Bogeys and Bandits Read online

  Flight surgeons had a clinical term for such brain paralyses: “cognitive saturation.” It meant the superbly trained pilot in whose education the taxpayers had invested something over two million dollars now possessed the intellectual powers of an orangutan.

  What it came down to was that the Hornet was a new kind of fighter plane. It was a vehicle of the cyberworld. To fly the F/A-18 Hornet—to master this smart-ass airplane—required a certain new faculty, something in addition to the traditional stick-and-rudder skills of the fighter pilot. You had to think and speak computerese. All the presentation of cockpit data was digital. Gone were the days when you just jumped in the cockpit of a fighter and flew the thing by the seat of your pants. Now you were supposed to interface with the machine.

  Oh, sure, certain fundamentals about flying hadn’t changed. To be a good fighter pilot, you still had to be a good pilot. But these days it helped if you were also a techno-geek.

  <>

  Before their first flight, the students received a briefing from Lieutenant Tom “Slab” Bacon. Slab was the Familiarization Phase training officer. He was blonde-haired, short and muscular, with an unlined face that made him look, everyone guessed, about sixteen years old. He wore a shoulder patch on his flight suit that signified he had logged a thousand hours in the F/A-18 Hornet.

  Slab’s job was to shepherd the class through the initial phase of their training, which included the ground school where they would learn all the Hornet’s high tech systems and performance parameters, the simulator course they would fly prior to actually getting into an airplane, and then the real thing—their initial flights in the F/A-18.

  Slab talked to the nuggets about procedures, about emergencies, about landings. “After a couple normal landings, we’ll do an engine-out approach and landing. It does just fine on one engine. In fact, students initially do better with one-engine approaches than with two because they don’t overpower the jet, using too much throttle.”

  To help slow the jet on the landing roll out, the Hornet pilot was supposed to bring the control stick between his legs back toward him slightly. This action caused the big horizontal control surfaces on the tail, called stabilators, to tilt to a twenty five degree angle, which added aerodynamic drag and helped brake the jet to a stop on the runway.

  There was a small hazard associated with this. “Don’t bring the stick all the way back in your lap,” Slab warned. “All you need is about an inch-and-a-half. That will get you full deflection of the stabilator. Anything more than that, and you’ve got the stick uncomfortably close to the ejection seat handle.”

  The ejection seat handle was a pair of lanyards attached to the seat between the pilot’s thighs. With either or both hands, the pilot could grab the handles and pull, firing the rocket-motored ejection seat, blasting himself up and away from the jet. He could do this anywhere, even on the ground. The parachute would deploy in time to save him.

  Slab told the wide-eyed students a true story. “This actually happened. On the landing roll the pilot yanked the stick all the way back to the stop. One of the buttons on the top of the stick got caught in the ejection seat handle. Then he shoved the stick forward again and—Pow! —there he went. Big surprise. He ejected himself right there on the runway.”

  The pilot was attached to the seat and the parachute by “Koch” fittings, which were four metal clip-buckles, one at each shoulder and hip that fastened the pilot’s torso harness to the straps in the airplane. The Koch fittings were designed to be fastened and released by two fingers. The fittings were the pilot’s anchor point to his life-saving parachute.

  Slab told another eye-opener. “Check your Koch fittings. They have been forgotten. . .”

  One of those events was witnessed by everyone on an aircraft carrier deck. A Hornet was launched from the bow catapult, then experienced some sort of control failure. What happened next was a tableau that no one watching from the flight deck or the bridge of the ship would forget.

  As the jet plummeted like a sick eagle toward the ocean, the pilot ejected. Back on the ship they saw the tiny dark shape of the pilot pop out of the fighter, soaring in an upward arc. They saw him separate from the seat, just like he was supposed to. And they waited for the long white plume of parachute to blossom above him, like it was supposed to.

  And they waited.

  And while they waited they watched the small dark shape of the pilot arc downward toward the ocean. Not until the last instant did it suddenly became clear to them what was happening.

  No parachute.

  Sploosh. And then nothing.

