The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  The Kitty Hawk’s CAG added an extra wrinkle: launched jets wouldn’t use their radios except in absolute emergencies. More important, pilots would fly with their radar altimeters turned off. All Navy planes had two devices that read their altitude. There was the barometer altimeter, the hoary old instrument used since before World War II to judge altitude by tracking barometric pressure. But the radar altimeter was far more precise: a “ping” sent from the plane’s belly would bounce off land or sea and give an accurate altitude reading. Of course, if you were an A-4 Skyhawk escorting bombers at 12,000 feet, a precise reading of your altitude wasn’t all that important. But if you were flying at low levels, a faulty altimeter reading could mean the difference between death and life.

  November 28 was set as the day the Kitty Hawk would restart air operations. (The helos from Diego Garcia would be flown aboard in the afternoon.) The only aircraft scheduled to fly low and fast that day was an EA-6B Prowler flown by my father.

  The last thirty-six hours of Dad’s life were typical Navy, serious, idiotic, and lonely. The Kitty Hawk crossed the equator in the small hours of November 27. This meant there would be a Wog Day, a shellback initiation in the morning for first-time crossers. The tradition dates back to the seventeenth-century British Navy and has mellowed in the modern Navy. But in the 1970s, it was still fairly brutal, a rite of passage where bones might be broken. Dad met with the squadron at 5:00 a.m. in Ready Room 5 for the festivities. He watched as first-time crossers—pollywogs—were clad in shorts with underwear on the outside. First, they were blindfolded and then covered in Crisco, gravy, and whatever else viscous was on hand. Then they were run up and down ladders and passageways and whipped with fire hoses and screamed at until they bled from their knees and elbows and ears.

  The wogs reached the flight deck only to meet another gauntlet of punches and paddling from shellback vets. They finally reached the throne of Neptune, a crusty thirty-year chief petty officer with the most equatorial crossings. The wogs kissed his belly and it was over.

  Dad watched from the flight deck and laughed as his young men stripped off their stained clothes, tossed them into the ocean, and got a fire hose shower.

  He did paperwork in the afternoon and had an early dinner. Around 8:00 p.m., he briefed with his XO, Zeke Zardeskas, and his electronic warfare officer, Lieutenant Commander Bill Coffey, about the next day’s flight.

  The Kitty Hawk’s air wing was operating under the assumption that there was a strong possibility of an air strike against Iran, particularly if any of the hostages were executed. The fact that Iran had been an American ally just a year earlier created some problems. The Iranians had American-made Hawk antiaircraft missiles, the precursor to the Patriot missile, and mobile launch sites with sophisticated tracking equipment. The Navy had piles of tactics and battle plans for destroying Soviet-made SAMs, but no one had come up with a plan for defeating an American missile.

  The Prowler’s pods were set to jam the frequencies used by Soviet radar stations and SAMs, but Hawks were at a completely different bandwidth. Zeke took the pods off and recalibrated them so the Black Ravens would be covered. Dad and Zeke both agreed the best way to defend against the Hawk was to fly in low and fast below enemy radar. When they arrived in-country, they would pop up to 20,000 feet, above Hawk missile range, and begin jamming. A-6 Intruder bombers would follow as soon as Iranian radars were reading a blizzard of snow. Zeke and the technicians made adjustments to the jamming pods, but that didn’t make them battle ready. The pods were temperamental and susceptible to falling offline when set at unfamiliar frequencies.

  That meant the Prowlers had to be taken out for a rigorous test drive. Dad decided that as skipper he should take the first Prowler out with the new specs. There was an added wrinkle: The Kitty Hawk had intelligence that Soviet trawlers were just north of the carrier. So Dad filed a flight plan that would take his Prowler south of the Kitty Hawk. He planned to keep his plane low and close to the ocean, minimizing chances that Soviet radar could pick up his movements.

  Bill Coffey, the squadron’s top electronic warfare officer, requested to be subbed in for Lieutenant Steve Underriter. Dad agreed that was a good idea. That night, the squadron gathered in the ready room and watched The Champ with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder. The projector jittered and jumped, a sign that the Kitty Hawk was hauling at its maximum of 28 knots. Dad headed back to his stateroom around midnight. At 1:15 a.m., he wrote a letter to Mom.

