One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power

by Smith, Douglas V.

  Naval aviators always viewed themselves as daredevils. The difficulties of taking off from and landing on a ship were unequalled in the land aviation domain, and naval aviators therefore considered themselves both exceptionally skilled—and expendable. The naval aviation accident rate (if not the sheer numbers) from its inception through World War II was hardly less than the awful rates experienced in the early jet era. Naval aviators have always regarded themselves as a different breed than their surface Navy brethren, but for all that, have shared in the Navy’s culture of independence and self-reliance. The simplicity and relative inexpensiveness of early naval aircraft allowed this culture to thrive, in that flight instruction was personal and aviators had few detailed procedures or rules to follow in mastering their aircraft. Seat-of-the-pants flying and individuality in technique were the order of the day. But since the piston-engine aircraft all operated essentially in the same way and roughly at the same speeds, especially when landing, and since they rarely operated at night or in bad weather, pilots could transition between aircraft easily and informally. Mr. Richard “Chick” Eldridge, a member of the Naval Safety Center for several decades remembers his Navy flight training in 1943: “To my recollection, there was little emphasis on aviation safety. What safety information was imparted to the fledgling aviator came from the primary instructors. Lessons learned usually came in the form of ‘gems of instructor wisdom.’ You were simply told to fly certain maneuvers in a specific way or wind up as a statistic.”12

  The first thing to change was the technology. Culture change lagged by more than a decade, causing a virtual bloodbath. In addition to the specific challenges of flying jets mentioned previously must be added the greatly increased speeds. Things happen much faster in jets and a different mindset and discipline are called for to avoid disaster. Pilots who spent significant time flying at propeller aircraft speeds tended to have more difficulty adjusting to jet speeds than those who were introduced to them early. The author observed this during the Navy’s transition from the piston-engine S-2 Tracker carrier anti-submarine aircraft to the jet-powered S-3 Viking. The more senior pilots seemed to have the most difficulty, and indeed a number of them either quit, had accidents, or failed to pass flight checks. This was a serious issue that attended the fleet introduction of the A-3 Skywarrior. Initially, the Navy brought in senior aviators from the land-based patrol community as well as some carrier pilots. A series of accidents and difficulties involving former patrol pilots prompted the Commander of the Sixth Fleet to write a letter to the CNO recommending only carrier-trained pilots be assigned to A-3 squadrons.13

  In the early years of the jet transition, naval aviation remained wedded to its individualistic culture. Structured programs of training, detailed reference manuals, and disciplined evaluation of pilot performance did not exist in any coherent way across naval aviation. But jets, with their higher speeds, challenging handling characteristics, and ever-more complex systems required just that. The horrible accident rates eventually drove the Navy to do something. The Air Force had been suffering an increase in mishaps also and formed a Flight Safety Directorate with 525 personnel and undertook to impose discipline on the aviation corps by disciplining crew when fault and culpability could be assigned. In contrast, the Navy’s first effort was puny by comparison with only twenty-five personnel. However, war hero Captain James F. “Jimmy” Flatley wrote up a highly critical and influential report on naval aviation safety in 1953 that generated organizational and procedural changes that went far to change the culture.14 Along with these changes, a more structured program of flight training was introduced, eventually culminating with the establishment of replacement training squadrons that provided intensive and detailed instruction for newly winged aviators in the aircraft they would fly in the fleet. These squadrons would also become the centers of flight and maintenance evaluation of the fleet squadrons based with them. A variety of other measures also served to further professionalize and discipline the naval aviation culture, including formal training for squadron safety officers, improved accident investigation techniques, specially trained medical personnel called flight surgeons, the publication of a safety magazine to share stories of accidents and near misses, and top-down leadership that countered the laissez-faire cultural heritage.

