Bogeys and Bandits Page 13

  No one was climbing out of the other helicopter.

  No one had been pulled out of the ocean.

  In the ejection sequence, which he had initiated when he pulled the ejection handle, the back seat in the Tomcat fighter fired first, leaving the cockpit at angle slightly to the right of vertical. Four-tenths of a second later the front seat fired, angling out slightly to the left.

  The Tomcat was rolling hard to the left when the crew ejected, and Klemish’s trajectory had been nearly parallel to the surface of the ocean. Which meant that the pilot, ejecting an instant later and more to the left, must have been fired directly into the water—before the parachute had a chance to deploy.

  That’s the way it looked on the video tape. In replay after replay, you could see the deadly sequence—the big fighter slewing and yawing out of control, then the moment of truth. . . snapping to the left and plunging toward the ocean. You could see the little dark shapes of the crew members hurtling from the cockpit as the jet entered its death dive.

  From one of the shapes streams a white plume of parachute. From the other, nothing. The other little dark shape smacks the water like a stone.

  She was killed instantly. Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen and her F-14 fighter sank to the floor of the Pacific.

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  The news traveled, literally, at the speed of light. The report was flashed from the Abraham Lincoln to the Naval Air Forces, Pacific command at North Island, San Diego, whose public affairs department dispensed it to the media. They consumed it like hungry jackals.

  The Navy’s first woman fighter pilot was killed today in a training accident while. . .

  Even before an official accident investigation could begin, the issue of gender, like a renascent plague that began with the Tailhook affair, was visiting the Navy again. Recriminations were flying like flak bursts:

  “She shouldn’t have been there. . .”

  “The Navy was pushing her to do something she wasn’t ready for. . .”

  “It proves that women shouldn’t be flying jets. . .”

  “They gave her preferential treatment, and it got her killed. . .”

  “Well, the damned liberals and feminists finally got what they’ve been wanting: They got someone killed.”

  The repartee in the press was nasty. To the opponents of gender integration, the Hultgreen accident was proof positive that women didn’t belong in the cockpits of jets. Letters to the editor flooded the pages of Aviation Week, Navy Times, and newspapers like the San Diego Union that had large military readerships. Most of the letters were from outraged males who were convinced that Kara Hultgreen had been allowed to kill herself in order to serve a political agenda of the Clinton administration.

  The Navy found itself enmeshed in yet another media war. And in true Navy fashion, it waged this new media war just like it waged all the old media wars: It lost.

  It wasn’t that the Navy public affairs office actually. . . lied about the circumstances of the accident. They just omitted some pertinent details. And obfuscated some others.

  For example, the Navy declared that Lieutenant Hultgreen was a competent and qualified carrier aviator, one with “above average” grades for landing the F-14 aboard carriers. Furthermore, the accident in which she lost her life, they declared, had nothing to do with “pilot error.” She was the victim of an insidious failure of the Tomcat’s left engine, from which virtually no one, experienced or not, could have recovered.

  This information, the Navy said, was all corroborated in the MIR—the Mishap Investigation Report—which, of course, was privileged information and not for scrutiny by parties outside the Navy.

  Which might have put a lid on the controversy. But then someone from inside the establishment, presumably a disgruntled male aviator, put the entire MIR on the internet, via the America On Line service. Suddenly the facts were out there for everyone to see.

  Yes, the accident board had concluded that the left engine probably did experience a compressor stall, causing it to fail. But the failure was exacerbated and probably caused by the pilot’s yawing of the nose to the left, compensating for the overshooting approach to the carrier. Yawing the nose, in effect flying sideways through the air, blocked the flow of air through the left engine air intake and caused the engine to stall. The airplane also had a history of a sticking bleed valve, which in these circumstances would also have contributed to the stall. Whether or not she knew an engine had failed, she did not compensate with the necessary input of right rudder that would have kept the jet flying straight. She allowed the jet to slow to an unsafe airspeed. By the time the LSO radioed “Wave Off!” and she responded with a burst of power, only the right engine responded.

