Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces
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Maximum Payload: 17,000 pounds
Length: 56 feet
Height: 15.2 feet
Wingspan: 40.7 feet
Originally produced as a single-place A version and a two-place trainer B version. Now produced as an improved single-place C version and a two-place night, under-the-weather D version.
APPENDIX II
The Author Learns to Fly Back Seat
Al Frazier, the chief experimental test pilot for McDonnell Douglas, made an unexpected comment at the conclusion of an interview during my research for this book.
We had just spent an hour or so talking about his adventures testing the F/A-18 at extremely high angles of attack (a regime where other planes routinely fall off into a spin) and his work on the poorly understood physiological effects on today’s combat pilots of the frequent and sudden onset of extreme pressures of gravity—loads that, within half a second, can multiply a man’s weight by as much as nine times.
As we stood and shook hands, Frazier looked at me and said, “You certainly have an interesting job.”
Rear Adm. William A. Dougherty, Jr., commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s Carrier Group Four, made a similar comment at the conclusion of an interview aboard his flagship, the U.S.S. Coral Sea: “I know why you’re writing this book … so you can do all these neat things.”
Frazier and Dougherty were both right about on the mark. Writing a book on the Hornet has been not only a fascinating job of research and reporting but a physically demanding series of adventures as well.
In a long career as a newspaper and magazine reporter, I have always believed it was the reporter’s job to go where the action was and then report back to the reader as accurately as possible. Research on the Hornet has taken me where the action is: An arrested landing and catapult takeoff from a carrier; streaking across the Nevada desert at 600 miles an hour, 200 feet above the sagebrush; hours “flying” the F/A-18 in simulators; down into the engine rooms of the Coral Sea; to the factories where the plane, its radar, and its engines are made, and to the air bases where the plane was tested and where the pilots are trained.
Before the navy would let me ride in the back seat of one of its $30 million strike-fighters, it sent me across a demanding set of hurdles. First was a flight physical that would result in an Up-chit—qualified to fly as a passenger—or a Down-chit—not qualified. Dr. James M. Craven, a flight surgeon at Patuxent River Naval Air Station granted me an Up-chit.
With Up-chit in hand, I was subjected to two days of lectures on the physiology of flight. I learned a good deal about what happens to the human body in flight, including some things one would rather not know, such as: at high altitude, a person’s blood boils, and a wound bleeds a kind of froth. From the lecture room, the next move was across the hall to the flight training area.
First was a session in the altitude chamber, where the air is pumped out to simulate flight in an unpressurized plane at 25,000 feet. Next, I was strapped into an ejection seat and fired up a rail to simulate ejection from a plane. This part of the training was fun, only a pale approximation of what it is like actually to eject from a plane, where the ejectee is subjected to a momentary force of 200 Gs. The ejection seat was the last fun part of the training.
Next came the water survival course, all of it conducted in full flight gear, including heavy steel-tipped boots, parachute harness, G suit, and helmet. First was five minutes of treading water, with all that gear wanting to go to the bottom, followed by five minutes of the dead-man’s float. This was all preparatory to the real test: a seventy-five-yard swim covering three lengths of the pool. The first length was done in the breast stroke, the second in the side stroke, and the third in a relatively relaxing back stroke.
The scene then moved to the water survival building at Norfolk Naval Air Station. On one floor was a large indoor pool equipped with an array of fiendish devices.
There, I stood on a tower about ten feet above the water, attached my parachute harness to risers connected to an overhead cable, and then was jerked off the platform and into the water face-first. As the cable dragged me down the pool, I had to twist the risers to turn on my back, disconnect the so-called Koch fittings from the risers, and swim to the side of the pool.
Then came underwater breathing. While another trainee held me down, I learned to clear my oxygen mask and breathe underwater. Then I put my legs, bent at the knees, over the edge of the pool and went through the whole procedure again, upside down. That was not fun.
Next came the helicopter rescue. Up above, large shower heads simulated the down draft from a helicopter. I was taught to grab a line dangling from a platform, signal that I was ready, and then be lifted about twenty feet to the platform. At Pensacola Naval Air Station, this training is conducted out in the Gulf of Mexico, with a real helicopter churning the water with its down draft. They say sharks come hurrying to see what all the excitement is about.
This was followed by the parachute escape. I attached myself to a parachute suspended from the ceiling. Then I was swung out over the pool and dropped, with the chute and the tangle of lines falling on top of me. I released myself from the chute and then followed a seam, pulling the chute forward over my head while sculling backward. I was taught to be careful to clear all the lines, which can easily become entangled with the seat bottom dangling below me and containing survival equipment. More than one pilot has ejected safely and then been dragged to his death after becoming entangled in his parachute lines.
Our damp, shivering group of trainees then climbed the stairs to a large room containing a pool about fifteen feet deep. Suspended above the pool was an object that looked like a huge metal barrel. This was the Dunker, about which we had all heard fearsome stories. It is designed to teach navy people how to escape from a helicopter that has crashed in the water and then turned upside down—which a helicopter, with its engine up top, is almost certain to do. A friend had described it to me and added: “It’s not bad after you get over the idea you’re going to die.”