  However, as with naval aviation maintenance, the “ready room” culture was resistant to change. Thus the authors of another 1961 Naval Aviation News article felt compelled to say “Some people view the idea of everyone in naval aviation doing everything ‘the one best way’ with some misgivings. They fear that general use of standardized procedures, while it may reduce the accident rate, will result in a reduction of a pilot’s ability to ‘think on his feet’ and deal flexibly with emergencies and combat situations. Experience in other fields has proved that fear unfounded.”15 A major element of the resistance to change was the fact that adaptation to the new technology had a value content; that is, it made irrelevant certain skill sets that were associated with being a respected, professional aviator in the propeller-driven era. It wasn’t so much the difficulty in learning new skill sets as it was abandoning old ones that were associated with professional virtue. The naval aviation culture that grew up from 1911 to 1947 was intense, insular, and value-centric. Moreover, likely because of the acrimonious relationship that developed between the Navy and Air Force in the late 1940s, there was a reluctance to view anything the USAF did as appropriate for naval aviation, and it took a long time for the Navy to adopt or adapt Air Force best practices.

  Despite the organizational and procedural progress that was made in the 1950s and 1960s, the social culture of naval aviation lagged. Apart from the drinking and partying that contributed to any number of one-car fatal accidents after happy hour at the officers club, there existed a testosterone-heavy atmosphere of pressure in the ready rooms that put pilots in a difficult position when they manned up their aircraft. It was almost normal to find on start-up that some piece of equipment on a multi-system jet was malfunctioning. The pilot or crew now had to decide whether the problem was of sufficient severity to warrant “downing” the airplane and canceling the flight. However, such a decision was not straightforward. Many a CO, Air Wing Commander, or carrier skipper was hell-bent on making all scheduled sorties or setting new operational records. The pilot that downed too many aircraft, especially in night or bad weather conditions, would quickly get a reputation as a coward. Thus pilots were under considerable pressure to get their aircraft in the air. How many mishaps were caused by pilots launching with defective aircraft is not clear, but the number was significant. The arrival of the F-18 changed this aspect of the culture significantly. The airplane was extremely reliable, and its design meant that any defects encountered on start-up were more clearly either insignificant or were cause for not launching.

  The Navy has always placed considerable responsibility and authority into the hands of the individual officer. An imperative of war at sea, this delegated style of command and control has both enhanced and afflicted naval aviation. Throughout the history of naval aviation, outstanding decision making by relatively junior officers has made the difference in battle, such as Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky’s decision to take his strike group in the direction a Japanese destroyer was headed and thus find the Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. However, faced with the imposition of new technology that demanded new types of procedural discipline and centralized management, the culture was slow to adapt, and literally thousands of naval aviators lost their lives as a result.

  FINDING THE RIGHT COMBINATION OF INGREDIENTS

  The development of aviation technology between the time of the Wright brothers’ first flight and 1947 was amazingly fast. In just forty-five years aviation had progressed from machines that were hardly more than powered kites to jets that pushed the speed of sound. This rapid development meant that individual models of combat aircraft became obsolete fairly quickly. This had been the case prior to and during W
orld War II, and was to be the case over the early years of jet transition in the Navy. The initial echelon of straight-wing jets had an operational lifespan in the fleet of only a few years, although some of them had a longer second life in the reserves or through other specialized shore-based uses such as the training command. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, as whole squadrons transitioned from propeller airplanes to jets, pilots—who had developed a set of habit patterns molded to straight-wing propeller planes that flew slower and used gas slower and were lighter and simpler—were put into fast, gas-guzzling jets with the challenging operating characteristics we have previously described. It was a lethal combination. Rear Admiral Thomas Brown III, who was a mid-grade officer in those days, summed things up pretty well in his oral history to the Naval Historical Foundation:

  Something that is important to understand about that era is that the Navy introduced a number of different jet aircraft into the fleet in the middle ’50s. Among them were the FJ3, FJ4, the A-4 Skyhawk, the F4D Skyray, the F8U Crusader, and the F-11 Tiger. Also, we had a whole bunch of pilots that had transitioned from props to jets, from slower to faster airplanes, from straight wing to swept wing, and the accident rate was horrendously high. It was almost off the graph how many accidents we were having in large part because of poor training. In our squadron alone [flying A-4s] we killed three people in our first year in the Skyhawk.16

  Admiral Brown was talking about the state of affairs in 1956 and 1957, a period when the mishap rate was falling sharply due to the introduction of the angled deck and the optical landing aid. A number of institutional fixes were generated, such as the founding of the Naval Aviation Safety Center in 1953, the Naval Aviation Maintenance Program in 1959, and the Naval Aviation Training and Operational Procedures Standardization (NATOPS) program in 1961. These measures had a dramatic effect; the accident rate per 100,000 flying hours plummeted from about fifty-five in 1954 to less than ten in 1971. None of this includes combat losses in Vietnam; the numbers reflect the total naval aviation rate, which includes shore-based patrol planes that had a much better safety record; even through the 1990s carrier-embarked mishap rates were always higher. Given that a single carrier air wing can fly 10,000 hours in less than three months of deployed operations, even a rate of ten is ruinous. By comparison, today’s rate hovers between one and two per 100,000 hours, commensurate with that of the Air Force—an indication of the maturity of the naval aviation professional culture.