  What happened next was what fighter pilots called a “departure.” It meant that the jet stalled and snap-rolled to the left.

  What caused the accident? According to the Mishap Investigation Report:

  Aircrew factor Pilot attempt to salvage overshooting approach led to reduced engine stall margin, contributing to left eng comp stall. RAC II.

  Aircrew factor Pilot failed to execute proper single eng wave off procedures. Aircrew factor Pilot failed to inform Radar Intercept Officer (Lt. Klemish) of single eng emergency.

  Material factor Left engine directional control valve stuck in bleeds closed position.

  Aircrew factor MP (Mishap Pilot) failed to make timely decision to eject. MP lost situational awareness, failed to scan AOA (Angle of Attack), allowed pitch attitude to slowly increase and exceeded maximum controllable AOA of 20 units.

  The causal factors of this mishap and injury are a result of overcontrol, external distraction, cognitive saturation, channelized attention, wear debris, complacency and problem not foreseeable.

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  Hultgreen had already completed RAG training—the qualification program in the F-14—and reported to her fleet squadron, VF-213, which was scheduled to deploy aboard the Lincoln. Despite the Navy’s early bumbling attempts to categorize her as an “above average” aviator, she had, in fact, a record that put her in the lower middle. Although she had performed well in the tactical phases of training, she had failed on her first carrier qualification attempt, having a particularly difficult time landing aboard the carrier at night.

  On her second shot at the carrier, Lieutenant Hultgreen passed, qualifying aboard the ship for day and night operations. At the time of her last flight, she had accrued over 1200 total flight hours and 58 carrier landings.

  Was Hultgreen “above average?” No.

  Was she “qualified?” Indisputably.

  Then why did she crash?

  The grim truth about aviation accidents was that most were caused by pilots. Often the fatal sequence began with a subtle mistake, an oversight, a mishandled control input. And then another event, sometimes unrelated, compounded the mistake. If the pilot was unprepared, or inexperienced, or unlucky—he, or she, became a statistic.

  Which is what happened to Kara Hultgreen. Her flawed landing attempt on the Lincoln deteriorated into a life or death scenario faster than she could have imagined.

  During a lull in the Hultgreen controversy, someone had the sense to point out that the violent death of a fighter pilot, really, wasn’t a rare event. Kara Hultgreen happened to be the tenth student fighter pilot to die in a Navy training accident since 1992. Furthermore, of all F-14 candidates training to land aboard aircraft carriers, fully twenty-four percent failed on their first qualifying attempt.

  All in all, the circumstances of the accident were quite unremarkable. The only thing that made them remarkable was that Lieutenant Hultgreen was a woman.

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  Even Kara Hultgreen’s funeral became a flashpoint for male anger. Why, some demanded, did the death of one aviator generate such a wave of high level mourning? If all the stuff about gender integration and equal treatment and mutual respect were really true, why weren’t deceased women pilots treated the same as their dead male colleagues?

  When a male f
ighter pilot bit the big one and immolated himself in a smoking crater somewhere, who came to his casketless farewell? If you were the deceased and a mere lieutenant—a male lieutenant—what you got was a handful of squadron buddies, your folks, siblings, wife or girl friend, all of whom didn’t fill the first two rows of the chapel. The President definitely wouldn’t show up. Nor would the Chief of Naval Operations. Probably not even one lousy congressman.

  A chaplain would be there to lead the crowd in a few verses of the Navy Hymn. Your commanding officer, of course, would be there. He would be looking morose, mostly because you had screwed up his squadron’s safety record. Someone might recite John Gillespie Magee’s poem, High Flight.

  And that was it. Afterwards the squadron pilots would mumble their condolences and head for the parking lot. They’d shuck their uniforms and reassemble at some joint downtown like Hop’s or the Swinging Door and knock back a few in remembrance of ol’ Whatzisname.

  That’s the way it had always been. At least, that’s the way it had always been until the Navy had women pilots.

