The optimum narrative myth in tales told by
fighter pilots occupies a fairly homogenous genre: First off, he's always the
hero of the tale, with the naval variant catapulting off into the ocean skies on
a routine training hop. Then, when hostilities suddenly arise, he vanquishes
numerically superior adversaries in a pitched battle where the outcome is very
much in doubt and the world trembles in the balance. And afterwards, after an OK
3-wire arrested landing, he gets the girl.
Getting the girl was always
problematical, in my early days at sea. Combat warships were not yet gender
integrated. Come to think about it, it'd still be problematical today, but for
different reasons. See here for examples
why.
Anyway, these kinds of stories are
what makes fighter guys smile in their
sleep.
There are a thousand stories
like this one, all taking place in the training environment since no one comes
up to play, anymore.
Sigh.
But
this is not one of them - this is a story of a career decision.
I first started flying the FA-18 in 1987, when
the airplane was still quite new to the fleet. Our weapons systems were
comparatively simple at the time - we mostly carried dumb iron bombs for ground
attack, and for self defense, infra-red homing AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles and
radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow missiles. Oh, and the cannon - a 20mm Vulcan/Phalanx
gatling gun. So while the aircraft itself, with its multiply redundant,
electronically controlled fly-by-wire flight control system and hexadecimal
weapons and integrated mission computers represented a technological great leap
forward from the Vietnam era aircraft it was designed to replace, the weapons
themselves would have been very familiar to an F-4 Phantom, or even an F-8
Crusader pilot.
Practice ordnance,
which is to say "things that don't go 'boom' but carry the same shape" are
painted blue, showing that they are inert. We often carried blue Sidewinders to
train with, since the variety of audio tones that the Sidewinder provides
require a certain level of exposure to ensure that a pilot would employ the
missile effectively. We rarely carried practice Sparrows, since all of the
weapons symbology could be simulated in the cockpit by selecting a display
pushtile, without the penalty of dragging around the "great white hope," as the
AIM-7 was sometimes called by its waggish
detractors.
In the pilot's heads up
display, or HUD, a radar lock on a target in range would generate a "shoot"
light, along with other cues, to inform the pilot that a valid opportunity to
employ ordnance was available. Often in training missions, or just when flying
to or from the training range, students would be encouraged to lock onto various
targets and pull the trigger, in order to familiarize themselves with the way
that altitude, airspeed and target angle (which is a measure of where your
aircraft is, referenced from the target's nose) impacted upon missile kinematics
and times of flight. As long as they were in the "sim" mode, they would get all
of the same cues as an actual missile launch, and of course the aircraft weren't
armed with real missiles, so there was no danger. "Sim" was also a "gotcha," in
that once selected, and for safety's sake, no ordnance can be released, either
air-to-air or air-to-ground. If you wanted to get weapons off, you had to both
raise the master armament switch, and ensure that "sim" was not selected. It's a
multi-step process to ensure that weapons only come off when they're supposed
to, when you really, really mean it.
So
anyway, I joined the fleet in the summer of '87, aboard an aircraft carrier
already at sea, and nearly half-way through deployment and stationed in the
North Arabian Sea, south of Iran. The very first thing I noticed as I climbed
out of the transport plane, was that all the FA-18's on the flight deck were
carrying missiles, both on the wingtips, where the Sidewinders were customarily
mounted, and on the fuselage stations, where Sparrows were to be found. But
there was something different, and it took me a moment to recognize what that
difference was: The missiles were not painted blue. They were gray, like the
aircraft themselves. I had never, in training, seen a gray missile.
These were not training missiles, they
were live missiles, war rounds. And every aircraft had several of them mounted.
It was a sort of eye-opening,
you're-not-in-Kansas-anymore-Toto "welcome to the
fleet."
When a new pilot checks aboard
a squadron, he will go through an indoctrination period with the squadron's
senior leadership, the several department heads, the executive officer and the
CO. It is designed to both ensure that the new guy gets the benefit of all the
accumulated wisdom of the most senior squadron aviators, and to give that same
leadership the opportunity to assess his skills, attitude and intelligence. This
is especially important when the air wing is already deployed and on the line,
since the opportunity to do scripted training in a simulated environment is
passed. And in a single seat aircraft, it's pretty hard to tell how a new kid is
doing in there, all by himself.
