On the bow cats, the lieutenant junior grade saw a yellow-shirted director walk up to his jet, with a single light want pointed up: “Is your jet up?”
The JG took his red-lensed flashlight out of his chest harness, fumbled for a moment before turning it on and then moving it in a rapid circle: “Up jet.” The director responded with an upward thrust of his wand, followed by brushing motions across his forearms: “Off chocks and chains,” followed by crossed wands over his head: “Hold brakes.” The young pilot felt his heart jump in his chest. He’d heard that in the old days, during Vietnam, there had been an experiment wherein the attack pilots were wired to measure their pulse during combat, as a way of determining their stress levels. It had surprised the flight surgeons to discover that, almost to a man, all of the pilots had manifested higher pulse rates during their approach to land aboard the carrier at night than they had during final attack run of a defended target under flares, with the terrain rushing up to meet them as they refined their targeting solutions in 45 degree bomb runs, the altimeter unwinding crazily even as the SAMs and AAA rose up to meet them. He didn’t have any idea how that might have felt, the JG reflected. But he knew that his heart rate had to be at least a hundred and twenty just at the signal to break down the jet’s chocks and chains. Once he started rolling forward, he’d be committed to the cat. Once on the cat, he’d have to launch. Once airborne, he’d have to land. And he hadn’t been landing very well lately. He knew he didn’t have many more chances to prove that he could. You either hack it or you don’t, he thought. Sooner or later, non-hacks get scraped off. Nothing personal. Just business.
A Hornet rattled down Cat-3, afterburners shouting in the darkness. “Departure, 304 airborne,” said his commanding officer.
“Roger 304, passing angels two-point-five, switch Red Crown, check in.”
“304.”
The squadron CO rolled to Red Crown, the check-in frequency for the strike group’s air defense commander, “Red Crown, Dragon 304 up for a parrot/India.”
“Stand-by Dragon,” came the controller’s reply, followed shortly by, “Say posit?”
“Red Crown, Dragon 304 is Mothers, ah…” looking down at the horizontal display between his g-suited legs and verifying the TACAN data, “Mothers 340 for 7, passing angels six.”
“Dragon 304, Red Crown, sweet and sweet, cleared to proceed.”
“304.”
Back on the flight deck the JG raced through as much of his take-off checklist as he could with the wings still folded:
“SEAT” – Armed, the ejection seat was a handle pull away from blowing the canopy off over his head, catapulting him into the sky before the rocket motor fired, vaulting him further in to space before the ballistic firing of his drogue ‘chute, which in turn would pull his main parachute out of the headbox behind him. This would carry him safely back to the flight deck, where in 25 knots of wind he would be dashed against something sharp or unyielding, or flung into a propeller, or into the waiting sea below, ensnared in his parachute lines and gasping for air. No, he though. Let’s don’t eject on deck if we can avoid it.
“RADALT” – set at 40 feet. If the radar altimeter went off and he wasn’t positively climbing it’d mean he’d somehow lost thrust or taken a soft shot – it’d be time to stroke the blowers and jettison external stores, maybe even eject depending upon the rate of descent. Which was always hard to tell at night.
“TRIM” – trim set 16 degrees nose up on the stabilators, rudder and aileron neutral, rudders check for 30-degree toe-in. The nose up trim sets the rate of capture for optimal flyaway angle of attack. With a properly trimmed jet, it would be a hand’s-off cat shot, with the flight computers setting the climb attitude.
“HARNESS” – check locked. The FA-18 cat shot is a rowdy ride, and if he wasn’t strapped in he’d be sitting sideways at the end of the stroke and there was the yellowshirt with lighted wands beckoning to him, “Come Ahead,” followed by “Turn Left,” and “Harder” finally “Hold left brake!” and the jet sharply pivoted down the starboard side of the bow, the wind over the deck helping to push his aircraft’s nose through the darkness before “Hold Brakes!”
Knowing what was coming next the JG quickly flipped a switch to cool the AIM-9M sidewinders on his wingtips and now another series of signals from the director, “Spread wings,” “Hook down,” and finally “Hands up.”
With the wingspread engines shaking the jet slightly he selected IR missile on the stick-mounted weapons select switch to hear a reassuring, sibilant hiss in his headset, the sound of a cooled seeker head, before throwing the hook handle down and raising his hands and arms above the canopy rail. There would be troubleshooters under his jet, manually checking his tailhook prior to launch, and his raised hands were their guarantee that the hook would not be raised while they were entangled, maiming them.
An ordnanceman passed a red-capped mag light in front of first his starboard, then his port missiles, and each of them agreed with a hearty growl that the sight was highly attractive to them, even worth dying for, if that was asked.
Everything in order, the director cleared the troubleshooters out from under before signaling, “Fold wings,” “Hook up,” and once again, “Come ahead.”