… Safely airborne, the landing gear comes
up, followed by the flaps. Passing 1500 feet, a radio shift to the carrier air
traffic control center’s (CATCC) Marshal Controller, who issues you
vectors and altitude assignments during your climb, and passes you your holding
instructions. You turnout to port away from, the ship, but you can’t avoid
looking at her, a dimly lit and flickering ghost in the absolute darkness, the
landing area lights and the approach lights of aircraft strung out on final
approach course the only cues to her existence. No longer does she appear as she
did from inside the ship, or even in the daytime overhead – her reality as
a complex weapon of war, a hardened steel container with 5000 souls aboard. At
this distance and in this light, she seems a brooding, implacable presence,
imbued with her own unknowable vitality and purpose.
For initial CQ, you’re told to expect 15
minutes of “comfort time” before commencing your first approach.
While many will dispute the existence of any degree of comfort whatsoever in the
night environment around an aircraft carrier, this is designed to let you get
your head on straight after that bone-rattling cat shot, and allow accomplish
your let-down and approach checklists prior to throwing hurling yourself at the
ship.
Holding instructions generally
follow a format: “Raider 525, hold on the 160 radial, 7,000 feet. Expected
final bearing is 355, altimeter 29.92. Stand-by for expected approach
time.”
There is a marker showing
the ship’s position on your horizontal situation display. In the lonely
darkness, while carefully cross-checking your principal instruments to ensure
that you are on the proper heading, you are not climbing or descending, gaining
or losing airspeed, you strike a course line through the navigational marker
– a 340 bearing, which yields your holding air space on the reciprocal
course south-south east of the ship, the 160 radial. The final bearing is the
magnetic course, adjusted eleven degrees left to compensate for the
carrier’s angled deck. The final bearing need not perfectly align with the
approach course; there are correction procedures once established on final.
There are numerous radio calls from the controllers to other aircraft, but since
they are routine, and not preceded by your call sign, your brain rejects them,
they are not heard.
You work the math
on your holding point – 15 + your altitude yields 23 nautical miles. Since
you’re approaching the holding airspace from the downwind, you use a
parallel entry maneuver to join the holding pattern, slowing to optimum holding
speed.
Set
up in marshall, left hand turns, six minutes exactly for one full lap. You step
through the elements of your penetration / approach checklist. The canopy defog
handle goes forward, and the cockpit suddenly becomes noticeably warmer. To
compensate, your hand of its own volition finds the cabin temperature knob and
turns it counterclockwise. It wouldn’t do to sweat, too soon. The
navigational aids are all set to the proper frequencies. The divert field
location is set up in your inertial navigation system – you check the
range, estimate the required fuel to get there. It jibes with the numbers
you’ve received from Marshall. Your hook goes down. You set your
barometric altimeter warning in software at 5000, or platform – at this
altitude you will break your rate of descent to avoid violating the
“minute to live rule,” which states that vertical rates of descent
in feet per minute will not exceed altitude remaining. Your next software
warning is set at 1100, just below your next level-off altitude – if that
alert should go off unexpectedly, you will know that you are “behind the
airplane,” and in danger. Finally a hardware pointer, or
“bug,” is set at 400 feet on your radar altimeter dial – you
will not descend below 400 feet without seeing “the ball,” or glide
slope indicator. Finally, you set the “Bingo bug” at a few hundred
pounds above your maximum fuel landing weight. After you commence your approach,
you’ll have to dump fuel in order to land. The Bingo bug
should
prevent you from inadvertently dumping too much gas. If you trust it. Which you
don’t.
All of this is merely
mechanical - it serves to keep your mind occupied, your thoughts away from the
trial to come. Sufficient to the moment, the evil therein.
As your eyes adjust to the darkness,
you are continuously fiddling with a numerous rheostats to dim the instrument
panel lights, the console floods, the HUD and other numerous display levels
– you want them to be as dim as possible, so that when the time comes to
transition from instruments to the carrier’s approach aids, your eyesight
will be as sharp as possible.
The radio
crackles, this time the call is for you: “Raider 525, Marhall, your
approach time is 32.” You write the number down on you kneeboard card, and
cross-check the clock. Seven minutes and 26 seconds from now. An awkward number
to work from, you turn back towards the push point, crossing it with six minutes
and 50 seconds to go. Better.
Two
standard rate turns of two minutes each will burn four minutes, leaving two
minutes and 50 seconds collectively on the downwind and upwind legs. Divide that
number by two and you have one minute and 25 seconds, but the ship is steaming
away from you on both legs, so you subtract ten seconds (the speed differential
between the ship and your aircraft is at a ratio of 1:10) and start your turn
back towards the ship when that time has elapsed. Your heart begins to race in
your chest.
In the Vietnam War,
human performance physiologists wanted to examine the effects of combat stress
on naval aviators – they wired them for EKG’s, attached to
battery-powered recorders. When the data was later analyzed, the physiologists
were surprised to find that, based on pulse and breathing rates, the aviators
were under higher stress during their night approaches to the carrier, than they
had been in actual combat, when they were being shot
at.
You hit the push point right
on time, and call “commencing.” Idle power on the throttles, as you
deploy the speed brakes. A sharply nose-down attitude is required to maintain
your target airspeed of 250 knots in this configuration. The ocean races up to
meet you, unseen in the darkness, as your vertical velocity indicator spikes to
a negative 5000 feet per minute.
You
carefully watch the unwinding altimeter, crosscheck airspeed and refine your
course. At 5000 feet, the female voice warning system, or “Bitching
Betty,” fills your headset: “Altitude, altitude,” she croons,
unconcerned. You have been expecting
her.
In come the speed brakes, and you
raise the nose while bumping the power up to maintain 250 kts and 2000 feet per
minute rate of descent. You call “Platform” on the radio, are
directed to switch to approach frequency, and
check-in.
You switch freqs, but wait a
moment before speaking, as you have been trained – fortunately it turns
out, since the voice of the LSO’s speaking to someone ahead of you in the
landing patter is suddenly heard calling, demanding, and shouting for, “A
little power Power… POWER… WAVE-OFF,
WAVE-OFF!”
You flinch a bit, as
though you had been struck. To have stepped on that transmission would have been
very bad form indeed, but while you are momentarily grateful for your training
in radio discipline, you also wonder what the hell is going on down
there…
"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
