Neptunus Lex

It’s funny how the memory well can run dry, and then something comes along and primes the pump and there’s one story after another waiting to spill out of you. This one, like yesterday’s, is not my own, but told to me by the man to whom it happened. Another Marine captain, an instructor in the TA-4J training squadron in Meridian, Mississippi. Had a livid scar across his eyebrow, a white line that ran from atop his brow half way to his right ear.

I often wondered how he got it. One day, without prompting, he told me.

It was a night bombing hop out of Cubi Point Naval Air Station, south of Olongapo in the Philipines. He was dash-2 on a dark and drizzling night - a night maybe, where wisdom might have called for discretion as the better part of valor, but that was not our culture in those days. We didn’t scrub for darkness, and we didn’t scrub for weather if there was any way around it. Only non-hacks cancelled. They were Marine attack pilots. They were going flying.

It was a ten-second separation take-off, and he watched through the bulletproof glass in front of him as the taillight of his lead faded into the muggy darkness. Having waited the alloted time, he ran his engine up to mil, released the brakes and felt the familiar kick of the A-4F “SuperFox” engine behind him. Dark enough to be on and off the gauges on the go, backing up the runway edge lights as they flashed by with his AJB-3 gyro-compass. The little bomber’s nose got light at 120 knots, and at computed lift off speed he hauled back on the stick. Reluctantly, the heavy jet rotated to a take-off attitude, and up came the flaps as he transitioned to level flight above the harbor. After a moment to climb and gain some airspeed on course, he turned hard left to avoid mountainous terrain a mile or two ahead.

In the turn he strained over his left shoulder to re-acquire his lead’s tail light in the gloom, finally finding it, nearer than he had anticipated. He focused with all of his energy on setting the light in the proper quadrant of his forward glareshield, trying his best to be a good wingman and make a safe rendezvous. The sight picture looked strange - the lead’s tail light seemed to grow far too quickly, and - alarmed - he pulled the throttle back to idle and extended the speedbrakes in anticipation of an under-run. Still the light loomed ever closer, and he wrapped the jet up in a hard, belly-up turn, trying to shred airspeed as best he could - trying to avoid a collision. The last thing he distinctly recalled hearing before he struck the water’s surface at a 150 knots was the wheedling cry of the radar altimeter - which, given his intended altitude, didn’t make any sense.

There was a single bright flash of pain, and then down came the darkness like a falling curtain, and the darkness lasted an indeterminate time.

When he awoke, it was in slow stages and he felt pain in several places. He did not know where he was or how he had come to be there, only that he was heavily seated in a cramped space and restrained around the shoulders and hips. Something warm flowed across his face while a cool wetness rose around his legs, climbing to mid thigh. The snoring sound of his oxygen mask was loud in his ears, but louder still was the voice of Ray, his roomate, “It’s time to wake up, Mark. It’s time to go.”

“Tired,” he tried to reply through thickened lips, adding, “hurts.”

“I know, but you’ve got to try, you’ve got to get up, we’ve got to go,” and now he felt his roomate shaking him, slapping him around and he raised his arms in protest even as he came more fully awake and aware of his surroundings.

He was seated in the cockpit of his A-4F SuperFox, at the bottom of Subic Bay. He had cracked his head against the eight-day clock on impact - the light he had been attempting to rendezvous on was not his lead’s tail light but instead a navigational buoy in the harbor - the warmth across his face was blood, one of his legs was broken and the fingers of his left hand were smashed. The pain washed over him with panic following close behind - the water around his legs was rising. For a moment he considered pulling the ejection handle, even reached up for it, but his roomate shouted at him, “NO!” and he realized that Ray was right. The canopy would never clear under the water pressure, if he didn’t break his neck when he slammed into it, he’d burn to death when the seat’s rocket motor initiated in the enclosed cockpit.

“The knife. Use your K-bar,” Ray said in a conversational voice, and for the first time Mark felt a moment of scratching doubt at how his roomate had come to be with him in the cramped cockpit of a single-seat attack jet that was underwater.

He pushed these thoughts aside and retrived the rugged Marine knife from its position on his survival vest, turning it end over to hammer against his canopy above him, to break it so that he could swim away and even as he started to strike at it with all his desperate strength he heard Ray’s voice as if in a receding whisper, “Your harness. Release your harness first,” and he admitted that to be a good idea. He relased the Koch fittings that had restrained him in the seat and even as the water rose around his chest he hammered at the plexiglass above him with everything he had and there was a hole! And water rushed through like a spigot and it was cold but he kept on hammering until the canopy gave way in chunks and the spigot became a torrent pressing down on him and he felt Ray pulling him roughly up by the shoulders - he’d come back! - felt Ray pull him out of the cockpit, cutting his left arm on the plexiglass as he came out and Mark felt a flash of resentment at this new assault but then he was rising up through the black water, his life preserver automatically inflating as the salt water hit his FLU-8P actuators and he was trying to remember to keep exhaling as he ascended, keep exhaling because you didn’t want to hold the pressurized air in and cause an embolism, not after all that.

When he got to the surface, the IP told me, Ray was gone. Which only made sense, he said, staring me in the eye as if daring me to question him, or begging me to explain it because, he said, even if somehow the laws of physical space and probability had been overcome, his roomate had died in a fiery crash off-target during a practice bombing mission the week before.

That was the story he told me. Other Marine instructors verified that this had been the only story he had ever told, and that the outer details were undoubtedly true - he had become disoriented during a rendezvous on a filthy night, and flown into the water. His roomate, with whom he had been particularly close, even by the standards of the service, had indeed died the week before.

“But what about the roomate, down in the cockpit,” I asked. “Do you believe any of that’s true?”

They grimaced a bit, exchanged glances and shook their heads a little, before finally replying, “He thinks it is.”

