Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Hughes was well along toward solving its production problems when, in the summer of 1980, Mike Tkach, a McDonnell Douglas test pilot, strapped himself into an F/A-18 at Patuxent River Naval Air Station and took off to find an answer to that nagging question of what would happen to the radar—and the plane’s other electronic equipment—when the gun was fired in flight.

  While the engineers worried about the radar’s performance, Tkach had two very personal concerns. One was that the firing of the gun might disrupt the operations of the flight control computers, making it difficult or impossible for him to control the plane. This problem had already occurred in tests of the F-16. His other concern was that he might shoot himself down.

  “I had to shoot the gun at all parts of the envelope, from as slow as the plane would go to as fast as it would go,” Tkach says. “I remember the stories I had heard as a young boy about an F-100 or 101 shooting itself down. I had this fear.”

  Before the flight, in which he was to shoot the gun while flying straight and level at 40,000 feet and 1.5 Mach—faster than a bullet—he asked the engineers about his fear. This is what worried Tkach: During design of the plane, there had been a sharp argument between the fighter and attack pilots. The fighter pilots wanted the gun cocked up at a two-degree angle so they could get an enemy in the sights without turning or pulling up quite so sharply. The attack pilots wanted the gun aimed down about one and a half degrees, so they wouldn’t have to fly quite so steeply while strafing. The fighter pilots won the argument and the gun was cocked upward. Tkach could imagine the bullets arcing upward and then falling back down on him as he sped under them. The engineers told him there was no problem; the bullets would fall below his flight path before he got there.

  “They had it all figured out. You can study all the physics and they tell you, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid.’ But when you’re out there, you want to be sure. I was pretty nervous. It was sweaty-palms time,” Tkach says.

  Before he took off, another plane flew out over the Atlantic off the Virginia coast near Wallops Island and checked to make sure there were no ships in the test zone. That assured Tkach of a 100-square-mile area in which to do his testing. He leveled off at 40,000 feet, pushed the throttles forward and felt the familiar kick in the backside as the plane surged up to one-and-a-half times the speed of sound. Then he took a deep breath and pressed the gun trigger on his control stick for a full second. He heard the whirrrr of the gun firing and saw the muzzle gases whip back past his canopy as a hundred bullets sped out into the space in front of his plane.

  And then … nothing. The bullets didn’t hit the plane. And the radar and flight control computers continued to operate flawlessly.

  In a later test, he put the plane into a turn and fired an entire drum of 600 bullets in a six-second burst. No pilot would be expected to do that in combat, but the test proved that it could be done without melting the gun barrels or causing parts of the plane to burn. He also strafed ground targets and found that the fact that the gun was cocked upward to satisfy the fighter pilots caused no problems. When he was finished, he concluded that, despite all the early worries, the gun tests had been “benign.”

  The engineers back on the ground, who had been anxiously monitoring data automatically transmitted by the sensors on the plane, were ecstatic. Their fears about the performance of the radar had been groundless. It had operated as though the gun weren’t there.

  Well before the radar passed that final examination, Kent Lee, worn out by years of bureaucratic battling, decided to retire to a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. A few months before he left in the fall of 1976, he called in Captain H. L. (“Hank”) Halleland, the project officer during the gestation period of the plane, and told the captain he was going to be replaced.

  “We decided we needed a different man to run the program,” Lee says.

  What we needed was a man who was a better manager, who was technically qualified to take the program at that point and run it through the research and development phase. The toughest thing I had to do when I was at NAVAIR was to tell Halleland he would be replaced. Halleland was a good man. He had worked long and hard at this. I know he felt very let down, indeed. He had put his heart and soul into it, but we decided he just wasn’t the man to pick up the project at this point and drive it through. We needed someone with more technical experience, who would be a tougher manager.

  The choice was Corky Lenox, who took over early in 1976. He was also promoted from captain to rear admiral, giving him the added clout that comes with rank. A 1952 graduate of Annapolis, Lenox had spent most of his career as a fighter pilot, but he had also flown attack planes and, during the Vietnam War, had commanded an air wing with both attack planes and fighters. He had also picked up degrees in aeronautical engineering from Princeton and the Naval Postgraduate School.

  During two tours of duty in NAVAIR, he worked on the F-14 and later headed the carrier branch, overseeing development and production of all carrier aircraft. When he became program manager for the F/A-18, he felt he had a better understanding than most officers of the development and production part of naval aviation. He also had the advantage of being one of the relatively few naval aviators who shared Lee’s belief that a true strike-fighter was feasible.

  The appointment of Lenox was part of the navy’s response to a problem that Will Willoughby had quickly discerned when he came to work for the navy in the mid-1970s. He found the program management offices filled with very bright officers who “had never been in a design room, never been on a manufacturing floor.” And as soon as they learned, through on-the-job training, he complained, they were sent off to another assignment.

  Lenox, who had become familiar with the F/A-18 while serving in NAVAIR and on the source selection board for the plane, was to remain as program manager through the entire development process.

