Bogeys and Bandits

by Gandt, Robert

  They were being steered by GCI (Ground Controlled Intercept) — radar—to intercept the “bogey,” who in this instance was his classmate, Rick McCormack. In McCormack’s back seat was another instructor, Comet Halley.

  Road locked up the bogey on his own APG-65 radar. Then, about ten miles out, he obtained a VID—visual identification. The other Hornet looked like a sinister gray predator coming directly at him. Road could just make out the fighter’s distinctive frontal silhouette—the angular vertical stabilizers that identified it as an F/A-18. Road knew that the bogey pilot, the Heckle of the Heckle-and-Jeckle McCormacks, would at this moment be going through the same drill—locking him up with his own radar.

  They were merging. Rapidly. Two specks in the Caribbean sky, coming at each other head on with a Vc—closing velocity—of eleven hundred miles an hour.

  It was a classic opener for a one-vee-one. Whoooooom! Eyeball to eyeball, five hundred feet apart they passed, same altitude, twenty-nine-thousand feet.

  “Fight’s on,” called out Comet Halley.

  And so it was. The idea now was to get behind your opponent, to maneuver into that thirty-degree cone, from one to four miles behind his tailpipe, which was the killing zone for the AIM-7 “Sparrow” and the AIM-9 “Sidewinder” air-to-air missiles carried on the Hornet. If you got closer, inside a mile from the bogey’s tail, you switched to guns and tried to pop him Red Baron style with the big Gatling gun in your nose.

  With a level, head-on engagement like this one, at equal speeds, neither fighter had an advantage. The combatants either commenced a turning duel, each trying to turn harder than the other, cutting across the radius of the turning circle to bring his nose toward the other’s tail. Or it became a scissors duel, as the fighters turned back toward each other, crossing noses in another head-on pass, then reversing directions to again cross nose-to-nose, and so on. They continue reversing—scissoring—until one managed to turn more tightly than the other and get inside the other’s turn. In small increments he gained a positional advantage and got behind his opponent’s tail.

  With high-performance fighters like the Hornet, the scissors could go vertical instead of horizontal. As the fighters passed each other head on, they pulled straight up, each trying to sustain the climb longer than the other, until one was forced to bring his nose down again, exposing his tail to a shot from his opponent. With evenly matched fighters, the vertical scissors might go on for several up and down cycles, which was called a “roller.”

  Road and McCormack flashed past each other. Road saw the other Hornet’s nose start up. He was going vertical! Road matched him, hauling back on the stick, grunting under the six Gs he was applying to the jet. Up, up, up went the nose. The horizon dropped away. He could see only blue, blue sky directly ahead through the windscreen, getting bluer as the nose pointed straight to heaven. Through the top of his clear plastic cockpit canopy he could see the other Hornet. It was close, maybe only a hundred yards away.

  They were both vertical. On parallel tracks. Straight up. Each staring at the other through his own canopy.

  This was very damn close, Road thought. He was peering straight into the cockpit of Rick McCormack’s Hornet. He could see McCormack and his back-seater, Comet Halley, peering back at him. On this line, thought Road, it was going to be hard to pull the nose back down without hitting them.

  They were getting slow, running out of upward velocity. It was time to pull the nose downward into the back half of a loop.

  Road started to bring his nose downward, toward the horizon. Toward the other fighter.

  Then he saw the other Hornet’s nose move. Toward him! Damn! They were about to merge, going straight up! And running out of airspeed.

  Road reacted instinctively. He “bunted”—pushed —the nose away from the oncoming opponent—back toward the vertical.

  Which was the wrong thing to do. With its dangerously low airspeed , and the abrupt control reversal, the jet fell out of the sky.

  Road Ammons’s Hornet fighter did what they call a “departure,” meaning it left the realm of controlled flight. The graceful F/A-18 Hornet fighter became a free-falling body, gyrating, tumbling, flopping out of control like a dropped garbage can cover.

  It happened so suddenly. Hey, whoa, now. . . what’s happening here. . . Oh, shit. . . come on, airplane, stop doing this to me. . .