The story of the grounded Raptors in Hawaii reminds me of one of the first TRANSPAC tales I ever heard. I was an ensign, or maybe a JG in Meridian training in TA-4J’s, and one of the Marine IP’s started talking about a WESTPAC pump his squadron had been on.

It seems that eight Yuma-based A-4F’s were on the way to the P.I., herded by a USAF KC-10 - and unlike the high-tech F-22, they didn’t have to worry about navigation systems that might fail. For the A-4’s, it was TACAN and NDB only, neither of which was worth a damn more than 200 miles or so from a land station.

Anyway, about half-way between California and Hawaii, the site of their first lay-over. One of the guys was in the basket, replenishing his go-juice - A-4’s didn’t carry much gas, so it was pretty much a constant cycling through the tanker to try and maintain options if something should go wrong aboard the tanker itself. Fatigued, I guess, from all of that form flying and refueling in the cramped environment of a Skyhawk cockpit, he hit basket with too much closure and a little off-center, the result being that the basket ripped off the hose. The still-pressurized fuel hose dumped JP-5 straight down his intake causing the (only) motor to cough and finally quit.

Which combination of events was bad for pretty much everyone. For him, it was a complete loss of the technology pilots use to generate airspeed, which is in turn used to create lift, which force - and this is the really important part - is marshalled to overcome gravity and slip the surly bonds of earth, like. He also experienced an explosive decompressurization since engine bleed air is also used to provide cabin pressure, but that was of secondary, even trival concern.

His seven remaining wingmen were left to thoughtfully consider the fuel quantities in their own tanks, the groundspeed they were making good and the distance remaining to the field as they were just past the go/no-go line and no diverts were available. After quick consultation with the heavy tanker, they worked the math and realized that they would not be able to hang around if junior couldn’t get his machine started again. Although the warrior ethic is to never to leave a man behind when he’s in trouble, no useful purpose would be served by swimming alongside him in the ocean so they did what they had to do and pressed on course. Even as they motored west, the lead kept up an excited conversation with his stricken wingman, going through the engine out checklist.

The wingie had gotten his ram air turbine out into the slipstream, and was trading altitude for airspeed just like he’d been taught, so at least he had radio comms in his otherwise eerily silent cockpit. While Skyhawk pilots may refer to their machine as “God’s jet,” this probably means that God is not a glider pilot, however, because with the engine stubbornly refusing to re-light, the A-4 was falling like a delta-winged rock.

Eventually the time came when he was simultaneously out airspeed, altitude and ideas. After trimming the jet up carefully, he reached above his head and pulled the overhead handle out and down, the face curtain coming down over his head. Now whether or not that causes the airplane to eject the pilot, or the pilot to jettison the airplane is a matter of perspective I suppose, but the net result was that in just a shade more than second later, the canopy had blown, the catapult had lauched him up the ejection rail, the rocket motor had blasted  him free of the jet’s tail, the parachute altimeter had sensed his height (less than 14,000 feet), the drogue gun had fired - taking with it the drogue ‘chute - and the full parachute had opened behind it. Good ‘chute!

IROK is the post-ejection acronym he had been taught, and it stands for Inflate (life preserver), Release (raft, out of the seat pan), Options - (O₂ mask and gloves off/on depending on environment - mask on for overwater ejection, gloves off) and Koch - (find and prepare to release the Koch fittings which would release the parachute from his harness- but not too soon: Although getting tangled up in parachute cords after water entry and being dragged under to drown is a serious concern, it’s very difficult to judge altitude above a flat sea and he wouldn’t have been the first guy to jettision his chute from an unsurviveable altitude).

Things worked out well for him though, and he kept his head even as he marvelled at how quickly chaos could arise from order. In a short time his boots were wet, the Koch fittings released and fortunately the parachute blew clear of his splash zone with little fuss.

A lanyard connected to his seat pan led to the one-man survival raft he’d set free during his descent, and so he pulled it close and struggled aboard, after first freeing the seat pan from his lap restraints. He made himself as comfortable as he could in the warm Pacific Ocean, entirely alone as the sound of his wingman and their tanker faded in the distance.

It’s quiet at sea,  half way between California and Hawaii with your wingmen receding out of radio range. A man can get thoughtful.

But our hero was not just a man but a Marine, so it was ix-nay on the ought-thay. After a short time bobbing around in the deep blue sea, not unlike a solitary rice crispie in a milk bowl, he considered his entertainment options. In the chest pocket of his survival vest was the Sony Walkman he’d brought along to enliven the weary aerial hours of the TRANSPAC. Removing and stowing his helmet in the raft, he discovered that it was still fully functional. Probing his shoulder pocket, he discovered that his pack of Marlboro cigarets were somewhat the worse for wear, but that middle ones were still sufficiently dry to light with the emergency matches in his vest.

And when the merchant ship found him and hour or so later, pretty much exactly where the KC-10’s navigator had said he would be, they found him kicked back in his raft, smoking a cancer stick, listening to Chuck Mangione on his Walkman.

Which says something, I think, about the power of a positive mental attitude.

When I joined the 125^th Fleet Replacement Squadron as a fresh young scraper in the winter of ‘87, the Hornet was very new to the fleet, having only made its first operational deployment two years earlier. The FRS was staffed by instructors who were the first to transition to an important new aviation program, and they were, almost to a man, outstanding officers and aviators - the Navy had put all the eggs in the FA-18 basket, and were using quality personnel to guarantee success.

This led to a very high quality level of instruction for we few,we happy few, we band of students, but also a fair amount of mostly good-natured rivalry, since you can’t put that much talent in one pool and not expect some jostling for position. Can’t everybody be number one, a truth that came to each of these guys as a first-time revelation.