On the first ride, the six of us in our group were assigned seats and strapped ourselves in. We looked around and found we were in a cabin about twenty feet long and ten feet in diameter, with four large openings on one side to represent windows, and three windows and a door on the other side.
The Dunker seemed to drop into the water rather gently. As the water rose to chest level, I took a big breath, waited until the violent motion had stopped, unfastened my seat belt, grasped the edge of the nearest window opening, and propelled myself out and up. I swam to the side of the pool and grabbed the yellow safety line before I remembered I was still holding my breath.
On the second dunk, I had seat number eight, in the right forward corner. This time, as the Dunker entered the water, it slowly rolled upside down. I thought I had a slight edge as I watched the water rise first on the man across from me, as I rolled over the top and entered the water head-first. It gave me a few less seconds to hold my breath. The goal this time was to find and exit through the large doorway. For me, this involved avoiding a large box protruding from the floor (now the ceiling) and pulling myself hand over hand diagonally across the cabin to the exit. When I bumped into the protrusion, there was a moment of confusion and panic, but I worked around it and out.
On the third dunk, a new hazard was added. We had to wear blackout goggles. As I felt the Dunker drop into the water and begin to invert itself, I realized that, as I rolled over the top, I would not be able to see or feel the water rising. How would I know when to take that last deep breath? What if the water reached my face while I was inhaling? Perhaps I took that breath a moment too soon, but I had plenty of air to slip out the nearest window as soon as the Dunker came to rest. I felt sorry for one young woman who had taken swimming lessons and worked very hard to qualify to fly. But when she was told to put on the goggles, she decided this was too much for her and walked out. Actually, as my friend had said, it was not that bad after you decided you weren’t going to die.
All very neat and orderly, except that the man who was supposed to exit first and begin the knee-tapping routine got disoriented and went out a window, leaving the rest of us sitting there in the dark in fifteen feet of water. The fellow across from me finally decided it was time to go, and I felt him swim past. I tapped the man next to me and went out with enough air left to reach the side of the pool.
To my Up-chit, I added two sheets of paper proving that I had successfully completed the water survival course. I felt like Houdini. My sense of accomplishment was diminished only slightly when one of the instructors explained that they also had a device to simulate escaping from a fighter plane that has crashed in the sea. But they didn’t use it, he said, because the chances of survival were so slight that training for that eventuality wasn’t worth the effort. Later, when I was catapulted off the Coral Sea in a small cargo plane called a “Carrier-On-Board-Delivery” [COD], it was comforting to know what to do if the plane crashed in the sea.
After the ordeal of the Dunker, my actual flight in the Hornet was a pleasant adventure. But more than that, it helped me to gain some appreciation of what a pilot experiences when he takes the F/A-18 into combat.
With Lt. Victor Steinman, a recent graduate of the Top Gun school, in the forward cockpit, we took off from the Lemoore Naval Air Station in California’s Central Valley, climbed quickly out of the ground-hugging tule fog that often grips the valley in the winter, and flew in brilliant sunshine over the snow-mantled Sierra Nevada mountains.
As we flew, Steinman picked out other aircraft, mostly airliners, using the radar’s air-to-air mode. Then he switched to air-to-ground by pushing a button on the instrument panel and demonstrated how the radar could zero in on a small island in the middle of Mono Lake.
In the training area south of the air station at Fallon, Nevada, we went through the “squirrel cage”—the loops and other maneuvers a pilot would use in aerial combat. For a minute or so, we flew upside down at 18,000 feet, looking at the world from a decidedly unfamiliar angle.
Then, at my request, Steinman demonstrated two of the maneuvers that distinguish the Hornet from most other planes.
First, he pulled back on the stick and engaged the afterburners until we hung virtually motionless, with the nose pointing almost straight upward and the tall vertical tails vibrating visibly in the vortex of air pouring back over the wings. It was a maneuver that would cause most other planes to stall and fall off into a spin, but the Hornet remained firmly under control.
Then we rolled over and dove down toward the desert floor. Leveling off at 200 feet, Steinman headed toward a target about six miles away at 600 miles an hour. Then he pushed the throttles full forward to engage the afterburners and pulled back on the stick. Up we streaked as we began the maneuver known as the Hornet high pop. Seconds later, at 10,000 feet, he rolled upside down, aimed the plane’s nose at the target, rolled back right side up, pretended to drop his bombs, and then turned sharply to leave the area.
Sitting in the back cockpit, I suddenly learned what it is like to experience an almost total loss of situational awareness. The sky and the desert rotated before my vision, first one way and then the other. There was no up or down, just swirling confusion. Steinman, sensing my reaction, suggested we try it again. Again we screamed in close to the ground, zoomed sharply upward, and again went through our contortions. It wasn’t until we were back on the ground, with paper and pencil, that I was able to follow through and understand the gyrations we had experienced.
Al Frazier was right: reporting on the F/A-18 has made my job a very interesting one, indeed.