  Nobody is more disappointed than me that we’re not on our way home—but it’s part of the reason we were out here in the first place . . .

  The letter closed, as always, with a message of devotion:

  I love you Barbara, and want to be with you always. I will be with you sometime soon and we will make up for all the days and nights we missed. I am thinking of you constantly and am waiting to hold you in my arms and kiss your wonderful lips and feel your body around me. Just knowing you love me and are waiting for me makes it all worthwhile. Take good care of yourself and we’ll all be together soon.

  All my love forever, Pete.

  By the time he finished the letter it was almost 2:00 a.m. He woke six hours later and made his way to the flight deck for the Black Ravens cruise picture, scheduled long ago when they thought they were almost home. The photographer positioned them in front of Prowler 626, the plane Dad would fly later in the day. The sky above was an endless blue and the water was glassy and clear. Dad stood to the left, a step separated from his men. He looked gaunt and exhausted.

  The men returned to the ready room and shot the shit for a while. Dad had early chow with Zeke and then briefed his flight. Coffey would be in the back monitoring the pods with Lieutenant James Bradley Brown, the husband of Cathy Brown, who lived behind us in Crosswoods.

  In the front seat, Dad put Lieutenant John Chorey, a soft-spoken redhead who had become an ECMO after washing out of the pilot program after some hairy moments around the boat in an A-4. He was a quiet guy with a beautiful blond wife and a baby boy at home. He had just 300 hours in the Prowler, by far the fewest in the crew. Chorey had received an earful from Dad after he misspelled his name on a flight schedule, so he tried to keep out of Dad’s way. Placing him in the front seat was counterintuitive but standard Navy: the only way a rookie gets experience is to play the game.

  The crew briefed the flight. The plan was to take off, head south of the Kitty Hawk, and practice low-level tactics. Dad would fly low and then pop the Prowler up to 10,000 feet and dive back to the ocean. Coffey would run scans on the pods and see which ones stayed online during the maneuvers. Dad would repeat the maneuvers for about an hour until it was time for the afternoon recovery on the Kitty Hawk.

  Zeke ran into Dad as he left Ready Room 5. Dad had a smile on his tired face.

  “I’m gonna throw her around.”

  The crew walked to their plane around 12:15 p.m. Dad kicked the tires and then shoved his fingers into the plane’s nooks and crannies checking for pins in the right positions. He dropped on all fours and checked the screws on the landing gear. He looked for hydraulic leaks on the tacky tarmac below his Prowler. He walked around back and checked the tailhook and its cable.

  Then he climbed up. He strapped himself in and did a cockpit check, making sure all his gauges were up and in the go position. He connected his communication cord and flipped on the radio and waited for the rest of his crew to settle in. He checked the landing lights. And then he waited while the plane captain fired up his engines.

  On the flight deck, Aviation Technician Mark Hagood plugged his headphones into the pilot’s side of the jet. He listened as Dad ran through his checks. He recognized his voice because Dad did the preflight checklist by the book every time. Everything was set.

  The Prowler was scheduled to launch from catapult two, and it was Hagood’s job to keep an eye on the plane as it was taxied to the catapult: checking tires, brakes, hydraulic systems, wings, s
lats, flaps, nose trim, rudder, and anything else that was visible from outside the plane. He was only twenty-two, but he knew Dad could change his life with a grunt or a signature. He paid attention.

  As Dad’s Prowler was hooked up to the catapult, Hagood noticed some white steam or smoke coming from the nose wheel area of 626. He called over Chief Petty Officer Jack Pimley, part of Dad’s Goat Locker.

  “I see smoke coming out of the nose wheel.”

  But just as quickly as it appeared, the smoke was gone. Pimley motioned for the launch to continue. Hagood gave the thumbs up to the plane captain. Another sailor held up a sign reading 45,500, the weight of his Prowler. Dad did his usual final check, moving the stick in a 360-degree motion to check the flaps and slats. He kicked the two pedals at his feet and moved the rudder from side to side. He moved the Prowler to 85 percent power and waited for launch.