Two of the leaders among that crowd, in airmanship, officer-like qualities and not insignificantly, self-esteem were Dawg and Shortney. Dawg was of stout Norwegian stock and a kind of samurai - a warrior poet who had flown armed Huey’s under the jungle canopy in Vietnam as a 19-year old in the Army before deciding that, what with clean sheets, (mostly) hot running water and three squares a day, flying jets for the Navy had so much more to offer. Shortney was, well, short, but he was also a superb professional, the kind of guy who made it his purpose to know everything there was to know about the aircraft and weapons system the better to teach the young men he clearly hoped to fly alongside in combat. They’d both flown sewerpipes before transitioning to Fighter/Attack, but even with a legacy of mud-moving in their resumés, yielded nothing to any man when it came to the manly art of Basic Fighter Maneuvering.

They were fast friends as well as professional rivals, and the truth of the matter for those who did not know them well was that the first fact was often obscured by the second. In a lecture, Dawg would often teach his students which tactics or procedures to avoid as “Shortney-isms,” while a perpetually jocund Shortney, for his part, used a highly theoretical Dawg as the obtuse and hapless butt of his jocularity.

Came to pass on day that the two of them were scheduled for a 2v2 dissimilar air combat training ride, or DACT. F-16s were to be the loathsome foe, and the opportunity one to be treasured - the Viper is a significant adversary for the FA-18, and winning or losing often came down to the “man in the box.” Winning of course meant the privilege of bringing home gun camera footage to show to an admiring audience of your peers - a kind of twentieth century scalp taking - while losing meant the humiliation of being simultaneously out of altitude, airspeed and ideas and having to look over one’s shoulder at the yawning intake of an F-16 as its pilot pulled cannon lead to put you out of your misery. Or at least, that’s what people tell me it meant. Can’t say for myself.

Shortney kindly offered to take the telephone brief with the F-16 pilots, thereby completing the requisite coordination on airspace, altitudes, time on station, radio frequencies and training rules, Dawg being otherwise employed. Having gotten through the coordination brief successfully, Shortney waxed loquacious:

“You guys are really in for a treat today,” said an admiring Shortney.

“Oh, yeah? Why is that?” replied a suspicious pair of blue-suiters.

“Oh, you’ll be in the presence of greatness! Dawg is my wingman, and an excellent pilot by his own admission. Stand by to be impressed. Have you heard of Dawg?”

“No, do tell.”

“Well all you need to know is this: Dawg has never been gunned by an F-16. Not ever.”

“Gotcha.”

And an hour or three later, professionally briefed and having broken the surly bonds of earth to claw into the morning sky, the two of them finished their final turn on CAP prior the heart-thumping “Tape’s on, fight’s on” call on the UHF radio. Being a good wingman, Dawg pushed out into an offensive combat spread position. Our heroes worked their radars in their respective altitude blocks, speaking back and forth to one another in taut bits, building situational awareness to go with their invincible attitudes and at 15 miles or so, with the intercept in a suitcase, mock missiles in the air and beginning to consider the dynamics of a visual 2v2 engagement with F-16s - and having chosen the tactic of an offensive bracket - Dawg heard this unexpected and unwelcome bit of comm from the Viper lead on the Safety-of-Flight frequency:

“Which side is Dawg on?”

To which Shortney primly replied, “He’s to the north.”

Well, gentle reader, if one F-16 is a handful, you can imagine what two are like: One will engage with you and drive down your energy while the other one can arc above the fight at high speed, popping Sidewinders in your tailpipes when the odd opportunity arises. Once they’ve got you thoroughly beaten down they can take turns like, a-stomping on your poor broken body.

Dawg brought home no gun video that day to show the tribe, but he did bring home the knowledge that in the future he’d attend all coordination briefs, and the realization that “buddy” was only half a word.

Good times.

As predicted, the USS Ronald Reagan got underway on time Saturday morning. There’s a good article here in the SD U/T which also touches on the FRP that some had questions on:

The Reagan deployment is the first real-world test of the Navy’s four-year-old Fleet Response Plan, designed to make most of the 12-ship carrier fleet available for use on short notice.

“We stay in a state of readiness now,” said Capt. Terry Kraft, the Reagan’s commanding officer.

During and after the Cold War, the Navy operated its aircraft carrier battle groups on a highly structured cycle of training, deployment and repair that typically kept only two or three of the 12-ship fleet at sea simultaneously. Sailors could count on a six-month cruise every other year.

Navy leaders crafted the Fleet Response Plan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, speeding up training and overhaul time to make as many as six carriers available on 30 days’ notice, and two more available in 90 days. They tested it 2½ years ago with an exercise called Summer Pulse ‘04, which sent seven flattops to sea at the same time.

And I got this pic through the service pipe - it was a beautiful day to get underway.

Fair winds and following seas, bubbas.

As I mentioned recently, the Ronald Reagan strike group is surge deploying in the very near future - heading out to cover what would have been the Stennis CSG’s Western Pacific commitment while that strike group joins Eisenhower’s in the roiling waters of Arabia. I got to see a number of old friends last week brief my boss on the ship and airwing’s readiness to get underway - to “surge” deploy, having returned from a previous deployment last summer.

They were publicly upbeat and even enthusiastic about what must have been for at least some of them bitterly unwelcome news just a few weeks ago - this is the nature of things, orders being orders after all, and misery being optional. If they were privately feeling sorry for themselves - their disrupted home lives, discarded plans, any uncertainty about the scope and scale of the task before them - you could not tell it from the faces of their leadership. It will be important for those leaders to convey that same enthusiasm and purpose to the younger people who have not yet fully embraced the third element of the sea service’s core value set: Commitment. Important, but routine - this is what leaders do. There is a war on, after all, and although their job in WESTPAC will not take them to the combat zone, it will help to stabilize a critical policy flank even as additional combat power joins the kinetic fray. We take these things for granted, but no other nation in the world can commit three carrier strike groups half-way around the world and leave so very much capacity in reserve - friends take notice and are reassured, as do those who weigh the calculus of enmity. There is honor in such service.

