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

by Orr Kelly

  The crash occurred during a hectic period at Patuxent. Development and testing of the plane had fallen several months behind schedule and there was pressure from Washington to hurry things along. In any such program, there is always tension between the testers, who want more time to make sure that everything is just right, and the managers, who fear that any slip in the schedule will mean higher costs and political problems. In this case, Brannon and other fleet pilots were brought in to begin operational testing of the plane—trying to determine how it would perform in actual service in the fleet—before the professional test pilots working for both the navy and McDonnell Douglas had explored the outer edges of the flight envelope. At least one pilot protested in writing against turning the plane over to the fleet pilots without further testing.

  The test pilots insisted after the crash that they had carefully described the regions in which it was safe to fly the plane. They blamed officials in Washington for trying to rush the program and Brannon for exceeding the limits they had set. Brannon, who later left the navy to go to medical school, felt he was being blamed unfairly for stumbling onto something that was actually wrong with the plane.

  Whether or not, in the excitement of a dogfight, he pushed the plane into a maneuver that had not been explored by the test pilots, he certainly did find something seriously wrong. The F/A-18 not only could fall off into a spin, but it spun in such a way that recovery was very difficult, perhaps even impossible. If Brannon had not lost a plane at Patuxent and Hornets with this deadly defect had found their way into the fleet, a number of pilots and planes might have been lost in mysterious crashes at sea before the problem was identified and corrected.

  The task of trying to duplicate what had happened to Brannon and then find a way to recover from the subsequent spin fell to Denny Behm, a fighter pilot who had left the navy in 1967 to become a test pilot for McDonnell Douglas.

  Behm, the assistant program pilot, had been assigned to the F/A-18 from the beginning. In September 1979, he obtained one of the first planes off the assembly line, a craft specially rigged to explore its performance at high angles of attack, and flew to Pax River, where he was to remain for three years, performing some of the most demanding tests. At the end of almost every flight, he would turn off his engines at 20,000 feet, glide down to 8,000 feet—dropping at a rate of about 34,000 feet a minute—then do one full turn and test the performance of the plane in a dead-stick landing. “It’s a lot of fun—like a shuttle approach,” Behm says.

  For the tests of the high angle of attack, in which he would deliberately push the plane to its limits to see if it would spin, Behm’s plane was equipped with a huge parachute in a compartment in the tail. If he got into a spin, he could pop the parachute. That would pull the plane out of the spin and leave it hanging vertically. He could then release the parachute and fly away. Earlier, Behm had tested the parachute to see if it worked properly, and he had found that being jerked up by the tail and left dangling nose-down was an extremely uncomfortable experience. Behm recalls listening to a tape made during the chute test: “The calm test pilot pulls the handle and his voice goes to 3,000 rpm and three pitches higher. I sounded like a mouse squeaking.” He didn’t want to do that again unless his life depended on it.

  At the moment when a plane ceases to fly and falls off into a spin, it is said to “depart.” In most planes, departure is fairly benign. “When a pilot gets his brains shook up a bit,” Behm says, “that’s a normal departure.” But a few planes, such as the A-7, have a violent departure. The nose wanders left and right, then the plane snap-rolls and corkscrews through the air, banging the pilot’s head violently against the canopy.

  When Behm went out to attempt to recreate the situation that had gotten Brannon in trouble, he already had done almost everything he could to see if he could make the plane depart and spin. He had even tried to spin the plane upside down.

  In the NASA wind tunnel at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, engineers had tried what they called the “frisbee test” on a scale model of the F/A-18. They held the model upside down and then flipped it into a vertical stream of air to see if it would spin inverted. The tests indicated it might. So Behm was told to try it in the air.

  He went straight up at 300 knots and then let the plane slow down. As it slowed, he crossed his controls, pushing the stick as far forward and to the right as he could and, at the same time, pushing hard on his left rudder. In effect, he was telling the plane to go one way with his right hand and the opposite way with his left foot.