  But then Hagood saw the white smoke again. He threw his arms up and made an X, the sign for downing an airplane.

  Dad powered down the Prowler, and Pimley headed toward Hagood. Planes were backing up behind 626. The tower started crackling through headphones.

  “Is 626 a go or a no-go?”

  Pimley asked Hagood what was wrong.

  “Smoke from the nose wheel.”

  Pimley shook his head.

  “It’s air-conditioning vapor, it’s not smoke. Let it go.”

  Hagood conceded to his boss. He dropped his hands and gave 626 the thumbs up and moved out of the way.

  A voice from the catapult cockpit at deck level crackled through Dad’s headphones.

  “Ready to go? Tension.”

  “Roger that.”

  It was 1324.

  The catapult fired and Prowler 626 with Commander Peter Thomas Rodrick at the controls was launched cleanly. Hagood watched the plane until it faded over the horizon. He would wonder for the rest of his life how close he came to saving the lives of four men.

  An A-6 Intruder launched from the Kitty Hawk a minute after Dad. The Intruder climbed to 500 feet in preparation for a bombing exercise. The pilot looked out the window and saw a Prowler at his three o’clock moving at over 450 knots per hour and less than a hundred feet off the sea. He clicked on his mic and talked to his navigator.

  “Shit, he’s moving fast and low.”

  He watched the Prowler move aft of the fantail of the USS Jouett, the Kitty Hawk’s cruiser. The Prowler then began a 90-degree nose-up climb, the beginning of an Immelmann maneuver, an aerial loop where a pilot rolls his wings level at the top of the vertical circle before plunging downward. The pilot watched the plane reach an altitude of between 7,000 and 9,000 feet and then begin its descent back toward the sea.

  That was the last the Intruder saw of him. He went off on his own mission. And that was the last sighting of Dad’s plane.

  Around 1445, the planes launched at 1324 returned to the sky above the Kitty Hawk for recovery. Dad’s Prowler was missing. In the Kitty Hawk’s pri-fli, the carrier’s flight headquarters, CAG turned to Ensign Tim Sparks, one of Dad’s junior officers.

  “Ensign, do you have any information on your Prowler?”

  “No, sir. Boss, maybe they diverted to Diego Garcia.”

  It was possible. Everyone had their radios off, so the Prowler could have headed to Diego Garcia without anyone knowing. A call was made to the island. There was no Prowler. A terse message was sent back to NAS Whidbey Island.

  “626 is missing.”

  There were no names. Dad had fuel for two and a half hours. There was another recovery of aircraft at 1545 and the Kitty Hawk air ops thought maybe Dad would turn up for that. But he didn’t. The two-and-a-half-hour mark passed at 1554. Another message was sent to Whidbey, this time with four names. An officer came down to the ready room and secured the flying records for Dad and his crew.

  At 1653, Diego Garcia launched a P-3, while the Kitty Hawk sent out four search-and-rescue helicopters. Back at 2125 Conifer Drive in Oak Harbor, it was almost 4:00 a.m. and I’d just sneaked downstairs and scored my nightly six Chips Ahoy! cookies. I slipped back upstairs, looked in on Christine, and flipped on Larry King’s overnight radio show on 710 KIRO. I fell back asleep.

  Around the same time, the P-3 spotted an oil slick sixty-three miles southeast of Diego Garcia. Soon, helos arrived on the scene. There were no signs of life. The sun was setting by the time the USS Jouett arrived at the crash site. There wasn’t much to salvage: some oxygen bottles, a seat cushion, and a map. Then a crewman spotted the cracked visor of a helmet. A long pole with a net was dropped over the side to fish it out. But the piece of helmet disintegrated as it was picked up. It dissolved into pieces and drifted to the bottom of the ocean. At midnight, the search was called off and the flight surgeon on the Kitty Hawk began writing up four death certificates.

  Because of the radio blackout, it took hours for that information to reach Whidbey. Early in the morning, Laddie Coburn got a call at home and was told to report immediately to the commodore’s office. He was briefed that 626 was missing and Pete Rodrick was the pilot. The Coburns lived just three houses away, so he called his wife, Ulla, and told her to watch our house. Mom didn’t know anything. Chrissie had an ear infection, and she wondered whether she should take her to the base emergency room. She called Ulla for advice. Should she go?