In a strange way, I rather envy them, the sailors aboard Reagan.

Oh, I know this is an easy thing to say: We all tend to idealize past hardships. In our middle age we tend look back with nostalgia upon the days of our carefree youth, recalling a kind of happy innocence but not remembering the burning need to be free of parental constraint, the agonies of adolescent relationships, the toxically combining uncertainties of self-identification, worth and potential. I have spent many, many days at sea in the course of my service and many times promised myself to remember the bad along with the good, to write a letter to myself about the pains of separation from those you love for months on end, the austerity of day-to-day existence, the grinding burden of doing a very great number of exceptionally difficult things to a routinely uncompromising standard of excellence.

But the same “boundedness” that a life at sea entails and which so sharply constrains the sailor’s freedom of movement can also embrace him in its clarity of vision. In both the literal and metaphorical senses it is true that you can see further at sea than you can ashore. The details of life spring out more vividly once free of men and their cities, machines, dirt and pollution.

Each deployment has a beginning and an end, and every day that passes is one day less until you stand re-united with those you love best. Each day brings with it a focus and unity of effort - different for each person, but nevertheless sharply defined. Some will cook and clean, some must run the plant, some will navigate and some will steer, some will develop plans and others will execute them. Some will even get to fly fighters from a carrier flight deck.

And in the midst of all of the noise and confusion and the great moving limbs of impersonal, powerful machinery there is the constant need to remain aware and awake so that one may remain alive: There are many ways to be killed or maimed on a warship at sea, it is no place for the unwise or the unwary and these things too tend to focus the imagination. Much of what is done at sea requires courage, both moral and physical and there is something quietly joyous in knowing that one has been both tested and is therefore trusted, and a quiet joy too in being surrounded by others who have overcome their own fears. It does not always feel that way ashore.

Very soon now the last mooring line will come over aboard USS Ronald Reagan, the bosun’s mate of the watch will sound one prolonged blast of the ship’s whistle and sailors fore and aft will shift colors, lowering the jack forward and the national ensign aft, only to raise the latter again on the main mast. Tugs will flail and thrash alongside, turning her into the channel where, once pointed towards safe waters she will make her own purposeful way out to sea, chasing the setting sun.

On the tip of the bow as the ship gains way, her prow brusquely shouldering aside the waves, a man will be standing alone with his thoughts as he stares into a suddenly revealed horizon. The sea breeze will be in his face, the wind will flap at his trousers and tussle his hair as he contemplates the enormity of God’s creation in that endlessly retreating line. This will also give him the time to reflect upon the infinitely small piece of that creation which he himself represents - a useful exercise in humility.

He will know exactly who he is, up there on the bow, where he fits into the grand scheme and what it is that he ought to be doing. And even as the day fades he knows that this thing he is embarked upon will have a beginning, a middle and an end. Uncertainties will fall away even as the land falls behind. And eventually, having seen what he came to see, he will go below - there will be much work for him to do.

I have been that man before, had his clarity and sense of purpose. There are times when I miss it.

Just as my own well of sea stories runs dry comes this tale, courtesy of ENS Tim. It’s an anecdote from an aviation physiologist teaching ENS Tim’s flight school class - the hero of the tale is a certain ENS X:

“In all of aviation, one of the most common causes of spatial disorientation, loss of consciousness, loss of vision (blackout/greyout), or loss of voluntary muscle control is acceleration placed on the body due to high G-load maneuvering.  When a pilot executes a high G turn, there is a higher load factor placed on the body due to centripetal acceleration, causing blood to flow away from the eyes, brain, and core, eventually pooling in the outer and lower extremities, especially the thighs, calves, and feet.  Since a human’s eyes are the most susceptible to oxygen deprivation of all the flight-essential organs, they are the first real sign of a syndrome known as G-LOC (Gravity induced Loss Of Consciousness).  The vision begins to fade and narrow into a tunnel-like field of view, eventually disappearing, immediately followed by unconsciousness.  There are measures to combat GLOC, such as a “G-suit” that relies on air filled bladders strapped to your legs and torso that help force blood back towards your head, as well as proper strength training, diet, and hydration regimen, however; the most effective means for combating a high G situation is known as the Anti-G Straining Maneuver.

The AGSM is a process by which the pilot can use isometric muscle contractions in his lower body and torso combined with a highly specialized breathing pattern known as the “Hick” maneuver to literally force blood back towards his brain by force of his own muscles. During the fifth week of training in the initial stage of flight school known as Aviation Preflight Indoctrination, this AGSM technique is taught to all prospective aviators and flight surgeons, since its use is essential for even basic day to day aviation once the students begin the flying portion of their training.  Sitting at amphitheater style desks mounted to the floor in a large classroom, the students are shown the proper combination of breathing (Hick maneuver) and muscle flexing used to increase pressure on their diaphragm and push the pooled blood out of their lower limbs to feed their brain and eyes.  In small groups of 5-10 at a time, the students practice the maneuver under the supervision of an Aviation Physiologist so that they can receive critique and special help learning the fundamentals of this so that they are prepared for their first flight.  The order of operations for the AGSM is “Legs….Breath….Pull”  meaning that the student first braces his or her legs against the ground and flexes the gluteus, calf, and hamstring muscles while firmly tightening the abdomen, then breathes in deeply saying the first two letters of the word “Hick.”  The effect is a closing of the glottis, the membrane that separates the windpipe from alimentary canal.  The student then counts to three, at which time they exhale while saying the last two letters of the word “Hick” and quickly re-inhaling another breath and starting the sequence over again.  All of this makes the student look they’re saying “hi……ck hi…….ck hi…..ck hi……ck.”  In a normal combat situation, after considerable experience of course, most tactical fighter pilots can withstand up to 9 g’s of acceleration without experiencing GLOC.