  “It is a terrible thing to do,” Behm says. “It causes the plane to start to yaw, then cartwheel once and tumble, or vice versa. Talk about brain scrambling! It is just very, very difficult to tell what is going on. You’re far from the center of rotation, with motion about several axes. I did not like that at all. That was not fun. We never got a stabilized inverted spin, so after some thirty attempts at scrambling my brains I called it off.”

  As Behm headed out to the spin area, which stretches from eight to fifteen miles off the end of the runway where the Patuxent enters the Chesapeake Bay, he was confident he would not experience the extreme discomfort involved in trying to make the plane spin upside down. But he also knew he was heading into the unknown.

  He leveled off at 30,000 feet and then pulled the stick back until the plane was aiming upward at about fifty degrees and, at the same time, made it rotate about its axis. Abruptly, the plane stalled and fell off into just the kind of flat spin Brannon had encountered. Most fighter planes, when they spin, whip completely around in three or four seconds. But the F/A-18 was rotating at a lazy rate of about twelve seconds for a complete turn. Behm had decided earlier that he would deploy the big chute in the plane’s tail at 20,000 feet if he had not broken out of the spin by that time. That gave him about twenty seconds to solve the problem that had sent Brannon’s plane into the bay.

  As soon as the plane departed, Behm pushed his control stick in the direction of the spin and kicked the opposite rudder. That should have brought him out.

  “At 25,000 feet or so, it was apparent to me that this thing was not recovering normally,” he says. “I decided we were in trouble.”

  He cut back on one engine and increased power on the other, using the thrust of the engines to do what the controls refused to do. That was enough to stop the spinning motion and permit Behm to regain control of the plane.

  Fortunately, Behm’s flight turned out to be the hard part of understanding and dealing with the spin problem. Unlike the roll rate problem, where expensive modifications of the plane were required, this new problem was dealt with by changing the computer software to make the plane much less likely to spin and easier for the pilot to recover in the event he did get into a spin.

  Even as Weaver worked to solve the technical and financial problems of the Hornet, he could not ignore one large obstacle that would have to be surmounted before the plane could join the fleet. That was a review, set for the spring of 1983, of the entire program by a top-level Pentagon committee.

  Two years earlier, on 28 June 1981, the Pentagon board had given approval for full-scale production of the fighter version of the plane, but it held back approval for the attack version. Since, by that time, the two versions had become identical, the decision really involved how many planes would be produced. It permitted production to go ahead in an orderly way, and it meant that the marines would get their new plane after having agreed to wait for it. But it left open the question of how many planes would be produced for the navy. In fact, it left open the question of whether the F/A-18 would ever go to sea as a navy strike-fighter.

  In preparation for that final review, the navy ordered a major operational test of the plane by pilots from the fleet, not by professional test pilots. Most of them were combat veterans, and it was their job to use their experience to evaluate how the plane would perform if it ever went to war. Two operational test squadrons—VX-5, which focused on the attack role, and VX-4, which focused on th
e fighter role—joined forces in a combined squadron. That meant there were fourteen pilots with ten airplanes, two of them two-seaters.

  The Operational Test and Evaluation or, in the Navy acronym, OPEVAL, took place from May to October of 1982. Since this was the first time a new fleet airplane had ever been subjected to this kind of through-the-wringer testing, the pilots had to make up their own test program. Through the spring, summer, and into the fall, they flew at the naval air stations at China Lake, Yuma, Pt. Mugu, Lemoore, and Oceana, at Nellis Air Force Base, and off the carrier Constellation. For the final test, they moved to Fallon Naval Air Station, Nevada, to simulate the operations of the F/A-18 with an air wing. They flew a long cross-country navigation flight with extensive tanking (refueling), and then they were joined by a score of other planes for three major bombing strikes similar to that conducted a few years later against Libya.

  It was a big, expensive test, involving 1,232 sorties and 1,648 flying hours. It was marred by the fact that more than half the sorties were flown in early, pre-production models of the plane, so a good deal of time was spent discovering and reporting on problems that had already been fixed.