Image Gallery
Eugene Ely, a civilian pilot flying a Curtiss biplane, makes the first landing on a ship, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, anchored in San Francisco Bay, on 18 January 1911. (Smithsonian Institution.)
Ely takes off from Pennsylvania and flies ashore, duplicating his first takeoff from a ship two months earlier. (Curtiss Wright Co. photo from Smithsonian Institution.)
Royal Flying Corps aircraft similar to the Morane-Saulnier Roland Garros fitted with a machine gun that could shoot through the propeller. (Smithsonian Institution.)
A plane prepares for takeoff from a sea-based aircraft carrier to rendezvous with the airborne carrier Los Angeles. (U.S. Navy photo from Smithsonian Institution.)
A biplane “lands” on a retrieval mechanism extending below the hangar bay of the airship Los Angeles at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1931. Note the metal guard extending out over the propeller. (U.S. Navy photo front Smithsonian Institution.)
In this painting by artist R. G. Smith, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers are shown attacking Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway on 3 June 1942. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
Hellcats preparing for takeoff jam the decks of a carrier late in World War II. (Smithsonian Institution.)
A Grumman F-6F-5N Hellcat of VMF-511 gets the signal for takeoff near Okinawa in May 1945. Note the radar antenna protruding from the right wing. Installed late in the war, radar permitted the Hellcat to operate as a night fighter. (Smithsonian Institution.)
The famed gull-winged F-4U Corsair, at first considered too hot for carrier operations, became one of the workhorses of both World War II and the Korean War. (Sciences Services Inc. photo from Smithsonian Institution.)
A landing signals officer, or LSO, uses colored paddles to guide a Corsair to a carrier landing. (Smithsonian Institution.)
Here, in the first official photo of the plane in its new role as a fighter bomber, a Corsair is shown on 11 September 1944 carrying a thousand-pound bomb. (Chance Vought Aircraft Division of United Aircraft.)
Photographic proof of the existence of a new Soviet bomber, the Tu-26 Backfire, sent a shock wave through the U.S. Navy’s hierarchy in 1970. The four-man plane is seen here with its wings fully extended. For supersonic flight, they are swept back close to the fuselage. (Smithsonian Institution.)
Jack Krings, chief McDonnell Douglas test pilot, takes the new F/A-18 Hornet into the air for the first time on 11 November 1978. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
The Northrop YF-17 prototype, left, and the F/A-18, right, look almost like twins. But beneath the surface similarity, the Hornet is almost entirely different—bigger, heavier, and no longer a cheap lightweight fighter. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
The U.S.S. Coral Sea is shown here with an F/A-18 ready for takeoff. During the raid on Libya on 14 April 1986, the Coral Sea was ready to respond with Hornets if Libyan fighters had taken to the air. (U.S. Navy photo.)
Artist’s rendering of L.T.V. and General Dynamics’ navy F-16s flying from the U.S.S. Enterprise. The McDonnell Douglas-Northrop team won the competition with their F/A-18, and the F-16 never joined the fleet except for use in air combat training. (L.T.V. Aerospace.)
The main landing gear of the Hornet dangles awkwardly below the plane, seeming to grope for the deck, as a pilot comes in for a carrier landing. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
The main landing gear of a Hornet abruptly changes its appearance as the plane settles onto a carrier deck. The gear bends at the “knees” and seems to crouch beneath the plane. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
As one Hornet banks away to the left, it provides a clear view of the leading edge extension—the LEX—that extends forward from the wing to the area beneath the cockpit. Each plane carries two Sidewinder missiles on the wingtips and a 330-gallon external fuel tank on the centerline. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
Air sweeping over the LEX moves so rapidly that it forms a visible gray fog.
This vortex gives the tall vertical tails a bite on the air, but also causes buffeting so severe that it damages the tail structure. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
A smoke generator mounted near the nose of this test plane operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration gives a clear view of the vortex aiming toward the tail like a powerful fist. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration.)
The navy and McDonnell Douglas rushed to get the Hornet back in the air by attaching cleats at the base of the tail to give added strength and prevent cracking of the beams that support the tails. The three strengthening cleats can be seen at the base of the left vertical tail. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
These two planes of Strike-Fighter Squadron 192 have been equipped with the new “LEX fence,” the small piece of metal protruding from the upper surface of the wing just behind the “USS Midway” lettering. (U.S. Navy Photo by Lt. Comdr. T. B. Surbridge.)
The General Electric F-404 engine has proved one of the stellar features of the F/A-18. It is designed for ease of maintenance and can be removed and replaced in a few minutes. (General Electric Co.)
The new “glass cockpit” pioneered in the F/A-18. The pilot’s principal flight instrument is the Heads-Up Display—the HUD—that projects information on a transparent screen at the top of the cockpit. Three television-like screens help him control his radar, keep track of his location and monitor the performance of his plane. Note the round dials in the lower right corner—the only vestige of the traditional cockpit design. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)
Canada was the first foreign country to obtain the F/A-18. Note the distinctive outline of a cockpit painted on the bottom of the plane by the Canadian air force to confuse hostile pilots during aerial combat. (McDonnell Douglas Co.)