Well, approximately six months ago, Ensign X was in the class learning about the Hick maneuver and the complexities of the AGSM.  Overestimating the amount of effort required to execute this maneuver under normal gravitational conditions (i.e. not in a turning aircraft) the student decided that in order to impress the instructor, he would perform the maneuver to a degree comparable to actual combat maneuvering standards.  As the teacher prepared Ensign X’s group, the command “Legs!” was given.  Ensign X braced his feet against the rails of the seat in front of him, tightening his buttocks muscles, his calves, and his stomach.  The command “Breathe!” was given, and Ensign X inhaled deeply through both his nose and his mouth, ensuring a good fill of his lungs to help compress his diaphragm and chest cavity.  The command “Pull!” was given by the instructor, at which point Ensign X used all the strength in his stomach and buttocks muscles to bear down on his lungs and midsection, forcing the blood from his legs back to his “simulated” oxygen starved eyes and brains.  Three seconds passed, at which point the instructor chanted “Hick!” echoed by the sound of the 7 other fellow students exhaling, pressing out their air with the muscles in their stomachs and legs, followed almost instantly by a quick, punctuated breath inwards to refill their lungs and reapply pressure to their diaphragm. Herein lay the failure in Ensign X’s calculations, for when he reapplied pressure to his diaphragm, stomach, and buttocks, he felt a warmth spreading underneath him reminiscent of the sensation one experiences when reclining into a relaxing bath.  Almost immediately the students around him sensed the macabre turn the days events had taken and began to laugh and stare aghast as Ensign X struggled in utter futility to disguise his embarrassment.  As the smell punctuated the mood of the room, Ensign X decided, in true aviator fashion, that the mission was to be scrapped and decided to “punch out.”  As he retired awkwardly to the men’s room down the hall, the class burst out in laughter and amazement at what had just happened.

Several weeks later, Ensign X, callsign “Sh!tter,” reported to his follow on squadron.

Thus is a callsign born.

What a great business.

At the risk of offending the world I will share my conviction that there are essentially three kinds of pilots in TACAIR - tacticians, show-offs and engineers. Well, there are also plumbers and farmers, but my tale does not concern them.

Most of the engineers look at flying as an exceptionally complex mathematical problem. They know that if they could only control for all the decision variables and fully understand the constraints, that the linear application of force “x” will always result in desired output “y.” They get a distant, dreamy expression in their eyes when they talk about things like “mean aerodynamic chord line,” and the “Reynolds number.” Discussions on the implications of Bernoulli’s Law can send them into raptures, but they never quite understand why - despite their superior understanding of the machine and the fluid in which it operates - they so very often end up defensive in a 1v1, looking over their shoulder as their adversary closes to guns. Engineers pray at the altar of Test Pilot School.

Many showoffs live for the glamor of flying, their joy comes in the joy they give, the excitement that reflects back upon them by their acts of aerial derring-do. A showoff always needs an audience and if he does not have one, he will either create one in his own imagination - “if they could only see me now” - or he will practice for the time when he does have one: “Wait ’til they see this!” They are very often excellent aviators because they are always on stage, always performing, even if only in their own minds. Showoffs pray at the altar of “dynamic air demos” at air shows, and the very best, most motivated and most affable will end up as high priests at the temple of the Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron - the Blue Angels.

Finally we come to tacticians. A true tactician lives only to fight, he devotes himself to the art and science delivering precisely aimed ordnance - whether it be air-to-air or air-to-mud - exactly upon the point of maximum effect. Tacticians tend to be somewhat boring, fixed and even grim devotees of arcane knowledge - they bury their heads in the employment manuals, spend hundreds of hours analyzing the threats, learn how to maneuver their airplanes and those of others to optimize their lethality. They’re smart and they’re hard and they can be tricky bastards: They’ll scratch and claw for the slightest advantage, attempt to get into your head from thirty miles away just to mess with you and they’re not above cheating because they know deep in their hearts that in combat there are no points for second place, and that you will fight like you have trained. Tacticians worship at the altar of their typewing weapons schools, and their high priests are the shaolin monks who stride the prestigious halls of the original: The Navy Fighter Weapons School - TOPGUN.

There are no engineers in the showoff cohort, and damned few showoffs are actual tacticians, although some will for a time pretend to be. And while there is some cross-over between the engineer and tactical pools, I only ever knew of one man who was first a tactician - and TOPGUN instructor - before achieving the eminence of showmanship: He became a Blue Angel. His callsign was “Cato,” and I guess you could say that his flying career was blessed. He was a Marine FA-18 pilot at the school back in the early 90’s, built like an Adonis with piercing eyes and a Buzz Lightyear jawline. Women tripped over themselves to get next to him and men wanted to be his friend. He was a damned good pilot and instructor too. It almost wasn’t fair.

There was a deep undercurrent of tradition at TOPGUN, a reverence for those who had gone before, taking at least 5 enemy aircraft with them to earn the coveted title of “ace.” There was an equal opportunity pantheon of dashboard saints to which the Jedi masters and their paduan learners made obeisance: Israeli Air Force fighter pilots had equal billing with World War I German aces, and the words of each of them, and all the others, had an almost mystic power over the school’s devotees. For many years after the Phantom had gone into the night, but before the Hornet had ascended to the throne, the place was run by Tomcat pilots and RIOs, guys who could take lethal shots into bad guys at such long ranges that the bandits themselves wouldn’t even be in radar range to know that they were in trouble. But deadly as the F-14 might have been at a distance, the jet was a beast in a close-in fight, especially the vanilla F-14A model. It was awkward, underpowered, and had terrible slow speed handling qualities, a series of deficiencies only remedied when they re-engined the jet for the A+, B, and D versions. And all of them had huge visual signatures, a distinct disadvantage in a turning fight.

