A few years ago on this same flight deck an EA-6B Prowler veered to the right at the last minute and rammed into a row of parked aircraft, creating a fireball that killed fourteen men. (The autopsies of the deck crew revealed traces of marijuana; ever since Navy crews have been subject to random, on the spot urinalyses. OK, but it wasn’t the deck crew that crashed; why not just make the pilots pee in a cup? Never mind.) During a similar accident aboard the Midway some years ago, about a dozen deck crew were knocked unconscious and asphyxiated on spilled jet fuel fumes. Sometimes the inch-and-a-half arresting-gear cables snap and slice through torsos and legs. For exposing themselves to all this twelve hours a day, the men who work the deck earn ninety dollars extra per month. But then it’s an adventure, not a job.
As I was stepping out of the Trader into the furnace heat of the deck, a crewman checked to see that no pens or eyeglasses were protruding from pockets. These items do not agree with delicate million-dollar jet engines.
We are shown an orientation film. At Pensacola, Navy officer candidates are shown a film in which a drill instructor is screaming himself blue in the face at a trainee who has not quite mastered the art of folding his boxer shorts into little neat squares. (At moments like this, I am grateful to my Maker for endowing me with 4-F asthmatic lungs.) “There’s this emphasis on attention to detail,” says one of the Nimitz’s lieutenants. “If you’ve ever tried to fold boxer shorts into little tight squares you’d appreciate how difficult it is.” The next scene in the film is a close-up of a plane just before a carrier takeoff. The camera goes in for a close-up of the wheel well and you see a bolt sticking out. It’s loose.
I ask if the next scenes show a plane plowing into the flight deck.
“No,” he says. “They’ve already made their point.”
There’s a certain élan aboard these ships. A skull and bones adorns the tail of an F-14; a business card affixed to a pilot’s cabin says MARAUDERS, and beneath, SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE. The antisubmarine helicopter guys wear patches showing a mythological griffin standing astride the carrier, snapping a sub in two.
We meet Capt. Eugene Conner and RAdm. Roger Box. They have this after-you-Gaston number: the admiral earnestly defers to the captain (“This is his ship. I don’t tell him anything.”) and the captain earnestly defers to the admiral (“Let me tell you, we’re glad to have the admiral aboard. We sure can use his guidance.”). Between them they have about four hundred combat missions over Vietnam.
We scarf up finger sandwiches as Captain Conner excuses himself. He needs to get back to the bridge. They are in the midst of CQ—carrier qualification. Right now there are pilots circling up there who’ve never landed aboard a carrier. Poor bastards.
In the Combat Information Center, the Tactical Air Officer rules over a dark domain of martial blips and colored lights. This is the nerve center of the ship’s defense system, where threats to the carrier are identified and assessed. Once the captain has given permission, the TAO orders planes into the air to intercept fighters or missiles or to sink submarines. He can also launch missiles and fire gatling guns at such things as incoming Exocet missiles.
He and his watch officers wear leather jackets with a quiltwork of squadron insignias. Amid these manly motifs is a Planned Parenthood lapel pin. I’m wondering about that when I notice a CRT screen that looks interesting. Looking closer, I see that it shows every Soviet ship on the face of the earth. Cool! The young black seaman sitting in front of it maneuvers the control ball with his palm. The cursor zips about, from the Bering Strait to the Caribbean, down to Tierra del Fuego. He centers the cursor over a Soviet sub off the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, punches a button and the sub’s characteristics flash up on the screen: name, speed, course, and symbols I can’t begin to figure out, probably the captain’s mother’s maiden name and favorite brand of scotch. The TAO appears and discreetly tells the seaman to stop revealing military secrets to visiting journalists.
I ask a theoretical question. Suppose someone decided to try to land a Cessna aboard the Nimitz. How far would he get? The TAO fields it, but it’s one of those military answers: “Well, I don’t think it’d be a good idea.” I persist. Wondering, no doubt, why this bozo is trying to get him to say “Guess I’d blow the goddam thing into pieces smaller’n a bee’s pecker,” he creases a grin and says, “I’m trying to avoid giving you a straight answer.”