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  By early 1995, three months after the Hultgreen accident, the other women naval aviators were feeling the heat of the controversy. The most bellicose voices in the military were those decrying the “double standard” that they believed was being applied to women in naval aviation. Female aviators, they charged, were graded on a different, which was to say, easier scale. In other words, women were not squeezing through the same Fine Mesh that men candidates did. Was the military pursuing a gender-biased form of affirmative action?

  Whether or not it was true, the controversy was making life stickier for the two surviving members of the Terrific Trio. The word was filtering down from the A-6 RAG in Oceana, Virginia, that Lieutenant Bonnie Detweiler was having her own share of trouble checking out in the A-6 Intruder. She had already received more than one SOD (down) and was in danger of washing out.

  And down at Cecil Field, Lieutenant Sally “Shrike” Hopkins, in the F/A-18 RAG, was making herself even more controversial.

  One of the questions fired at the Navy after the Hultgreen crash was, Why didn’t women aviators receive FNAEBs (Fleet Naval Aviator Evaluation Boards)? A FNAEB (pronounced “Feenab”) was a formal board of inquiry that was conducted when an aviator experienced difficulty in a phase of training. A FNAEB investigated the pilot’s problems and then recommended whether he or she should be retained. It was pointed out that men candidates usually found themselves standing before a FNAEB for exactly the same transgressions that women seemed to be getting away with. Both Hultgreen and another woman aviator going through F-14 training had received low enough grades to merit a FNAEB.

  FNAEBs? Was it true that women weren’t getting them?

  It became a moot question. In March, 1995, another member of the Terrific Trio bit the dust, but not in the same spectacular manner. Bonnie Detweiler failed her carrier qualification training. She received a FNAEB and was removed from further A-6 training. She would not be going to a fleet squadron.

  That left Shrike Hopkins. Of the brave and hopeful Terrific Trio, she was the only one still in the game. And things weren’t looking so good for her. Shrike had just gotten another down.

  Part Two

  METAMORPHOSIS

  So the pilot kept it to himself, along with an even more indescribable. . . an even more sinfully inconfessable. . . feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind, lone bearers of the right stuff.

  TOM WOLFE: THE RIGHT STUFF

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “A” IS FOR ATTACK

  “Bombardment is the sledge hammer of airpower.”

  -- Claire Lee Chennault, AVG (Flying Tigers)

  Attack.

  In Naval aviation parlance it always had a specific meaning. It designated that realm of naval aviation devoted to the obliteration of enemies on the ground. An attack pilot was a bomber. And a rocketer. And a strafer.

  In the hierarchy of military flying, being an attack pilot was not at the apex of the ziggurat. Attack pilots were the mud-fighters, the guys who flew down in the weeds and delivered fire on the heads of the enemy. And who took fire in return.

  Being an attack pilot had always implied a certain expendability. Losses were expected. It was like walking into a bar room brawl: You always hoped to land a lucky first punch and take the guy out, but you knew you’d probably take a few hits yourself. That’s just the way it had always been for attack pilots. That’s the way it was in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam, where the Navy’s greatest aircraft losses by far were in the attack squadrons.

  Fighter pilots, by contrast, remained high above the mud-fighting. They dwelled in the thin pure stratosphere, tracing their lovely contrails, awaiting the summons to go joust with an incoming MiG. Fighter pilots wouldn’t think of spoiling the sleek lines of their jets with ugly bomb racks, nor would they burden their nimble fighters with crude tons of high explosives. After all, fighters were supposed to go fast, like thoroughbreds, not plod over the paddies like aerial pack mules.

  For decades the fighter/attack enmity in naval aviation had festered like a congenital jungle itch. This new business of “attack”—the “A” in FA (“F” was “fighter”)—still offended the fighter community. The new air-to-mud mission, meaning the strike function of the so-called F/A-18 strike fighters, was somehow undignified. Bombing? Flinging ordnance (the Navy’s label for variety of munitions) at grunts on the ground? The old label, “fighter pilot,” used to mean only one thing: You fought other airplanes. Air-to-air. Period. Like knights of old, you climbed onto your steed and went one-on-one against another guy on his steed. It was all a modernized evolution of the old single combat warrior ethic.