  Road was vaguely aware of Barney in the back seat. Barney was yelling in the intercom: “Road, what the fuck are you doing? Road, goddamn it, turn loose of the frigging stick! Road. . .”

  The horizon was oscillating up and down. Blue sky was swapping places with blue ocean. Sky, ocean, sky. Road snatched the throttles to idle. He grappled with the stick, toggled the spin recovery switch, tried to remember the emergency procedure. He uttered the standard fighter pilot’s emergency invective: Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. . ..

  “I’ve got it, Road,” said a voice on the intercom. “Road, goddamnit, I’ve got it! Turn loose, Road. Lemme see your hands on the canopy.”

  Turn loose? Oh, yeah. Barney in the back seat. Barney the instructor knew how to stop this goddamn wild thing. Road turned loose. He put his hands up on the canopy rail, the metal support around the top of the windscreen.

  Now the Hornet was doing a “falling leaf,” swooping from side to side in violent lurching movements, still falling out of the sky at twenty-thousand feet per minute. The airspeed was indicating zero. It meant the jet had no forward velocity. No flying speed.

  Gradually the oscillations dampened. The airspeed was creeping up. One-fifty. One-seventy. “It’s coming out,” Road said. “I think we’re flying --- Oh shit—“

  The jet was tumbling again. It wasn’t coming out. Not yet. Once again the airspeed indicated zero. The Hornet was again flopping out of control like a dropped garbage can cover. Road clamped his hands on the canopy rail.

  They fell through eighteen thousand feet. Still flopping.

  Fifteen thousand.

  The Hornet was doing another falling leaf. The airspeed was still zero.

  The unthinkable was entering Road’s thoughts: We’re gonna have to punch out of this thing. At ten thousand feet, we’re gonna eject.

  Thirteen thousand. Still falling. The wild swinging of the nose was dampening. The airspeed was creeping back up.

  One hundred knots.

  One-hundred-fifty. One-hundred-eighty.

  At ten thousand feet the Hornet was flying straight and level. Back under control.

  Road allowed himself to resume breathing.

  “You guys okay?” Comet Halley radioed from the other Hornet.

  “Sure we’re okay,” said Barney. “What’s your position?”

  “Your six o’clock, of course. By the way, thanks for the shot. You just got schwacked.”

  <>

  With other, earlier fighters such as the F-4 and the F-8, there was one standard spin recovery: You ejected from the beast. The F/A-18 Hornet was considered a more benign jet. Sure, in basic fighter maneuvering, you could make it spin, or depart, as Road had done. And it could be violent. The Hornet would tumble, spin, perhaps enter a “falling leaf.” It was almost always recoverable from such departures, though it usually consumed vast parcels of altitude to do so.

  One feature of the F/A-18’s computerized flight control system was the spin recovery mode. Following a “departure” the pilot was automatically presented with a message on the DDIs (Digital Data Indicators—or video screens): “Stick Left,” or “Stick Right,” telling them which way to deflect the control stick to counter the jet’s wild oscillations. A large arrow also appeared on the screen pointing the direction the stick should be deflected (Navy pilots liked to say that the arrows were there for the Marines). If the spin recovery logic was slow to appear, the pilot could select it with a switch on his panel.

  It was supposed to be a no-brainer. Obey the command. Follow the arrow, stupid. Sit there and wait for the jet to recover. The problem was that pilots were not inclined to sit
there in a wildly gyrating fighter and wait for the thing to make up its mind whether it was going to kill them. They were programmed to do something. Try “A.” Try “B.” If that didn’t work, try “C.” Try every damn thing in the book. And when nothing you tried worked, you yanked the handle between your legs—Ploom!—and punched out of the thing.

  This was the closest Road had ever come to yanking the handle. And he wasn’t even sure how close it had been.

  Back in the ready room, Barney was his usual cup-spitting, ball-scratching self, grinning around a fresh glob of dip. “It was good experience,” he said. “Now you know the worst thing that happens when you screw up a vertical scissors.”