  “Barb, just stay at home for a while.”

  Lieutenant Greg Elcock was a VAQ-135 pilot who had just returned home early to prepare the squadron’s homecoming. But the commodore had a harder job for him. He had to find the four wives and tell them their husbands were officially missing at sea. A chaplain’s car would trail behind if things went badly. He started at our home. Mom answered the door carrying Christine.

  “Barb, Pete’s plane is missing. They’re looking for him. It was Brown, Coffey, and Chorey with him.”

  Mom let the news set in for a second.

  “Was it his fault? Did he do something wrong?”

  “Barb, we don’t know. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I should call the other wives. I’ll call them.”

  Elcock made Mom sit down.

  “Barb, you just stay here. I’ll handle it.”

  Elcock left to notify the other wives. About an hour later, he got another call. There were no survivors. Laddie was dispatched to pick me up at the Roller Barn. By the time we arrived home, the chaplain was pulling out of our drive. It was all over.

  A memorial service was held the next morning on the Kitty Hawk. There were four caps—one with the oak leaves signifying command on the bill—placed on a white altar. The men sang “Eternal Father” and taps were played. The ship’s MPs fired a sixteen-gun salute. The Kitty Hawk’s staff then began an investigation.

  I made a Freedom of Information request a few years ago and was sent a declassified version of the mishap report. It confirmed some of my worst fears. The investigation started with a few basic assumptions. The wreckage showed no signs that any member of the crew had tried to eject, suggesting there had not been a fire or an ongoing mechanical failure. Based on what the Intruder pilot and navigator saw, the investigators surmised that Dad was flying low and fast when he began pulling the plane skyward. The jerk of the plane can result in a momentary ten- or twenty-foot dip of the wings. If you’re flying very low, that dip can mean a wing hits the water and the plane disintegrates.

  The report doesn’t explicitly say Dad was flying recklessly, but it is there if you read between the lines.

  (1) It had been seven days since the pilot had flown. The fact that the aircraft was flying at approximately 100 feet and 450 knots followed by a max gross weight overhead maneuver is indicative of one overtaxing his “rusty” capabilities by unnecessarily flying the aircraft at the very edge of its envelope.

  The report also theorized that a junior ECMO like John Chorey “had neither the experience nor the personality which woul
d lend itself to ‘calling down’ a senior pilot in command.”

  That rang true as well. But from Tim Radel’s stories, it doesn’t seem likely that Dad would have listened even to a senior ECMO. He was going to fly the way he wanted to fly.

  But it was all an educated guess. No one knew for sure. The investigators left open the door for doubt. It could have been something banal:

  The pilot could have been incapacitated by a bird strike. Sea birds were noted in the operating area.

  I wanted to conclude that it was some factor beyond Dad’s control, but I didn’t really believe it. For years, that’s where I left it. Dad was flying too low and too fast for the situation and it cost four lives. But as I started tracking people down, I got an email from Steve Underriter, the officer in Dad’s squadron who was replaced on his last flight by Bill Coffey at the last minute. He pointed me back toward the radar altimeter being turned off on Dad’s flight.

  It was later determined that in high-speed, low-altitude flying over the water there is a disparity between the radar altimeter and the pressure altimeter. The radar altimeter reads lower than the pressure altimeter. The high-speed, low-altitude would cause the pressure altimeter to read higher than the actual aircraft as a result in air pressure changes from low-altitude, high-speed flight.

  I went back to the accident report. And there it was in the fine print:

  The barometric altimeter position error for the acft would have been negative thirty eight feet for 45,500 lb gross weight aircraft at 300 kts and negative 115 feet at 400 kts.

  The report also notes: “squadron did not have barometric altimeter adjustment knowledge.”

  That snapped my head back. Dad was going 450 knots, according to the Intruder pilot. The sea was glassy smooth; there were no waves to offer a reference point. His altimeter could have read 150 feet, plenty of clearance to begin a turn and climb. But maybe it was off by 115 feet and he was just 35 feet above the sea. At 450 knots, Dad wouldn’t have known the difference.