Up in the Pri-Fly (Primary Flight Control) bridge, the man who controls flight operations looks out with fixed grimness on his quarter-of-a-million square feet of flight deck. He wears a yellow T-shirt over his uniform. It’s stenciled, AIR BOSS. He is, basically, God, in that whatever he says, goes. Below on the flight deck, everyone is also color-coded. Red shirts for ordnance handlers; green shirts for men who hook the planes up to the catapults; brown shirts for those charged with plane maintenance; and so on. They all wear a “Mickey Mouse” radio. Every few seconds a pulse called a “confidence tone” goes off inside the mouse, letting the wearer know his set is working.
When things are hot, the Nimitz can launch a plane every thirty seconds and “trap”—land—one every forty. Today things are considerably slower because of the CQing. I know you’ve seen Top Gun, but let me tell you, watching in person 58,000 pounds of F-14 being catapulted screaming and smoking off the flight deck into a horizonless black night, one after another, is a fairly amazing spectacle.
The thrill of which wears off as soon as you go to bed in your cabin right under the flight deck. This is roughly like having a 12-gauge shotgun fired off in your ear during a significant seismic disturbance. Human beings apparently get accustomed to this.
The catapult on a carrier, combined with the thrust of the plane’s engines, shoots thirty tons of aircraft from zero to 140 miles per hour in two seconds. Admiral Box says the catapult is powerful enough to propel an elephant one mile. With all the animal rights groups around, I hope someone looks into this barbarous practice.
Launching is a piece of cake compared with “trapping,” or landing. An F-14 is going more than 150 miles an hour when it hits the deck. By the time a pilot tries this for the first time, the Navy has invested about $1.2 million of training in him. His plane costs anywhere from $25 to $35 million. As Admiral Box puts it, staring out into the night as an F-14 “bolters”—misses the arresting gear and keeps on going—off the deck, its hook trailing a fierce shower of sparks, “By the time you add it all up, you’re talking about a national asset.”
Before landing on a carrier, planes dump their excess fuel. If the launch and recovery clockwork breaks down, and a plane has to be waved off, the stress on the pilot is considerable. If he doesn’t trap on the next attempt, he has to refuel in midair before trying again.
Peering out through binoculars at approaching planes is the Landing Signal Officer. In the old days, the LSO stood precariously on the deck of carriers and held the colored paddles with which he guided planes in. LSOs are still called “paddlemen,” but they use something else these days.
When the plane is a mile out, the LSO tells the pilot to “Call the ball.” That’s the Light Landing Device, a vertical arrangement of Fresnel lenses. It’s also called the “meatball.” If the pilot is high of the glide path, he sees the top Fresnel lens; low, the bottom ones. If he’s right on, he sees the middle one. If the pilot can’t see the meatball, he says, for reasons no one seems to understand, “Clara.” (“Susan” or “Alison” apparently will not work. At this point, I myself would be whimpering “Mama.”) At the last moment, if the LSO doesn’t like the approach, he presses a button on his “pickle switch” that activates a bunch of red lights around the meatball. That’s the wave-off signal.
The LSO is a veteran pilot. He grades each trap, and critiques it with the pilot afterward. There are four grades: OK with a line underneath (awarded to about one in every thousand traps); OK; Fair; and Cut. A Cut is given when the pilot has endangered not only his own life but others’.
Then there is “hitting the s
pud locker.” This is not a form of KP duty. Otherwise known as a “ramp strike,” this happens when a plane comes in too low and hits the rounddown, or threshold. This is an especially unpleasant occurrence. The plane explodes and breaks into ton-sized pieces of flaming wreckage and ordnance that roll down the flight deck like amok bowling balls. Asked to describe the carnage and horror, one pilot said with proper sangfroid, “Ruin your whole day”
The whole trick here is knowing when to “punch out.” It takes less than a second for both Radar Intercept Officer and pilot to eject out of an F-14; the former is gone in four-tenths of a second, the latter one-half second later. Since F-14s have something called “zero-zero” ejection seats, you can eject while sitting on the ground and not kill yourself. (Thanks anyway.) Trouble is if you eject too soon before a ramp strike, there’s a good chance you’ll land in the middle of your own fireball. Eject too late and you won’t eject.