  The image of that little splash on the ocean remained frozen in the memories of a hundred witnesses.

  That one got to them. No one in the briefing room spoke for a moment. They sat there for a moment imagining what it would be like. . . grabbing the handles and punching out of the cockpit of your stricken fighter—Whoom!—a successful ejection, and then feeling the seat separating from you just like it was supposed to. . . waiting for the parachute to open. . . tumbling through space, waiting, waiting. . . then the horrible realization. . .

  Yeah, man. Great idea. Check those damn Koch fittings.

  <>

  To no one’s surprise, the first to finish the ground training course was Chip Van Doren, the undisputed champion computer whiz of class 2-95. He had zipped through the course—the CAI and the simulators—ahead of everyone else, and was scheduled for FFAM-101—the first real airplane hop.

  First flights in the Hornet were always in a two-seater—the F/A-18B or F/A-18D model. It was like driver’s ed. The instructor rode the back seat where he could coach, observe, critique, and keep the neophyte fighter pilot out of serious trouble.

  Chip Van Doren’s instructor for his first Hornet flight was Slab Bacon, which pleased Van Doren. The nuggets liked Slab. He was an up-front guy who gave them no bullshit.

  Flight instructors tended to fall into two categories: those who taught, and those who critiqued. Of the two roles, the easiest by far was critique: itemizing the bungling student’s errors and dumping them on him like a litany of sins. The tougher and more useful task was to teach. Good instructors taught by example. And they allowed—with a watchful eye—a student to make his own mistakes, thereby enabling him to learn what not to do.

  Most of all, good instructors had to be cool. Unflappable. They had to remain calm even when it seemed clear that a particular student had been sent from hell just to kill them. Maintaining coolness was a prerequisite when you were instructing nuggets.

  Van Doren showed up two hours early. It was his duty to fill out the mission briefing board that covered most of one wall in the briefing room. The student was supposed to write in with grease pencil all the data for the upcoming flight: times, communications frequencies, weather, call signs, operating area, divert information, fuel required. On the bottom of the board he wrote the emergency-of-the-day, the selected procedure that every student that day would be required to recite during his briefing.

  Slab appeared precisely at brief time. He reviewed everything on the day’s agenda. He had Van Doren recite all the required emergency memory items: ejection procedures, spin recovery, engine failure. Slab went through the entire flight from engine start to the final landing. He hit every detail, including how to adjust the seat and where to place your feet when climbing the boarding ladder. It was the longest and most thorough briefing Van Doren had ever endured.

  When he was finished, Slab said, “Any questions?”

  <>

  It was one of those crisp February afternoons in Florida, with high cumulus and a sky so clear and blue you could see forever. Chip Van Doren and Slab Bacon walked across the ramp toward their waiting F/A-18D, number 107. Van Doren felt like a pack mule with all the gear strapped and fastened to him—the clunky flight boots, the “G” suit fastened around his legs and torso, the torso harness with the Koch fittings that would attach him to the seat straps in the cockpit, the SV-2 survival vest containing the infla
table life vest and about ten pounds of paraphernalia—flares, lights, radio, mirror, water,—stuff intended to keep him alive wherever he might come down. They wore their helmets, complying with the air wing requirement that everyone—mechanics, fuelers, pilots—wear a hard hat on the flight line.

  As pilots did for every flight, they made a walk-around inspection. Slab led the way, pointing out to Van Doren the myriad items that had to be checked—landing gear struts, tires, panel fasteners, weapons pylons. They squatted under the fuselage, peered into engine inlets, exhausts, looked for leaks and cracks and dents. The Hornet’s engines were susceptible to FOD (foreign object damage)—nuts and screws and debris that the jet’s intakes vacuumed up from the ramp like a Hoover gobbling dirt. A single one-inch bolt going through one of the Hornet’s intakes would transform the GE-manufactured turbo-jet, low bypass engine to a disintegrating, fire-spitting, blade-throwing creature from hell.