  “The jet departs?”

  “Naw. That’s nothin’. The worst thing is that while you’re trying to recover, that other asshole gets a shot at you.”

  <>

  An odd thing was happening. The class ranking of 2-95 seemed to belie the Navy’s strong emphasis on an engineering or science background as a qualification for flying fighters.

  In nearly every class at strike fighter training, one particular student would excel in one phase of training. But seldom would that same student be the best in other phases. A student with a natural flair for air combat maneuvering, for example, might be abysmally bad at carrier landings. Sometimes the best bomber would be a consistent loser in air-to-air fighting. Rare was the super star who excelled at every phase of strike fighter training.

  But here was Burner—the top student in the class, with the highest grade point average and the most apparent natural aptitude in everything. No one could figure it out. Burner the philosophy major! Pointy-headed liberal arts types weren’t supposed to make good fighter pilots. How could they understand all the high tech nuances of advanced fighter aircraft? Here was an Ivy League poetry-reading philosopher, who didn’t know a logarithm from a luggage rack, beating all the techies in the class.

  But since they had come to Key West, Burner wasn’t reading much poetry. He was spending all his time outside the cockpit with a telephone clamped to his ear. Burner was spending hours on the phone with Greta, his new girl friend.

  The only class member who was a bona fide rocket scientist, Shrike Hopkins, was having great difficulty. Shrike, who possessed the most advanced of educations with her graduate degree in astronautical engineering, also had the most experience in jet cockpits. But Shrike was paying a heavy penalty for the time she had spent in grad school—and away from the cockpit. Now she was playing catch-up.

  Close behind Burner in grade point average was Chip Van Doren, who was a card-carrying techie. Chip, the techno-freak, stored information about the F/A-18 and its various missions like a computer data bank. And like his non-techie comrade, Burner, he was a “natural” in the cockpit, seeming to be blessed with a built-in situational awareness. Flying an airplane was something he was simply good at.

  <>

  To no one’s surprise, the McCormack twins were only micro-points apart in grade point average. In class ranking, they came in somewhere in the middle of the register.

  Lately the McCormacks had been doing something that drove everyone crazy. Rick had grown a mustache. For a while that pleased everyone—their classmates, their instructors—because for once they didn’t have to guess which of the two grinning redheads—Heckle or Jeckle—they were talking to. “That’s Rick, the one with the mustache. . .”

  And then one day, Rick shaved off the mustache. And Russ began growing one. And then Rick began growing his back. And then one of them—by now no one knew which one—shaved his off again.

  And so on. It was even driving their wives crazy, which they were beginning to think was the real reason the twins did such things.

  Instructors gave up trying to debrief the grinning twins separately. It was just too frustrating, critiquing a mistake one of them made while the other sat there grinning like a Cheshire cat. Why is he grinning like that? Am I talking to the wrong guy?

  “All right, Rick, you were really out to lunch in the pattern out there today. High and fast all the way—”

  “Must of been my brother.”

  “The hell it was,” said Russ. “It had to be you. I was right on speed—”

  “Naw, it was you.”

  “I don’t give a shit who it was!” said the exasperated instructor. “As far as I’m concerned, you were both dicked up. From now on, when either one of you screws up, I’m gonna nail you both.”

  <>

  Road Ammons was rarely the top student in any event. Nor was he ever the worst. Good ol’ Road stayed where he had always been since the beginning of training: slightly above average.

  Road was methodical in his approach to training. The goal was simple: Get through. Don’t push envelopes. Don’t show off. Don’t run your mouth. Keep it between the lines.

  So far this method had worked splendidly for him. Never had he received a SOD——in his naval aviation career. He had completed every phase of training right on schedule. He was a solid, if undistinguished, new strike fighter pilot. And that was just fine with Road Ammons.

  <>

  J. J. Quinn kept having these recurring nightmares. He dreamed he was the oldest guy in a contest, a decade more ancient than any of the sharp-witted kids against whom he was competing. The worst part of the dream was that the kids were winning.