  Fighter pilots were the king of the hill. Everything else that flew, including the lowly strike pukes, were simply targets for real fighter pilots. Fighter pilots were the hunters and killers. The old placards still hung in ready rooms: If you ain’t a fighter pilot, you ain’t shit. . .

  Well, times had changed. The aging F-14 Tomcat, which had reigned for over twenty years as the weapon of choice of any self-respecting Navy fighter pilot, was losing its potency. The Tomcat was getting old, and its technology was outdated. Just maintaining the complex fighter, with its variable-sweep wings and incredibly complicated systems, was a materiel officer’s nightmare.

  Sure, on a good day the Tomcat, in the hands of an aggressive pilot, could still mix it up with any of the hot new fighters, including the F/A-18 Hornet. But the good days were getting rare. The Tomcat’s glory days were over.

  Which meant that the classic, king-of-the-hill, Top Gun fighter pilot stereotype was out. He was being replaced by a new breed: the strike fighter pilot. The pilot for all seasons. With a machine like the F/A-18 Hornet, the strike fighter pilot could launch with a load of bombs, engage and kill an enemy fighter, then go on to destroy a surface target.

  It was the “strike” in strike fighter. It was what the nuggets of 2-95 would learn next.

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  Except for Fam (Familiarization) phase, all the other phases of training—strike, fighter weapons, CQ (Carrier Qualification)—were done on “dets” —detachments—away from home base. Married pilots—students and instructors alike—had homes and families in Jacksonville, close to Cecil Field. Depending on your marital status and social proclivity, dets were either great fun or worse than being deployed aboard a carrier. In places like Key West or Fallon, you lived in a BOQ (Bachelor Officers’ Quarters) and ate Navy chow, at least breakfast and lunch. Most evenings you socialized with your squadronmates at the officers’ club bar, rolling dice for rounds of beer and swapping tales of old adventures. On CQ dets you lived aboard the carrier for perhaps a week or more.

  Going off on det was like going to summer camp. You got away from the day-to-day tedium of the squadron, with its paperwork and mandatory meetings and command scrutiny. You also got away from home, which for some was an occasion to loosen up and sow a few oats. Being
on det was the equivalent of a businessman’s convention in another city. It was a time for attitude adjustment.

  Best of all, going on det was fun. You went to places like Key West, the laid-back party island down at the tip of Florida, or out to the high desert in Fallon, Nevada, with its tumbleweeds, rattlesnakes, and nearby Reno casinos. Being off on det also dissolved some of the caste distinction of the training environment. Instructors and students could drop the instructor/student uptightness and kid each other a bit. They convened every evening at the BOQ bar to knock back a few—sometimes more than a few—and rehashed the day’s adventures out there on the weapons range.

  Everyone loved strike phase because it was conducted way out in the high desert of Fallon, Nevada, far from Cecil Field and the rank-heavy atmosphere of the strike fighter command. Fallon was the spiritual home of the attack community. It was also the site of the Naval Strike Warfare Center, called “Strike U.”

  Fallon was the place where you could get your Hornet down in the weeds, ripping across the sagebrush like a roadrunner in high blower. Out there you learned to fly at four-hundred or so knots, a hundred feet above the dirt, avoiding enemy fighters and missiles, penetrating the defenses of a hostile country.

  You got to shoot guns, fire rockets, drop real—not just practice—bombs. All this you did on real targets—tanks, trucks, buildings. And with thousands of square miles of open space, they could practice low level navigation at weed-top altitude. The Fallon range was the world’s greatest amusement park for strike fighter pilots.

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  Before going to Fallon, the nuggets flew three low-level navigation sorties from Cecil Field. The first was with an instructor in the back seat. Then they flew a solo hop, with the instructor flying behind them in a chase plane, like an airborne baby-sitter. Each student also flew a radar navigation training mission, riding in the back seat of one of the squadron’s tandem-seat Hornets, with his head buried in the jet’s APG-65 radar display.