One former F-14 backseater I talked to once came very close to punching out. The pilot was using Direct Lift Control spoilers. Those take explaining, but the gist of it was that as the plane was a hundred yards from the spud locker a little thingamabob jiggled loose off the pilot’s joystick, causing loss of control. The F-14 dropped like a rock toward the ramp. The RIO had his hand on the eject handle, ready to go when the wheels just greased over the ramp. The hook grabbed the number one wire. “It was close,” he said. This is as close as fighter jocks get to expressing actual fear.
There are four arresting cables stretched across the deck at intervals. The one wire is the closest to the ramp, the four wire is the farthest. Trapping the number one is dangerous; it means you almost hit the spud locker. A pilot aims for the three wire. Two is all right, but still too close to the ramp for comfort. Four does the job, but means you were high of the glide path. The wires are thrown over the side after one hundred traps.
Just before touching down, the pilot throttles up to full power. By now he has less than four hundred feet of deck, and if he doesn’t trap one of those wires, his brakes aren’t going to do him any good. So he bolters. If a pilot can’t get it right and the carrier is within range of shore, he’s sent to land onshore, at a “Bingo Field.” Oh, ignominy.
To CQ, a pilot must make ten day traps and six night traps. If he goes more than thirty days without a carrier landing, even if he’s a veteran, he has to requalify. Even Admiral Box tries to fly his F-14 two or three times a week.
I stayed up late in the island—the carrier’s superstructure—watching the planes come and go. Most had already been repainted with the drab camouflage gray that will soon cover all Navy planes. It looks as if someone has taken sandpaper to a high gloss finish. The pilots don’t like it. It has a certain advantage, like hiding them from the enemy; but it’s the end of the fighter plane’s cool aesthetic. No more screaming eagles, unsheathed swords, aces of spades, and coiled vipers on all those Tomcats, Corsairs, Intruders, Prowlers, Vikings, Hawkeyes. No more skulls and bones.
The night is warm off Key West. The view from the admiral’s chair of the Nimitz is OK, underlined. (He’s turned in; his aide said I could sit in it.) It’s moonless black. The F-14s and A-6s are alternately trapping and roaring off the bow cats in almost metronomic regularity. Off the stern of the Nimitz some twenty-two-year old is approaching a critical moment in his life. G. K. Chesterton said courage is almost a contradiction in terms—a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
At the end of The Bridges at Toko-Ri, after William Holden has been shot down and killed by the North Koreans, Fredric March sits in his admiral’s chair and looks out to sea and asks, “Where do we get such men? Where do we get such men?”
A carrier pilot watching that movie would probably pop his chewing gum and say, “Denver, Seattle, Bridgeport …” But it is still a good question, even in peacetime. What I wonder is, where do we get such elephants?
—1983
How I Went Níne Gs in
an F-16 and Only
Threw Up Five Times
“Can you have it ready by Monday morning?” is a hard question. “Would you like to fly with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds?” is not. I gave my answer (you bet), and went on with life, not daring to hope that my intermediaries, an aviation buff and a retired three-star U.S. Air Force general, would be able to deliver. Slowly the request worked its way through the Air Force channels, from Thunderbirds headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, to the one-star general of the 57th Wing, then to the two-star commander of the Air Weapons and Tactics Center at Nellis; then to the two-star general for Operations at headquarters of the Air Combat Command at Langley AFB in Virginia, and finally all the way up to his four-star commander. It’s not all that routine to go for a ride in a $30 million fighter plane, when those planes are more profitably employed teaching real macho to Cessna-shooting Cuban MiGs or strafing people named Ratko. But the answer was yes, and so I found myself in the midst of the second improbability, Las Vegas on Ash Wednesday. “There isn’t a free room in town,” said the front desk clerk at Caesars Palace. So much for America’s spiritual well-being, circa 1996.
I had dinner the night before the flight with my intermediary, Lt. Gen. Robert Beckel (Ret.), at a restaurant that looks down on a lagoon in which two full-size pirate ships attack each other every hour. In a distinguished career, General Beckel flew 313 combat missions in Vietnam, including close air support during the siege of Khe Sanh. He also flew the U-2 and SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance planes, the latter so fast (Mach 3, 1,800 mph) that, as he put it in terms even a math imbecile like myself could understand, “If you fired a .30-06 rifle from Los Angeles and took off simultaneously in the SR-71, the SR-71 would get to New York five minutes before the bullet.” Later, as head of the 15th Air Force, he commanded the B-52 bombers that gave permanent nervous tics to the Iraqi Republican Guard during Desert Storm.