  Of course, it wasn’t just a dream. He was older than all his classmates in strike fighter training. And for the most part, they were beating his socks off.

  But J. J. Quinn was a plugger. Nothing, it seemed, had ever come naturally or easily for him. But he had persevered over every obstacle placed in his way since he entered the Marine Corps thirteen years ago. Inside his locker door at the squadron, he had taped a sign: CUNNING AND TREACHERY WILL TRIUMPH OVER YOUTH AND SKILL.

  Well, so far cunning and treachery weren’t helping a hell of a lot. J. J. had already collected the two SODs, the second nearly costing him the ball game. But not quite. Here he was, still in the game. Despite the predictions of some of his old helicopter cronies, J. J. Quinn was still flying F/A-18s and, more incredibly, he was still alive. He was even doing reasonably well in the air-to-air phase of training. J. J. had surprised everyone, including himself, functioning like a real fighter pilot in the 3-D, dynamic air-to-air environment. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was thinking, all those years of experience, even in lowly helicopters, still counted for something.

  <>

  There was a test every female aviator went through whenever she broke into a new peer group, a new squadron, a ship. The woman pilot would be sitting there minding her own business in the ready room, and a guy would toss out something like: “. . . there I was, falling out of the sky, and I knew this time I was really fucked. . .”

  It was just to check for reaction. Every male eye would be looking sideways to see if the woman aviator got huffy about it, if she growled or complained. Then they would know: Be careful around this one! If she appeared not to be offended, or better, if she listened with some sort of interest in the story, she was probably okay.

  With Angie Morales, it was hard to figure at first. She would put on that mask, neither laughing nor wincing at the ready room raunchiness. Zero response. But now it was April, three months into the training syllabus, and the guys were beginning to understand Rambo Morales: She didn’t care a hoot in hell what they said. The simple truth about Morales was that she was there to fly F/A-18s, not to clean up anyone’s language.

  They didn’t bother testing anymore. Rambo was one of the guys.

  <>

  Shrike Hopkins, on the other hand, was definitely not one of the guys.

  Road Ammons was worried about Shrike. He worried that she was playing the gender card—pushing everyone’s crazy button with all that they-don’t-like-me-because-I’m-a-woman stuff.

  Road could feel a kinship with Shrike. They were both minority members in the business of naval aviation. Road was one of the few African Americans in the strike fighter train
ing program. Shrike Hopkins and Rambo Morales were the only two women in the program. They all knew what it was like to be different.

  But it was Shrike who was brandishing her minority status like a loaded shotgun. Shrike Hopkins seemed to be looking for a fight, and she didn’t care with whom. And it was making the other minorities—like Road Ammons—nervous as hell.

  Shrike was a loner. She shunned most external support groups, including the “old girls” network of naval aviators. Shrike wanted to prove she was there not because of gender but purely due to her ability. But these days, more than ever, she was feeling alone.

  Road Ammons, of course, was different. Road knew he had the backing of a support group—his grandfather, his mentor, the tightly knit band of Tuskegee Airmen. And unlike Shrike, Road was most at home in the locker room camaraderie of the ready room. That was where he could be good ol’ Road, trading jibes, flashing the big grin, bonding with his squadron mates. Instead of using his minority status, Road made people forget it.

  Shrike didn’t give a flying fig about bonding or camaraderie or being a team mate. She had never had someone like Road’s grandfather or mentor to coach or counsel her, to provide a foundation of self esteem. She had done it on her own—without a support system. Except for the other two members of the Terrific Trio, she didn’t have a peer group.

  One night at the BOQ bar, Road said, “Hey, Shrike, I hear you’ve got the instructors so pissed off they’d like to use you for strafing practice.”

  “They’re caught in a time warp. All white, all male Navy fighter squadrons. Those guys think it’s nineteen-sixty and this is a John Wayne movie.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But I’d hate to see you bust out of here because you’re so busy trying to change the world. Why don’t you just, you know, sort of back off and keep a low profile? At least until training is finished and you’re in a fleet squadron.”