But fighter pilots who want to win - and there aren’t any other kind - don’t blame their gear for holding them back, they find a way to succeed despite it. And so it was that one of the more famous quotes to grace the halls of the school to somber approbation was this one by the Red Baron himself, Baron Manfred Von Richtofen:

“The quality of the box matters little. Success depends upon the man who sits in it.”

You saw it on photographs in the hallway, on lecture screens and heard it in conversation during debriefs. It was as close as you could come to dogma. The attitude behind those words explained a great deal about why good F-14 crews could be as successful as they were in training and when the opportunity arose to execute in combat. They believed in themselves because they had to - you want that spirit in your fighter pilots.

Back in the mid-90’s, when TOPGUN instructors flew as bogeys they had two choices, the powerful and shark-like F-16N or the trusty A-4F Super Fox, or “Scooter.”

Now, the Viper pretty much had it all: Thrust-to-weight, digital flight controls, reliable engine, clamshell canopy and a reliable, if relatively underpowered radar. It was a handful when flown by a competent pilot, and the TOPGUN instructors were thoroughly competent. The Super Fox on the other hand, was sneaky mean. It had a huge engine for a small airplane - it had been re-purposed from the much heavier EA-6B line - and was an exceptionally agile slow speed jet in good hands, although you had to respect the jet. It would gladly break a plumber’s neck, throw him to the curb and snarlingly spit on his corpse. But most of all, it was a pilot’s airplane: You got out of it what you put into it and there were no flight control computers to make Mongo look good.

One day Cato was out flying red air against some students in the class, and, having completed the first hack, the bandits were marshalling for the second push. He didn’t show up at the rendezvous, and neither the flight lead nor the bandit range control officer could contact him on the radio - they assumed that the A-4’s somewhat brittle radios had crapped out forcing Cato to work his way clear of the fight and back to Yuma for a comm-out approach and landing. It wasn’t until they’d finished the second hack and were heading back to get set up for the third that one of the bandit sections saw the oily smoke and ground fire characteristic of an jet airplane crash.

The lead bent his jet around and slowed it down, looking around the wreckage, looking for some sign of life. On his second pass of the crash site, he saw Cato standing like an oak tree a couple hundred yards away from the fire with his legs spread and his helmet tucked under his arm, not a hair out of place. A sheriff’s truck was barreling down a dirt road to pick him up. He was OK.

It turned out that as he was clearing the first merge, he’d turned hard to engage a Tomcat that hadn’t even seen him. His jet had recently come out of maintenance for an engine replacement, and somehow the mechanics had contrived to re-assemble the jet improperly. It broke in two under his g-application, right at the fuselage joint. One moment he was crossing a Tomcat’s tail with an advantage, the next moment he’d left his wings and engine behind and was tumbling through the air, encased only in a suddenly uncomfortable cockpit. Ejection made good sense, and fortunately he wasn’t much barked up by the experience. The sheriff even took a picture of him standing in front of the still-burning wreckage, a smile tickling the corners of his mouth.

That photo also graces the halls of the prestigious Navy Fighter Weapons School to this day, unless I am much mistaken. On the matte is this quote:

“The quality of the box matters little. But it does matter.”

True.

Tedium my friends, is the end of human decency, and there was a fair bit of tedium to be found on the line during the Cold War. We’d sail around the world, ever ready for any contingency but quite unwilling to offend anyone, tip-toeing around off shore, always careful not to kick the can over on that whole global, thermonuclear war thing. Because of the nuclear winter that was in it.

What joy there was for a strike fighter pilot in the late 80’s consisted of deeds of epic personal heroism in port during all-too-rare quality of life visits - the kind of things you didn’t write home about - and the very unlikely chance that your battle group might be called up for one of those very occasional, but classically Navy, drive-by shootings.

Bones was a lieutenant junior grade on my second such deployment, and the only nugget to join the squadron in the year-long turnaround between two cruises. Most new guys in the fleet have the common sense to lay low for a bit and let their flying do the talking, but Bones - so called because apart from skin, a prominent Adam’s apple and a yet more prominent pair of protruding eyes, there wasn’t much else to him - decided that the only thing to do upon joining our august ranks was to attempt to announce his presence with authoritay, chiefly on the basis of a whole lot of Cessna time he had gotten in high school.

Cessna time or no, being a brand new guy in the only flying business that actually counted, this didn’t go over so very well with the in-house mafia known in carrier squadrons as the Junior Officer Protective Association, or JOPA. Which continual moral pounding by his peers ought to have been bad enough, but he also contrived, being assigned the duties of squadron schedules officer, to place himself one day on a solo IR - Instrument Route - over the lush valleys of northern coastal California.

There were two kinds of navigation routes we flew, the IR and the VR, or visual route. Of the two the IR was much the more sedate, as it occurred in relatively medium altitude blocks at relatively low speeds - say 5000-8000 feet and 350 knots. The IR was designed such that it could be flown even in inclement weather, without fear of hitting something immovable, like the granite face of a canyon wall, just for example. The altitude blocks were “hard,” which is to say that if you exited from either the top or the bottom of the airspace, well, then you were no longer on an approved route. I guess the point of them was to navigate by visual and radar checkpoints, but having little application in a tactical environment they weren’t much more than medium altitude sight-seeing trips.