For two years in the mid-1960s, General Beckel flew the solo position with the Thunderbirds. He has the gentle manner that I’ve found in all but one of the numerous war heroes I’ve met. “If it’s possible for one man to love another man,” he tells me of the Thunderbirds, “this would be it.” I don’t think he’s spent much time in New York or San Francisco, but I got his drift. The Thunderbirds, eights pilots and 130-odd enlisted men and women, are a tightly knit group.
He told a story about the time actress Yvette Mimieux—remember her? the girl Rod Taylor rescues from the Eloi in The Time Machine—went up for an “orientation ride” with the Thunderbirds in the mid-sixties. Normally, the Thunderbird’s narrator is the one who takes visitors up for rides, but in this case the leader asserted droit du seigneur and took her up himself. A few days later the Air Force chief of staff opened the newspaper to an article featuring the very lovely Miss Mimieux in the cockpit of one of his planes, alongside the headline, OPERATION BEDSIDE. The story was full of breathless quotes about how she’d gone three times the speed of sound upside down, five feet above the ground. “Which of course she hadn’t,” said General Beckel. “And OPERATION BEDSIDE was the name of the program she’d taken part in, and for which this was the reward—visiting servicemen in the hospital. So that ended orientation trips for a while.”
He talked about G forces, the phenomenon that was going to be a big part of my day tomorrow. G forces are multiples of the force of gravity. Standing, walking or sitting normally, we are under one G. We experience two to three Gs in the seat of a 747 during takeoff. Tomorrow, in the F-16, I would be “pulling” up to nine Gs. My 185 pounds would, if put on a scale during the maneuver, weigh 1,665 pounds. Nine Gs is the normal operating limit of an F-16.
Nine Gs is also the point where your average civilian—such as myself—starts to black out. Astronauts on take-off go through up to twenty-five Gs, but they are lying on their backs. An F-16 pilot is reclining slightly and, if he is pulling nine Gs, is usually in the middle of a dogfight, or trying to shake a heat-seeking missile.
Flying the plane itself, said the gene
ral, isn’t really all that hard. In the old days, getting the aircraft to do what you wanted it to do was a big part of the whole job. These days, computers do most of that work, leaving the pilot to concentrate on up to 125 possible configurations of guns, missiles and bombs. The stick, which used to be between the legs, is now off to the right, leaving the left hand to operate the weaponry. The stick itself barely moves—a mere eighth of an inch in any direction. Pressure sensors register the slightest touch. In fact, the first modern sticks didn’t move at all, until the pilots demanded that a little play be built into them, for feel.
“Now we have what’s called ‘instantaneous Gs,’ ” said the general. The slightest pressure on that stick and the pilot can find himself pulling the maximum nine Gs and fighting not only the enemy but also from draining the blood in his brain. Pilots wear a G suit, outer leggings resembling chaps that contain air bladders that inflate automatically under G pressure, squeezing the legs and midsection and forcing blood to stay in the upper body. But G suits can’t do all the work, and if you are not prepared for high Gs, you can black out in only three seconds. It takes anywhere from seventeen to forty-five seconds to fully regain consciousness; that’s a long time if your nose is pointing to the ground at six hundred miles per hour. It happened recently to an American pilot in the Adriatic.
I remember two other things from that night: General Beckel pointing out that the Thunderbirds were formed in 1953 to convince Americans that jet fighters were really safe, despite the fact that so many of them were crashing in the Korean War; and riding up to my room in the elevator in Caesars Palace with a Roman centurion.
Nellis Air Force Base is a fifteen-minute drive north of Las Vegas. There are no centurions in its elevators, but it is headquarters to the Air Warfare Center, which runs the Red Flag exercises that simulate aerial combat between aggressors and defenders. They keep MiGs and other Soviet planes acquired (one way or another) here. This is where many of the top combat pilots in the Air Force come to train. It’s also home to the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, known more generally as the Thunderbirds. It’s a crisp desert day punctuated by the sound of screaming turbofan engines.
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