  Another factor that may have contributed to the brutal accident rates of the 1950s and early 1960s was the number of different models of jets operated by the fleet. Up through 1957 new types of jets were being introduced almost every year. Combined with the lack of an effective training and standardization program, pilots would switch back and forth between models, the newer of which possessed evermore-complex systems and more challenging flight characteristics. Mishaps were a virtual inevitability. Again, Captain O’Roarke:

  But for the kids newly arrived at VC-4 [the Navy’s night specialty squadron on the East Coast] from the all-prop training command and a short, night/radar course in props at Key West, sporting only about four hundred hours of total flight time, the simultaneous introduction to night, weather and jets, all done in an informal, casual manner, presented a real exercise in personal survival. This demanding environment, as might well have been expected, exacted a very heavy toll in fatal accidents.17

  A-6 Intruder on the USS Independence’s catapult, March 1965.

  By the mid-1960s, Air Wing composition was starting to stabilize, with the introduction of the A-6, F-4, and A-7. Pilots could build up considerable experience in one type of airplane and by 1973 naval aviation had more than halved its accident rate.

  Of course, some of the Navy’s jets were easier to fly and more reliable than others. The F9F Panther, and its swept-wing cousin, the Cougar, were well regarded by pilots, even if they were a bit underpowered. Perhaps the most infamous of the early jets was the F7U Cutlass, a tailless fighter unaffectionately known as the “Ensign Eater.” Part of the combination was also due to the operational mission of the aircraft. Some of the jets were almost exclusively used as “day fighters,” which tended to limit their exposure to the more threatening flight regimes such as low-level bombing and night or bad weather carrier operations. Newer models brought both improvements—designers learned from the defects of current aircraft that were brought to light via fleet operations—but also new problems as the limits of technology were pushed. Aircraft like the F-8 Crusader and F-4 Phantom achieved much higher airspeeds than their predecessors, but at the cost of higher approach and landing speeds that reduced the margin for error in landing them aboard the carrier. Perhaps the ultimate aircraft in terms of speed and difficulty of bringing aboard was the RA-5C Vigilante. A large aircraft at around 70,000 pounds takeoff weight, it was beautiful, fast—and fragile. The combination of high approach speed, heavy weight, and no-margin structural design (to save weight) made every landing a potential accident—and many were.

  However, chasing higher airspeeds was not the only technological limit that was being pushed. The introduction of the A-6 Intruder brought an all-weather, day and night attack capability to the fleet. Although the A-6 had a robust airframe and two reasonably reliable engines, it also had a complex radar navigation and attack system. Crewed by both a pilot and a Bombardier-Navigator (BN), the airplane had an incredible ability to sneak around at low level, in the mountains, at night to deliver weapons. However, there were limits to the system’s reliability, and in the low level, night regime, margins for error disappeared. Many Intruders and their crews were lost in those conditions. In theory, the A-7 Corsair was supposed to operate in a similar way with a single pilot and a single engine. A rash of training accidents quickly demonstrated that this was not feasible. By comparison the night strike version of the single-seat F/A-18 proved to be perfectly capable of flying low-level night missions in the mountains, albeit in a clear air mass. The difference was massive improvement in cockpit automation and display, and the introduction of imaging infrared and light amplification technologies.

  In this centennial year of naval aviation, the Navy’s air arm has been jet powered for over half of its history. The transition was long and brutally expensive in terms of loss of life and aircraft. However it was, by any measure, a success. Throughout the Cold War and a series of hot wars including Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and others, naval aviation has been able to provide effective tactical air power from the sea. Its ability to do this despite a long and difficult process of learning how to operate jet aircraft at sea is a tribute to the brilliance of various aircraft designers, the ingenuity of countless airdales, the sailors who struggled to keep those complex and touchy machines flying, and the bravery and perhaps foolhardiness of the crews that would climb into jets, which were hard to fly and lacked reliability, and perform missions that took them to the edge of what man and machine could do.