The VR route was what we called a true “low level,” and the minimum altitudes were usually restricted - over uninhabited terrain - to 200 feet above ground level (AGL), while airspeed was only limited to subsonic. These were a whole lot more fun of course, chiefly because of the very real possibility that you could die, and that right quick - zorching down low at high speed and high g, navigating by the nap of the earth, flipping her around mountain tops, etc. But they were also only flown when the weather was pretty damn near perfect, because otherwise you stood a better than even chance of tying the low altitude record, and who needed that kind of stress?

So anyway, off Bones went on his solo IR route, and half way through it he decided that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as a VR route, which in any case he would never have been allowed to fly solo as a new guy because those of us left behind wouldn’t know where to start our search for the wreckage. The weather being fine, he took it upon himself to cancel his instrument clearance and fly the rest of the route at 500 feet AGL and 400 knots, that being thought - by Bones - to be a good compromise. Now, being clever readers, you are probably thinking that such a notion sounds too good to be true.

As indeed it was.

Were the wine country denizens, accustomed as they were to a life of serene privilege, astonished to find an FA-18 ripping over their heads at 500 feet and 400 knots, where never one had been seen before? They were.

Was the control tower at Santa Rosa airport, in Sonoma county, accustomed to the positive control of aircraft within its airspace, surprised to see an FA-18 with whom they had not spoken squawking a VFR code and flying across their runways at an angle - those runways then being occupied with conforming traffic - at 500 feet and 400 knots? Oh yes, very.

Were each set of observers so absorbed by this phenomenon so as to make probing inquiries of the only Navy FA-18 base in the local area? Yes, and in fact those queries soon found their way into our very own ready room, where it was determined that we indeed had an FA-18 in the general vicinity of Santa Rosa, but that there must be some sort of mistake - the floor on the IR-201 over Santa Rosa was 5000 feet. Perhaps that was what they had seen?

No - it could not have been, and by the time Bones returned from his flight, stowed his gear and walked jauntily up to the ready room to report on his adventure, we already had a pretty good idea what had happened. And in this case, the term “we” had been so enlarged as to include the squadron CO - we had to tell him, he would have found out in any case - and who was very excited to speak with Bones on the topic of his flight. Practically dancing.

It was a brief but fascinating conversation, so long as your definition of “conversation” is expansive enough to include an apoplectic 40-year old commander shouting spittle-flecked imprecations at an astonished and speechless 24-year old lieutenant junior grade in front of an odd assortment of other lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, all of them listening in with carefully averted eyes and evident schadenfreude, fully aware that the fourth law of thermodynamics had been invoked for the foreseeable future and that, so long as we left the CO’s actual daughters alone, we were pretty much off the hook for everything.

The only reason that Bones didn’t join the Excellent and Venerable League of Former Navy Fliers at this point was because he was in fact so very new that malice could not be positively determined.

You: But what has this to do with tedium and being on the line during the Cold War?

Me: Which I was just getting to that.

How very like a god is man perhaps, because even FA-18 pilots could get bored of floating in the middle of the great nothingness for months on end, doing nothing in particular except for bombing maritime smoke flares with 25-pound practice bombs and 1v1 air intercepts at max conserve airspeed. Bones had toughened up a bit and learned a lot on cruise, but he was still the new kid and lacked a certain degree of deference to his betters. We often sought out innovative ways to get our message through to him, like the time the ship was locked down in a Security Alert.

In the old days we used to sail with a company of Marines on board the carrier, big, brawny men with rifles in their arms, sneers on their lips and an ever-present case of dyspepsia as they cursed their fate of being surrounded by squids. It didn’t matter if you were a lieutenant junior grade or the air wing commander himself, for if you were found out and about the ship’s passageways during a Security Alert, it would be: Get your face on the deck, spread your arms and legs and a rifle placed at your back and there was nothing much to be done for it until Someone in Authority could be found to vouch for you. The only authority figures those guys recognized were the ship’s captain, whose life they guarded, and the Marine captain who commanded their company, neither of whom could be reliably counted upon to materialize in your moment of necessity and save your bacon - the Marines didn’t play.

Their berthing was cheek-by-jowl to our ready room, and when the Security Alert was sounded on the 1MC, you only had a moment or two before there was shouting in the passageway, the sound of combat boots hitting the deck and burly men with rifles everywhere. It was the responsibility of the Duty Officer to hurl himself at our ready room door and lock the thing as soon as possible once the alert sounded, for if he did not the likelihood of having a group of armed Marines burst in and put us all face-down upon the deck was non-trivial.

Bones was the SDO one day while the rest of us sat around reading our Victoria’s Secret catalogues when the Security Alert sounded. He had been distracted by something on the ship’s TV and did not instantly leap to his duty, for which failure he was loudly and roundly remonstrated by the rest of the assembled JOPA. With the sound of approaching boots and shouts building next door, he chose that moment to grow a pair, telling us all that if we wanted the door locked so much, well then, we could go ahead and lock it ourselves.

This latest bit of impertinence could not, of course, be borne and we replied to Bones that he might very well tell it to the Marines, only this time we meant it. Bodily we bundled him up, physically we moved him to the door, and even as the cries and commotion increased in the passageway, joyfully did we hurl him out into the maelstrom, quickly locking the door behind him and bracing it with our shoulders.

Shouting and barking and “GET ON YOUR FACE, GET ON YOUR FACE!!!” did we hear and there was much eye-rolling and knee-slapping and antic gestures for a time until we heard a new voice of quiet authority in the passageway, that of the captain of Marines as it turned out. One of his Marines replied to his query, saying to him, “Sir, his own guys threw him out to us,” and hearing it put that way we momentarily felt a little remorseful. At having been caught.

Then there came a knock on the ready room door, and just like the three little pigs we spoke into the door jamb, asking, “Who is it?”

“Captain McDonough of the Marine Detachment,” came the reply, and “open the hatch.”