  The test became one of the most contentious issues in the history of the Hornet, pitting admiral against admiral in nasty personal attacks. And again, as it had before, the issue focused on personalities.

  One of those in the center of the maelstrom was Holly Hollandsworth, the A-6 pilot who had long been known as a foe of the F/A-18. He happened to be the skipper of VX-5 at the time the test was ordered, and so he became one of those most involved in setting up the test program and carrying it out. “A lot of people say we were primed to kill the thing, primarily because I’m an A-6 guy,” Hollandsworth says. “We did not. We went out with the idea that if we can make it work, we’ll make it work.”

  The other key actor was Rear Adm. Edward W. Carter III, who took over as commander of the Operational Test and Evaluation Force (COMOPTEVFOR), which is responsible for testing all naval weapons, after the testing of the F/A-18 had begun but well before the all-important evaluation of its performance.

  Carter, a surface warfare officer and weapons specialist—a black shoe and a cannon-cocker in naval jargon—was not a favorite among the aviators, who referred to him derisively as “Yosemite Sam.” He also had picked up other nicknames during a career that began when he joined the navy as an enlisted man in 1945. At the Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1951—a year before Lenox—he was known as Red, for the shock of hair that has now turned auburn, with gray on the sides. On the destroyers and cruisers where he spent most of his career, he was known as Bulldog or, sometimes, the Tasmanian Devil. “All,” he says, “imply a certain degree of stubbornness and tenacity, which I guess is deserved.”

  He came to his new job after a tour of duty as inspector general of the navy. “The IG’s job was a great preparation for becoming COMOPTEVFOR,” he says. “I didn’t have any friends left to lose.”

  By the time of the operational tests, the F/A-18 had picked up a strong body of support among naval aviators. The “hate and hostility,” as Carter puts it, came primarily from the office of the DCNO for air warfare, then headed by Adm. Dutch Schoultz—the same office from which most of the opposition to the new plane had been heard six or eight years earlier.

  The fliers were irritated that the fate of their new plane might rest, in the case of Carter, with a non-aviator and, in the case of Hollandsworth, with an aviator who had long been a foe of the plane. Carter rejects the concerns about his role. As commander of guided missile cruisers, he says he knew more about air defense and the command of air attacks than most aviators. In fact, the cruiser he commanded off Vietnam in 1972 claimed responsibility for destruction of thirteen MiGs—two shot down by the ship itself and the remainder by aircraft guided to their targets by the ship’s radar. As an aviator friend told the critics: “He shot down a goddam sight more MiGs than you did.”

  What really divided Carter and many of the aviators was a basic dispute over the role of the F/A-18. Carter, coming new to the issue in the summer of 1982, approached his job almost as though he were dealing with two planes. He insisted on testing and evaluating it in its two separate roles, fighter and attack. Schoultz and many of the aviators by that time had learned to think of the Hornet as Kent Lee had thought of it in the beginning—as a single strike-fighter in which performance in each role had been compromised to provide the carriers with a dual-role plane.

  When the tests were done, Carter called together his immediate staff at his headquarters at the Norfolk Naval Base in a building known as the Mattress Factory, because Italian prisoners had worked there during World War II making mattresses for the fleet. To Carter, the results seemed obvious. The Hornet was a superb replacement for the F-4 as a fighter. But the navy should not buy it for the attack role because of its limited range and load-carrying capacity.

  Carter held back on submitting a written report because he knew it would be explosive if it leaked, which it was sure to do. Instead, he called his old shipmate, Adm. Jim Watkins, the CNO, and asked to meet with him. Watkins knew he was bringing bad news.

  Carter’s basic objection was that the limited range of the F/A-18 would force carrier commanders to come in close to shore to attack targets on land, and this would greatly increase the danger to the carriers.