You
only get one chance to make a first impression, and first impressions are
generally enduring, so the new guy is always under both real and self-induced
pressure to excel. Everyone else has worked together and trained together for
many months, both ashore and at sea, so there are multiple chances to shine
parts of your anatomy that you'd prefer to leave covered.
My second fleet flight was with the
squadron commanding officer, The Skipper, The Man, he-who-will-be-obeyed, God's
chosen vessel, etc, etc.
It was to be a
"routine training flight," words which will sensibly send shudders down the
spine of any pilot with any degree of experience, especially if he has seen the
movie, "The Great
Santini." We would launch,
rendezvous overhead, get a couple of thousand pounds of gas from the overhead
tanker and go off to one of our escort ships which was dragging a sled target
well aft. We would drop some "blue death," or 25-pound practice bombs in her
wake. Once the mission was complete, we'd rejoin, head back overhead the
carrier, and wait for our opportunity to land. Pretty straightforward.
The weather in the North Arabian Sea
in the summertime tends towards extended periods of sharply reduced visibility
due to persistent haze. One-and-a-half to two miles vis was the norm. The
Skipper briefed low altitude pop attacks, in an extended, race-track pattern. At
any given time we'd be from 3 to 5 miles away from each other. We'd race around
the pattern at 500 feet and around 400 knots. Approaching the target, we'd pull
sharply up and away from the tow ship, and then roll inverted back down towards
the target sled. After a few seconds of tracking time, we'd use our CCIP
(constantly computed impact point) weapons system to deliver our ordnance as
close as we could to the moving sled, to the awe and amazement of the idlers
standing about on her weather
decks.
The launch went fine, I found
the skipper on radar and followed him to the tanker. I managed to get into the
basket on my second attempt, without looking too much like a pig trying to have
sex with a greased football, so I chalked up phase one as a mission success. Off
to the tow ship on the CO's wing, visual on the target and he broke away from
me, into the racetrack pattern. After seven or eight seconds, I followed him. At
the pop point, roll, pull, reverse - target in sight, master armament switch to
"Arm." Now the weapons system was hot, and I could concentrate on my solution. I
hit the bomb "pickle" at the appropriate time and began my breakaway from the
theoretical frag pattern, taking my eyes off the CO for a moment to spot my hit
- bullseye! They're gonna love
me...
Rejoining the racetrack, I found
that I'd lost sight of my lead - this is considered bad form, by the way - so I
quickly got out of the air-to-ground mode by selecting the AIM-7 on the stick
mounted weapons control switch. The multi-mission FA-18 flawlessly brought me
into the air-to-air mode, and another flick at the HOTAS
(hands-on-throttle-and-stick), and I was in a close-range auto-acquisition mode
- Bingo! Got the lock, three miles away, tail aspect.
Perfect.
With the lock came a shoot
light in the canopy bow on a receding target. Instinctively, as a product of
hundreds of hours of training in simulators and training aircraft, my finger
began to tighten on the trigger, to check out the missile kinematics for a
close-range, tail aspect target. But there was a nagging voice in the back of my
head that kept the trigger from being pulled fully past the commit to engage
detent. Internal monologue:
"Shoot
light, pull the
trigger."
"Something's not
quite
right."
"Pull
it - five more pounds of
pressure."
"Why do we have a
shoot light if we're not in the sim
mode?"
"Hmmm.. you're right, we're
dropping bombs and we couldn't do that if we were in
sim..."
"We shouldn't get a
shoot light if we're not in sim, except when we're armed up, with LIVE MISSILES
ON BOARD."
All of that took place
pretty quickly of course, probably in less than a second. But I was about a
second away from shooting down my commanding officer on my second flight in the
fleet. Which would have made a pretty poor
impression.
Which would have been, of
course - a career
decision.
------------------------
Oh,
I know you're going to ask: Did you tell the CO what happened? To which I must
answer, "What are you,
nuts?"
Single
seat, baby. No slack in fighter attack.
Posted @
11:03 AM
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Posted in
""
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Sendit
|
Credo
"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