  A few months after Lenox took over the program, Lee retired and was replaced by Vice Adm. Forrest S. Petersen. The assignment of Lenox and Petersen to their new jobs fortuitously brought together two men almost ideally suited to manage a project as difficult, both technically and politically, as the F/A-18.

  Petersen graduated from the Naval Academy in 1944, in time to spend the last months of the war on a destroyer in the Pacific. After the war, he completed flight training, served in three fighter squadrons, and then became a test pilot. In 1958, he was chosen as the navy test pilot on the X-15, a plane designed to fly at several thousand miles an hour and soar into the edges of space.

  In three and a half years at NASA’s high-speed flight station at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Petersen took the X-15 aloft on five flights, up to more than five times the speed of sound and an altitude of 102,000 feet. Unlike the early astronauts, who were strapped into their little Mercury capsules like the monkeys that had preceded them, Petersen was a true test pilot, fully responsible for his plane as it hurtled through the last few molecules of air at the limits of the atmosphere. To younger navy pilots, Petersen was an almost legendary figure.

  Later in his career, Petersen commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise in the late 1960s. Lenox was air wing commander aboard the Enterprise on one of her tours in the South China Sea, and he and Petersen became close friends. The result, when Petersen headed NAVAIR and Lenox was responsible for the F/A-18, was that Petersen trusted Lenox enough to give him a great deal of latitude in running his program. He was given the freedom to be a real program manager.

  “ ‘Pete’ Petersen was a tough taskmaster, a tough boss,” Lenox says. “But if he had confidence, he would give you a lot of rope. He trusted me. I was able to do things most rear admirals would be hesitant to do, making decisions, taking positions. I felt we made a good team.”

  Although the programmable radar had seemed to Kent Lee to be the key to building a true strike-fighter, many navy pilots were still deeply skeptical when Petersen and Lenox took over. The nagging question remained as to how one man would be able to master all the skills involved in both
air-to-ground and air-to-air combat and be able to use all the information made available to him by his radar and other electronic equipment.

  The first planes had few, if any, instruments. The pilot, sitting out in the open, could feel the wind in his face and see the ground clearly as it passed below him. It was almost literally true that he flew by the seat of his pants, sensing the movement of the plane in relation to the air through which it flew. Sometimes a scrap of yarn was tied to a strut to indicate whether the plane was side-slipping, but for the most part, the only “instruments’ ‘ a pilot relied on were those built into his own body. Gradually, more and more help was built into the plane: a compass; fuel, temperature, and oil pressure gauges; an altimeter; a turn-and-bank indicator; finally, a radio, a radar set, and computers. Military planes required even more gauges and switches to monitor and control the weapons they carried.

  By the time the F-4 Phantom came along in the late 1950s, the pilot found himself surrounded by a bewildering array of instruments and switches. They not only spread across the front wall of the cockpit but filled the spaces on either side of his seat. To reach some switches, in fact, he had to grope back over his shoulder, hoping to find the right knob. Pilots complained about having to look down at the control panel, beside the seat, in order to change radio channels—a particularly hazardous exercise while flying in formation through clouds.

  And this, of course, was the challenge facing the pilot of a two-man plane, who had a radar intercept officer in the back seat with his own massive set of dials and control knobs. In the one-man F-15 fighter, first flown in the early 1970s, the number of controls and switches surrounding the pilot had soared to 300. How were all these instruments to be crammed into the single cockpit of an F/A-18 and even leave room for the pilot, let alone permit him to function effectively?

  To understand the problem facing the cockpit designers, it is useful to try to imagine what it is like for a pilot going into combat for the first time, to bomb an enemy target.

  He is flying at high speed—500 or 600 miles an hour—at very low altitude—perhaps little more than a hundred feet off the ground. He is frightened and uncomfortable, buffeted by the rough air close to the ground, and driven down into his seat by gravity as he jinks the plane to avoid antiaircraft fire. As he comes within range of air-to-air missiles, warning lights flash, and he hears a buzzing sound in his earphones. His head swivels constantly as he checks the skies for enemy fighters.

  Suddenly, he is close to the target. At his low altitude and high speed, he may have as few as twenty seconds from the time the target comes in view to identify it, lock on his radar, steer toward the target, release his weapons, and escape. Add to this the fact that other members of his squadron will be flashing across the target within seconds, in maneuvers as precisely timed as any performed by the Blue Angels. If he is a moment too early, he risks a mid-air collision. If he is a few seconds too late, the fragments of a “friendly” bomb may blow him out of the sky just as surely as an enemy missile. If he becomes confused and fails to drop his bombs, he will have to come back to try again. The people on the ground will be waiting for him this time and they will be very unhappy.

  When he comes off the target, he may well find enemy fighters ready to pounce. Flying close to their own base, they will probably be lighter and more maneuverable and under precise control from the ground. If he wants to get home, the pilot who was, a moment before, flying a bomber, will have to become a superior fighter pilot. And he will urgently need a whole new array of information quite different from that he needed a few moments before when he was on his bomb run.