“We will not,” said we and braced our shoulders yet more firmly against the door, “for if we do, you will hurl us all to the deck and put rifles in our backs and we thank you sir, but we need none.”

“Open the hatch and let your man in, for we have work to do and my Marines will not molest you,” said he.

“On your honor,” we asked, “as an officer of Marines?”

“Yes, for God’s sake, open the hatch,” he replied, clearly growing exasperated.

And so we, seeing nothing more to be gained by further delay, opened the hatch and they left us alone and returned to us the person of one Bones, junior FA-18 pilot extraordinaire, only very slightly worse for the wear. So little the worse for wear in fact, that his impudence tended rather to increase than otherwise.

But this only enlightened our dreary and monastic lives for a matter of weeks, and soon the tedium set in again. Fortuitously the month of Bones’ flight physical was soon upon us, and the flight surgeon himself was recruited to play a critical role in our diabolical plot to make this birthday one to remember for our own dear JG.

Now you have read in these pages, gentle reader, the sore tribulations that can attend to an annual flight physical, especially when it is perpetrated by a man-hating ogre who will not even deign to give you wipies when she’s done. The difference between that and what you are about to read was intent, because while she was working her way through some issues that bedeviled the nether regions of her unilluminated psyche, we were just having a bit of fun while doing the necessary.

So it came to pass that when Bones was stretched out with his elbows on the table and his trou upon the deck, the jellied glove having been snapped in place out of his view and put to its intended purpose. At this point, the flight surgeon - a good man, though flawed perhaps in retrospect - placed his left hand upon Bones’ left shoulder. And at that moment of intense moral disadvantage, the assisting hospital corpsman, whose presence in the room Bones did not suspect, having heretofore hidden himself behind the examination curtain, reached through the curtain to place his right hand upon Bones’ other shoulder.

Now Bones’ was not a humble man as we have shown, nor was he much given over to the sin of introspection. He was nobody’s fool however, and could count with the best of them: He quickly realized that between the hands on either shoulder and the unaccustomed - dare I say, unwelcome? - intrusion abaft the beam that something was very much amiss.

He spun around so quickly, the flight surgeon later reported to us - we had asked for video, but had been told that would be a violation of client/patient privilege - that he had nearly broken the doctor’s wrist. He had been a good sport about the whole thing afterwards however, even allowing the examination to be completed. Which I suppose is making a virtue of necessity if you want to stay on flight status, but anyways.

Tedium, as I said at the beginning: It is quite the end of human decency.

And as for Bones? I cannot say that he ever quite grew out of his own self-regard, but he came at last to grow into it.

A foc’s’l follies vid from the Super Sh!t Hot, World Famous Golden Dragons.

Peek inside. 

Well, no, not really. It’s actually a pretty cool series of articles in the Reno Journal Gazette, tracking a carrier air wing and the carrier itself towards deployment. Well worth a read for those who are fans of the bidness:

Next year’s Stennis fliers are now training in Fallon

Before boarding their ship, pilots preparing for next year’s Pacific Ocean cruise on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis rehearsed combat above the Northern Nevada desert.

“It’s awesome flying out there,” Lt. j.g. Joe Berta said of last summer’s month-long practice at Fallon Naval Air Station…

Fallon is perhaps most famous as home of the (ed. prestgious) Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun (ed. actually, that’s TOPGUN. One word, all caps), where elite pilots learn to teach the latest combat lessons. But the biggest job at Fallon is air wing training. During a year, about four wings come to Fallon, each for its month of pre-deployment rehearsal.

Air wing squadron a close-knit team

Joking. Teasing. Trusting. Trying to be the best.

“I love it,” Tennille said of flying an F/A-18F Hornet with the rest of the pilots in his squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. “It’s kind of like being on a sports team. You have kind of a special relationship.”

Tennille, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in mathematics (ed. Geek.), hasn’t played for the Lynx since 1997. He flies for the Black Knights of VFA-154, one of eight squadrons that form Carrier Air Wing Nine aboard the Stennis.

The squadron is the air wing’s basic unit. The Black Knights are Tennille’s team.

“You see these guys every day,” said Tennille, who’s been with the Knights nine months. “You fly together. You eat with your squadron. You sit with your squadron.”

We get it.

Landing at night in the middle of the ocean: It’s not only surreal, it’s a little scary

When a supersonic jet approaches the back of an aircraft carrier to land at night, the plane appears headed for a spot right between your eyes…

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier moving on the Pacific Ocean at night is a dark and forbidding place…

A carrier isn’t brightly illuminated like a cruise ship. There are few lights and they’re dim. Airplanes parked on the deck are shadows. Members of the deck crew appear as silhouettes in the moonlight.

The whole scene is surreal and a little scary.

He needs to get on board with the talking points. It’s more than a little scary. It’s terrifying. You know, for ordinary people. It’s just that we’re so dern brave.

But anyway.

By land and by sea

Leaving family behind is probably the hardest part of going to sea.

“That gets tough,” said Gilliam, the father of 8-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. “As you get older, the time flies a lot faster. Six months used to be an eternity. Now, it’s the blink of an eye.”

Gilliam and his pilots have been away from home much of this year, getting ready for the cruise.

At Fallon, they learned the latest combat tactics. The path Carrier Air Wing Nine followed from the Northern Nevada desert to the Pacific Ocean is typical. Each of the Navy’s 12 air wings trains at Fallon before joining a carrier.

The Stennis is large, almost 24 stories high, with a 4-and-one-half acre flight deck. But it gets small when an air wing such as Gilliam’s, with about 2,500 men and women who fly and maintain the planes, joins the Stennis and its regular crew of more than 3,000 that maintains and operates the ship.

Good stuff, and more at the main RJG site if you’re still interested.