  “It is crystal clear when you look at this airplane, using this airplane in the attack mission, you’re going to have to make your force more vulnerable in order to deliver the same effects on an enemy that you can with what you’ve already got,” Carter says. “That doesn’t take any genius to figure that one out. But that certainly sparked a hell of a lot of disagreement.”

  When word of Carter’s negative report got around, the supporters of the F/A-18 were alarmed. To Lenox and a number of others, the real worry was Lehman. They had long suspected that the secretary opposed the plane and feared he would use this report as an excuse to kill it. They weren’t sure what he would do or say from one day to the next. When Lehman was scheduled to testify on the Hill, Schoultz, who became DCNO for air warfare in the fall of 1982 when this whole affair was coming to a head, would often don a business suit, sneak into the back of the hearing room, and take notes to “make sure I wasn’t on the wrong side of the street.” Relations between Schoultz and Lehman finally became so strained that, late in 1984, Watkins called Schoultz in and suggested he either retire or take an assignment outside Washington. Schoultz opted for a job in London.

  The worries about Lehman were intensified in September 1982 when he abruptly announced in a newspaper interview that he intended to force the contractors to produce the sixty-three planes to be funded that year for $22.5 million apiece. Otherwise, he said, he would kill the program and spend the money on A-6s. Lenox and those who shared his suspicions saw this as Lehman’s way of doing away with the F/A-18.

  To outside observers, Lehman’s threat seemed to be a grandstand play, a way of furthering his own future political ambitions by putting on a public show of getting tough with the defense contractors. But those close to Lehman knew he was deadly serious. Admiral Tom Hayward, who was chief of naval operations then, says he had no doubt that Lehman would kill the program if he didn’t get his price—and that his price was probably a couple of million dollars lower than a reasonable figure for the plane.

  The contractors reacted with predictable cries of outrage and alarm. Then they caved in. Lehman and Sandy McDonnell held a press conference at the Pentagon on 4 October to announce agreement on a fixed-price contract of $22.5 million apiece for sixty-three planes. The price included $18.1 million for the airframe and $4.4 million for the engines and other government-furnished equipment. That was a “fly-away” price that did not include each plane’s share of the costs of development or spare parts.

  The agreement on price ended Lehman’s threat to kill the program outright, but it didn’t end the fears about what he might do next. In the fall of 1982, just after the
negative OPEVAL report, Lehman ordered the navy to make a test flight to demonstrate whether or not the range of the F/A-18 was adequate. To the consternation of almost everyone involved, Lehman dictated the profile to be flown and picked Hollandsworth to fly it.

  Rear Adm. Paul T. (“Punchy”) Gillcrist, a deputy for air warfare and a late-blooming enthusiast for the F/A-18, was shocked. In effect, Lehman seemed to be putting the fate of the plane in the hands of a man who was already convinced the navy shouldn’t buy it. “I want Holly to fly it,” Lehman insisted. Carter resented being told how to conduct the test and even Hollandsworth himself had his doubts. He had more than 5,500 hours in the air and had flown 246 combat missions. But, as skipper of the test squadron, he had only forty-nine hours in the Hornet’s cockpit; much less than the pilots working for him.

  On the day set for the test, Hollandsworth reported to the flight line at Patuxent River. His plane was jacked up so it could be gorged with every last ounce of fuel. Then it was towed out to the end of the runway. Although critics later accused the navy of cheating, it made sense to tow the plane because it would not have had to taxi a mile or so if it had been operating from a carrier. Hollandsworth and the pilot of another F/A-18 operating as a chase plane planned to fly down the Atlantic Coast and around Point Hatteras, to an ocean bombing range off Beaufort, South Carolina. There, Hollandsworth, who was carrying six 500-pound Mark 82 bombs and two 400-gallon drop tanks, would make his bombing attack. Then they would fly back up the coast to Atlantic City, New Jersey, before turning around for the return to Patuxent. By flying along the coast, they would always be within easy reach of an airfield if they ran low on fuel. Hollandsworth, skeptical as always about the plane’s range, figured that point would come as they passed Patuxent on the way back up north.