  As he walked around the jet, bumping things, struggling with the fastener of an inspection panel, banging his head on a weapons pylon (so that was why they wore helmets!), Van Doren could feel the plane captain staring at him. “Plane captain” was the Navy’s appellation for “crew chief,” the sailor who was responsible for the cleaning and fueling and general airworthiness of that particular airplane. He was a youngish kid, all of nineteen or so. He was gawking at Van Doren like he’d just landed from Alpha Centauri.

  “This is his first time,” Slab explained, unnecessarily.

  “Yes, sir, I can tell,” said the kid.

  The two of them, Slab and the plane captain, got Van Doren strapped into the front seat, a chore akin to plumbing a patient for multiple surgery. The safety pin was pulled from the Martin Baker ejection seat, which has a separate handle on the side to arm and disarm the mechanism to prevent ejection on the ground. Shoulder and waist straps were attached to the fittings on his torso harness. Four retention straps, one around each thigh and ankle, were attached to keep his legs from flailing during a high speed ejection. An oxygen hose and radio coupling mated to a connector on the torso harness. The hose from the “G” suit plugged into a connector on the left console, which supplied the air that inflated the pilot’s G suit.

  G’s were units of acceleration. One G was the force of the earth’s gravity. When the jet pulled up steeply, or pulled out of a dive, the Gs increased from the normal one G to four or five or more, increasing the pilot’s effective weight by four or five times. The blood drained from his head to his lower body, causing “grayout”—a loss of vision and wooziness and, ultimately, “blackout”—unconsciousness. With the onset of Gs, the G suit inflated around the pilot, squeezing his legs and abdomen, preventing some of the flow of blood downward from his brain and helping him maintain consciousness. Wearing an inflated G suit felt like having a boa constrictor wrapped around the lower half of your body.

  Van Doren was finally installed in the front seat of the Hornet. When Slab had settled himself into the rear cockpit, they started the engines. On the plane captain’s signal, they deployed the flaps, the speed brakes, actuated all the flight controls, while he checked them all from the outside. With the pre-taxi checks complete, off they went.

  “Cecil Tower, Roman one-oh-seven ready for take off,” Van Doren said on the radio.

  “Roger, Roman one-oh-seven,” replied the tower controller. “Wind zero-seven-zero at eight, cleared for take off on runway niner left. Switch to departure control.”

  Then came the part that Van Doren had not experienced in the simulator. No matter how realistic the sights and sounds of a modern simulator, they didn’t replicate the unique chemistry of flight: that rush of adrenaline when you release the brakes and push the throttles forward, past the detent into afterburner and—Babloom!—you hear and feel the two torches of flame behind the jet nozzles and—holy shit!—you feel yourself shoved back in the seat as the beast goes hurtling down the runway like a drag racer out of the chute.

  That was something else new to the nuggets: afterburners. The jets they learned to fly in the training command were equipped with basic jet engines. No afterburners. The afterburner of a jet engine was a thrust augmenter, like the passing gear of a car’s automatic transmission. You selected afterburner by pushing the jet’s throttles all the way to full power, then nudging them even further past a detent. The exhaust nozzles of the jet engines widened and a spray of raw fuel was injected into the exhaust blasts.

  Chip Van Doren was making his first afterburner take off. It felt like popping a wheelie on a motorcycle. Lighting the afterburners produced a satisfying deep-throated roar and a blossom of flame like the tail of a comet from each exhaust. It instantly upped the thrust of each General Electric F404 turbofan engine from an impressive 10,000 pounds of thrust to a neck-wrenching 16,000 pounds. The afterburners on a jet fighter were used for short spurts of maximum energy.

  It was another joke—and a standard condition—that the nugget fighter pilot was at least forty miles behind the jet on his first flight. His brain was still back there behind the airplane somewhere, trying to catch up.

  So it was with Van Doren. They were already at flying speed, still barreling down the runway, when he heard Slab say gently on the intercom, “Rotate, Chip. Let’s go flying.”

  Oh, yeah.

  Van Doren was mesmerized, watching the concrete runway zip past like a video in fast forward. He “rotated”—nudged back on the stick—which lifted the nose of the fighter upward.

