dare retard the throttles for fear that the cat will fire. At this point, the catapult office must make sure the cats will not fire before he gives me the signal to idle the engine. When he is certain that it is safe to go to idle, he does something which he is required to do before I will reduce the power to idle. What he does shows me that he is fully confident that my plane will not be fired off the deck: he stands directly in the path of the catapult and gives me the signal to retard power. From where he is standing, if the cat fires, he is the first to go.
At this point I am still at full power, but the smoke is no longer coming out of the ac ducts. How odd. Nevertheless, something is amiss and I don’t want to go flying in this bird. I reduce the throttle to idle and am handed over to the taxi director to clear the catapult. He gives me a direction and the "come ahead" signal and as I advance the throttle, nothing happens. I cannot control the engine speed. Something has broken. At this point, I key the mic and tell the Air Boss of my situation. A tug is sent to tow me to a safe position and once there, I shut down the plane using the emergency fuel shutoff and it’s over for the day. My eyes are still stinging and watering. The spare is delighted; he gets to go fly. I get to go to see the doc and to a debriefing. But, I am alive.
It occurred to me as I was leaving the plane just how close I came to a very, very bad situation. Had the AC unit not malfunctioned, I would have had the throttle break in the air, and I would have been stuck with whatever power setting it was at when it broke. Landing on the ship would have been impossible, and the only alternative would be to shut down the plane over the ocean, and eject. I am not sure I can imagine something I fear more. Ejection is only an option when death is inevitable, and ejections have often proven fatal in and of themselves. I didn’t want to try it.
As it turns out, I had neglected to read the note in the yellow sheets about taking the cat shot with the AC turned off. This was a recurring problem in this plane, and once the plane was airborne, the AC unit could be turned on without the smoke. The smoke was due to a leaking seal somewhere in the system. Had I read this note, and done the right thing, I could have been faced with the unthinkable, to me anyway, alternative. My negligence may have saved my life and also the plane. I got chewed out by the XO for not reading the yellow sheets all the way through, but it was a gentle chewing. An obligatory chewing. He’s the XO; he likes to chew. Next year, when he takes over as Commanding Officer, he will transform into the beloved "old man" and another ass chewer will come on board. But this day, I left the tongue lashing with most of my butt intact, alive, with the plane on the deck. Neither it nor I was in the water, and I was glad of that. So was the XO.
I was touched by the hand of God on that day. The heavens opened, and a tired, scared child of God was given another chance. This is not the only time that happened, but those other stories are for another day.