  At the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis, a visionary named Eugene C. Adam had long been worried that the cockpits in combat planes were becoming so cluttered that, while all the instruments gave the pilot vital information, the message they sent was so confusing as to be almost useless. And even if the pilot understood what needed to be done, he often had trouble finding the right combination of switches to do it. Adam proposed what he called a “glass cockpit,” a revolutionary new kind of cockpit in which all those gauges would be replaced by a few cathode ray tubes, similar to little television or computer screens. Everything the pilot needed to know would be flashed on one of those screens right before his eyes. And all the switches would be replaced by a few controls on the throttle and control stick and a panel at eye level in front of the pilot.

  “The trick is to do a lot of things automatically for the pilot but never, ever, to leave him in the dark as to what’s happening,” says Adam, who began his career with four years as a navy combat aircrewman before earning his engineering degree and going to work for McDonnell Douglas in 1956.

  The technology for the kind of cockpit Adam envisioned was beginning to become available in the late 1960s. When McDonnell Douglas won the contract to build the F-15, it urged the air force to use the new type of cockpit. But the air force turned the proposal down. Precise military specifications spelled out the kinds of round “steam gauge” dials that belonged in a fighter plane cockpit and even dictated where they would be. The air force agreed to a few innovations, but essentially the early models of the F-15 retained the familiar cockpit layout.

  There were several reasons for the air force decision. One was concern whether the new system would work. Another was the danger of pilot confusion due to an entirely new cockpit design. Perhaps the most important reason was that the need for a new cockpit did not seem urgent. The F-15 was being designed as a single-purpose, air-to-air fighter, rather than a strike-fighter like the F/A-18, and it had a cockpit big enough to hold all the familiar instruments and switches. There was so much room, in fact, that Adam worried that the pilot’s workload in the F-15 would be increased because his instruments were spread over such a large area.

  By the time the navy came along with its F/A-18 only a few years later, the situation was dramatically different. Computer technology had advanced to the point where Adam’s proposal seemed much more feasible. McDonnell Douglas had done a great deal of preliminary work and was able to take visitors to a big domed simulator and show them what the new cockpit would look like and how it would function. But the biggest change was that there simply wasn’t enough room in the F/A-18 cockpit to cram in all the displays and switches needed for both dogfighting and bombing.

  The F/A-18 cockpit, having already surrendered half a cubic foot to the gun and radar compartment, was a full forty percent smaller than the cockpit of the single-purpose A-7 attack plane. There were only 350 square inches of space on the F/A-18 instrument panel, compared with 450 square inches in the F-15 and a mammoth 2,700 square inches in the two cockpits of the F-4.

  To Adam, the tiny cockpit was a challenge, but also a great blessing because it virtually forced the navy to give him a chance to try out his new design. It was one of those cases where it paid to bring in the best experts available, almost regardless of cost.

  Adam puts his philosophy this way: “We are an engineer-run company. If it is easy, we go by price. But if it is more art than science, we do an evaluation of risk. I’ve chosen the highest bidder out of eight. I know I will have trouble with the guy who bids $8 million on an $11 million job.”

  One of the first in the Pentagon to clearly see the need for a dramatically new cockpit was Robert Thompson, who worked for Admiral Houser and was largely responsible for drawing up the operational requirements for the cockpit in the F/A-18. With some trepidation, he sent his recommendations down the river to Lee’s shop at Crystal City, to be turned into specifications for the plane.

  “We pushed hard for a really advanced cockpit, but we never thought NAVAIR would go along,” Thompson recalls. “They came back and fully embraced the whole concept. That really surprised me. That was the item that has made the F/A-18 a useful airplane.”

  With NAVAIR and OP 05 in agreement, Adam was given permission to set aside the almost-sacred military specifications for the cockpit and to start with a clean slate.

 
; When word of this decision reached the fleet, however, there was an anguished cry of protest. Despite the daring things they often do in the air, military pilots tend, in other matters, to be rock-ribbed conservatives. They had all grown up with round “steam gauges,” and they loudly complained that changing over to this new cockpit would be not only wrong but dangerous.

  It is not difficult to understand why pilots in the fleet who had not had a chance to visit the simulator and who had heard about the new cockpit only by word of mouth reacted with so much hostility.

  Since the early 1930s, before most of them were born, the most important flight instruments had been clustered right at the pilot’s eye level. In the center were the two instruments that, if everything else went wrong, would permit a pilot to turn himself right side up and assure him he was not headed toward the ground. Those were the attitude director indicator and, right below it, the horizontal situation indicator. Grouped nearby were the altitude, angle of attack and air speed indicators, and the compass—all embedded in the consciousness of generations of pilots.

  Adam began by discarding almost all those dials. In his method, information generated by the plane’s computers is reflected on a glass screen at the top of the cockpit. This is called the Heads Up Display and of course it has an acronym—the HUD. As the pilot looks through the HUD toward the sky or the earth or the sea below, he sees symbols telling him everything he needs to know to fly his plane safely. And, because all the symbols are projected at infinity, he doesn’t have to change the focus of his eyes constantly from distance to the close-up view of his instrument panel.