You’ve finished your mission, and returned
to the carrier, setting up for your night approach and landing. If you’re
lucky, you’ll have quite a few night traps under your belt, maybe a couple
in the last week or so.
Not that
you’d want to do it every night, but proficiency and currency are two
altogether different things. And I am convinced that landing aboard an aircraft
carrier at night is the hardest thing that anyone could routinely be called upon
to do.
Day traps get to be fun, after a while –
your skills are tested, but you have a very high degree of confidence that
you’ll be successful. The horizon is in clear view, the ship and all her
visual cues lays there before you. Line up is easy. Judging relative winds is
relatively easy. Glide slope is apparent throughout the landing pattern, once
you’re used to the sight
picture.
It never gets to be fun at
night, and it never really gets easy – just
easier.
The first time you will have
carrier qualed at night will be in your fleet aircraft. You join the fleet
replacement squadron after day CQ in the training command – you’ll
join them wearing your wings of gold. They will welcome you to the team; teach
you how to fly the aircraft you have been assigned to in the fleet. They will
teach you how to fight that aircraft, how to bomb, strafe and claw for control
of the air around you. You will learn how to navigate at high speeds and low
altitudes using advanced navigation systems, how to refuel in mid-air – a
necessary survival skill for an FA-18 pilot. And at the very end of the
syllabus, they will teach you how to land aboard the aircraft carrier at night.
Hopefully you will succeed on your first attempt, some do not. Of those who do
not, many will pray to succeed the next time out. Because you only get two
chances, and those wings of gold aren’t permanently attached – as
hard as it is to earn the right to wear them, they come off easily
enough.
My landing signal officers in
the replacement squadron put it to me this way: Maybe you’ll go to war,
and maybe you won’t. But if you’re going to fly fighter aircraft off
an aircraft carrier, you are going to have to be able to do it at night. And on
any given approach, if you’re not as close to perfect as is humanly
possible, you could no kidding die. Or words to that
effect.
Having spent a month or more
doing little but field carrier landing practice, simulators and lectures, you
head out to the ship for your day CQ. You’re not in a training jet anymore
– it’s a no-kidding fighter. Heavier, larger and much more advanced.
But the day CQ is something you’ve done before, albeit in a different
aircraft. And once you get used to the landing systems presented on your
head’s up display, you’ll truly come to appreciate the efforts that
smart engineers and test pilots have gone through to make the aircraft easy to
fly, easy to land.
Day CQ complete, you
will brief with the lead LSO for the evening CQ in one of the carrier ready
rooms – a place still as alien to you now as it will be familiar in a year
or so. Eventually the time will come to suit up, and test yourself against the
terror machine. First comes the g-suit, over your coveralls. Then, after a brief
preflight of your harness and survival gear – flashlight, strobe light,
flares, radio, that too goes on, over the g-suit. Then finally you put on your
helmet, and ensure that your inflight guide, kneeboard and checklists are where
they are supposed to be, in a small bag you’ll carry to the jet in your
hand. And then you walk out of the rigger’s shop, up to
roof.
Up the starboard side, away from
the landing area, away from the noise of carrier jets whumping on board, their
engines running up to full power as they land, the shrieking protest of the
arresting gear as it pays out under the strain of stopping 18 tons of aircraft
moving at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. You make your way to flight deck
control, a small compartment right forward on the ship’s superstructure,
or island. There a lordly being called “The Handler” sits in his
throne, watching a strangely shaped table laid out before him, a miniature
version of the flight deck. Upon this desk are small cut-out figures, airplane
planforms complete with side numbers, being moved from spot to spot by a junior
Sailor wearing sound-powered phones – an aircraft lands, and like a
magician at a vaudeville show, he’ll place a planform in the landing area,
moving it from spot to spot. Sometimes it goes to the bow, for another launch.
Sometimes it gets sidelined, and bolt nut is placed on the planform –
you’ll learn later that this signifies an airplane being refueled on deck,
and that the cut-outs are all to scale with each other, and the flight deck
itself. But it is all a mystery to you at this point, some bizarre ritual whose
meaning you can only guess at, and anyway you don’t care. You’ve got
other things to think about.
You look
around the room, feeling very ill at ease, but trying to be casual, trying not
to appear concerned. Largely, you will fail in these attempts. The Handler has
seen this all before, thousands of times, and he will look at you and smile
slightly, but not unkindly. And then he’ll go back to his
job.
Eventually he will turn to you and
say, “Your jet’s on deck, just forward of the island.” So you
will pick up your gear, open the hatch and stumble into the darkness. Only the
landing area itself is lighted directly – everything else is shadows and
gloom.
Just getting to your airplane is
challenge enough – there are fighters turning engines on the deck,
swinging their exhaust pipes as they taxi under the control of their directors.
Even at idle power their residual thrust could knock you down, or blow you over
the side. There are E-2 command and control aircraft up there turning as well,
their propeller blades invisible disks of spinning murder. Even the aircraft
that are silent have hazards – tie down chains to hold them to the deck,
as well as snaking power lines from open deck hatches, and fuel lines that kick
like living things as the hose is pressurized – all of these to trip the
unwary or uninitiated, sending them lurching towards some other, unseen and more
fatal hazard.
You arrive beside the
jet that you will fly in – your predecessor awaits you in the cockpit,
awaits the completion of your abbreviated pre-flight inspection. You give him a
thumbs-up, and you hear the left engine spool down. The plane captain lowers the
ladder, and he climbs out. You replace him. He’ll climb up after you, to
give you a quick pass down on the jet itself. You see relief in his eyes that it
is over, for now. You see pride in what he has accomplished. And then he is
gone, and you are alone with your
thoughts.
When the canopy comes down,
you feel almost comfortable again – this environment you know. There are
checklists to go through, things you know how to do. And then you are ready. The
flight deck director breaks down your tie down chains and chocks at your signal,
and leads you to the bow. Everything seems to be happening much faster than it
did in the daytime, and your heart races as you perform the take off checklists
over and over again, convinced you have omitted some critical step. In moments
you are on the catapult, the engines screaming at full power – you turn on
your external lights with a pinky switch on the outboard throttle quadrant, and
after a few, agonizing moments of suspense, the catapult
fires.
All violence and noise and a
suppressed grunt that is not very far from a scream in the back of your throat
as you go from a standing start to 180 mph in roughly two seconds. Hurtled from
the deck, she springs into the air and your vision clears enough to see the
airspeed on the HUD, and the altimeter climbing. “Airborne,” you
call on the radio. “Alive,” you say to
yourself…
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