  The Hornet leaped into the air. They were flying. Really flying, and accelerating like a fox in a forest fire.

  “Gear up, Chip.”

  Oh, yeah.

  Still mesmerized. The Hornet was accelerating so fast it was already close to the limiting speed for the landing gear. If you delayed retracting the landing gear on an afterburner take off, the jet’s excessive speed would cause serious damage to the extended landing gear.

  More gentle suggestions. “Anticipate the level off, Chip. We’re climbing ten thousand feet a minute.”

  Oh, yeah.

  And so it went. Slab suggesting, reminding, coaching, Chip Van Doren going through his simulator-taught procedures, staying a good solid forty miles behind the Hornet.

  Out in the operating area, off the Florida coastline east of St. Augustine, they leveled at twenty thousand feet. Van Doren put the Hornet through the basic aerobatics he had rehearsed in the simulator. He did barrel rolls—big, graceful corkscrew rolls through the sky. Then he did aileron rolls, which were quick, neck-snapping rolls around the fighter’s center line. The Hornet was capable of a roll rate of 720 ° per second, meaning it could perform two complete revolutions around its axis every second.

  Van Doren did a loop—a great vertical circle in the sky. Then a split-S—rolling the jet inverted and pulling the nose straight down to complete the bottom half of a loop. They practiced slow flight—very slow flight—which the Hornet could do in a way never seen before in a Navy fighter.

  The Hornet could literally stand on its tail, almost in a hover, with its nose cocked fifty or more degrees above the horizon, indicating only a little over a hundred knots of airspeed. This was called “high alpha”—engineering lexicon for high angle of attack, the angle at which the airplane’s wings cut (attacked) through the air. The Hornet possessed this unique ability to fly at very high alpha, screeching almost to a stop in the sky, maneuvering behind the tails of its supersonic opponents.

  Then they flew supersonic. Van Doren dropped the fighter’s nose, shoved the throttles into afterburner, and flew beyond the so-called “sound barrier,” something he had never done before in the subsonic T-2 and A-4 trainers he had previously flown. It was something the Hornet did with ease.

  Van Doren watched the digital Mach indicator on the HUD (Head Up Display) in the windshield show .99 Mach (meaning 99% the speed of sound), then 1.0 (100%). He let it build until he saw 1.2 Mach. One-hundred-twenty percent the speed of sound.

  That’s all there was to it. The only way he co
uld see that they had shattered the once-unattainable “sound barrier” was by the little yellow digital indication. In the F/A-18 Hornet the “sound barrier” was not a barrier at all. It was just another number.

  When they had finished practicing in the operating area, they returned to the traffic pattern at Cecil Field for touch and go landings. Van Doren was gaining confidence with the new jet. He was catching up—almost. He had gone from forty miles behind the jet to about twenty.

  Slab was prompting less now, letting Van Doren figure things out for himself. This was what familiarization flights were supposed to be about: letting the student get familiar with the beast he was riding. It was something akin to the contest of wills between a new rider and his horse.

  Slab demonstrated the landing, using the Fresnel Lens—the optical glide path indicator that was installed on every carrier and air station in the Navy. The Fresnel Lens was a mirror-like board at the edge of the runway, next to the landing area. The mirror had a row of green datum lights on each side, and an amber “meatball” in the lens that moved up and down according to the pilot’s position on the glide slope.

  When the pilot saw that the ball was exactly between the green datum lights on the lens out there by the runway, it told him that he was on the correct descent path. If he scrupulously “flew” the ball, meaning that he kept it in the middle of the lens—between the green datum lights—his jet would plunk into the landing area exactly on target. If he let the ball go high, off the top of the lens, the jet was too high on its approach path. It would land beyond the touchdown zone, missing the arresting wires of the aircraft carrier and carom off the deck back into the air. Worse, if the ball went low, settling off the bottom of the lens, meaning he had gone below the glide path, it meant he was toast. Literally. His fighter crashed into the unyielding blunt ramp of the aircraft carrier.