  NOTES

  1.Tommy H. Thomason, U.S. Naval Air Superiority: Development of Shipborne Jet Fighters 1943–1962 (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2007), p. 123.

  2.Naval Safety Center aviation safety database. Unless otherwise cited, all mishap statistics were obtained from this source.

  3.Jeffery G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1994), pp. 233–89.

  4.Thomason, U.S. Naval Air Superiority, p. 265.

  5.Vice Admiral Gerald E. Miller, “Transition to the Jet Age,” Into the Jet Age, pp. 12–13.

  6.Captain Gerald O’Roarke, USN (Ret.), “We Get Ours at Night,” Into the Jet Age, ed. Captain E. T. Wooldridge, USN (Ret.) (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), pp. 31–32.

  7.Although it might seem more appropriate to use the term “generations,” it is avoided here to prevent confusion with the technical term “generations of fighters”—coined by the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun)—to describe various classes of fighters based on their performance characteristic
s.

  8.A-3 Skywarrior Association, http://www.a3skywarrior.com/memorial/full_accident_date.htm (accessed 12 April 2009).

  9.U.S. Navy LSO School, http://www.robertheffley.com/docs/CV_environ/Basic%20IFLOLS%20Lecture%5b2%5d.ppt#259,3,From Paddles to IFLOLS (accessed 15 August 2009).

  10.Major Richard A. Bauer, USMC, and Lieutenant Leo L. Hamilton, USN, “Naval Aircraft Maintenance Program,” Naval Aviation News, February 1961, p. 25.

  11.Ibid., p. 28.

  12.Richard A. Eldridge, “A Look Back: Forty Years of Reminiscing,” http://safetycenter.navy.mil/media/approach/theydidwhat/eldridge.htm (accessed 24 March 2009).

  13.Jerry Miller, Nuclear Weapons and Aircraft Carriers (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), p. 104.

  14.Steve Ewing, Reaper Leader (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), pp. 198–99.

  15.“The One Best Way, New Standards for Naval Air,” Naval Aviation News, August 1961, p. 6, http://www.history.navy.mil/nan/backissues/1960s/1961/aug61.pdf (accessed 28 May 2009).

  16.Oral history of Rear Admiral Thomas F. Brown III, conducted by Joseph Smith, 5 March 2002 to 24 March 2002. Naval Historical Foundation Oral History Program, 2004.

  17.O’Roarke, “We Get Ours at Night,” p. 26.

  CHAPTER 13

  Naval Aviation in the Korean and Vietnam Wars

  Gary J. Ohls

  THE KOREAN CONFLICT

  On Sunday, 25 June 1950, the North Korean People’s Army—the In Min Gun—attacked across the 38th parallel into the Republic of Korea (ROK) thereby initiating the Korean War.1 Numerous provocations over the preceding two years such as raids, sabotage, guerrilla activity, infiltration, propaganda, and economic pressure had failed to bring down the Syngman Rhee government or persuade a majority of South Koreans to support a Communist takeover.2 Meanwhile, the United States had sent ambiguous diplomatic signals regarding its commitment to Korea, and all of Asia for that matter, beyond its vital interests in Japan and the Philippines.3 The general weakness of American military forces in the Far East coupled with their withdrawal from Korea after the establishment of the Rhee government in 1948 created an impression among Communist leaders that a conventional assault from the North could succeed where numerous subversive efforts had failed.4 Additionally, the 1949 Communist takeover of mainland China had reinforced the notion that America would not commit ground forces on the mainland of Asia.5 The United States had stood by as Mao Zedong’s Communists forces defeated the Nationalist Chinese—an America ally throughout and after World War II—and drove them to the island of Formosa (Taiwan), at some cost to America’s international stature.6 In light of all these considerations, Communist leaders in Pyongyang, Beijing (Peking, as it was then called), and Moscow believed attacking South Korea would be a relatively low-risk operation, which could produce great strategic advantages throughout Asia.7