The Good Wingman

When I was a plebe midshipman at the Severn River Trade School, CAPT Dick Stratton came to speak to us one fine day in the fall. We were always tired in those days, always harassed and always getting “motivational” speeches from officers so senior to us that there was no real frame of reference to their experiences. We often dozed off.

Captains were, after all, unspeakably old men. Ancient.

But Stratton was different, we knew of him. We’d seen him over the summer during leadership courses, in grainy video clips and photos, wearing the gray and black, vertically striped sack that was issued to guests of the Hanoi Hilton prison system.

He’d gotten bagged – or, to use his own words “shot himself down” – on an H&I mission over a northern canal system in January, 1967. He’d unloaded a salvo of 2.75″ FFAR – folding fin rockets – on a hostile convoy of barges bringing supplies to the Viet Cong down country. Some of the rocket fins didn’t open, they interfered with each other and the next thing he knew he’d taken debris down the intake of his single-motor A-4E Skyhawk. It ran rough for a bit even as he turned for the coast, but he punched out when the motor quit. He was treated roughly after capture and more roughly still over the next 6+ years of his captivity. As a POW, he courageously endured the worst forms of physical and mental torture imaginable and survived – like almost every one of them – with his honor intact.

There are no heroes in lost wars, we are not permitted them, not at least for many years afterwards. But the POWs were the next best thing to heroes that we were allowed from what was still a suppurating wound of national disgrace in the fall of 1978 – it had only been three years since the fall of Saigon, and the bad memories, shame and blame-casting were still fresh.

We stayed awake for Dick Stratton. We listened to him.

Continued:

By lex, on June 7th, 2007

Every strike fighter pilot worth his salt has a dream, a very simple one: In this dream he will launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea loaded for bear. Having marshalled the forces at his disposal – the dream is scaleable by experience and qualification: The forces at a wingman’s disposal are himself, his jet and the weapons he is carrying, while a strike lead may have 18-20 other aircraft attuned to his every whim – he will navigate his craft towards a target, acquire the target successfully and deliver his ordnance precisely. He will capture the moment of the target’s destruction on video tape in his cockpit, a kind of scalp-taking for the digital age – call it: Proof of death. Having successfully cleared the defenses around the target – if it was worth attacking, it was worth defending – he will regain situational awareness to his team members, reset the formation and head back to the ship, making good time.

And then it will happen: Having transitioned out of air-to-ground mode and back to air-to-air, he will dig something out of the ground on the margins of his radar, something that doesn’t make sense, not one of us, moving fast, climbing – heading our way. Or else the watchful eyes of an E-2 NFO will report a pop-up contact between his group and the ship, altitude low, identity unknown. Or maybe even something at six o’clock, moving fast. Moving very fast. Closing.

By lex, on June 6th, 2007

It was late January or early February almost ten years ago when my wingman and I rattled down the cats, each of us carrying one of the then brand-new Joint Stand-Off Weapons (JSOW). In the best traditions of the strike fighter service, we were also carrying an AIM-120 AMRAAM mounted on a cheek station, with a forward looking infrared (FLIR) pod on its opposite. Each of us also had a pair of AIM-9M Sidewinders on our wingtips and of course a full drum of 20mm in the nose. We were ready to strut down main street.

Continued:

Being that I’m going to be sort of busy for the next ten days or so I’m going to treat you all to a five part story by Lex to keep you all entertained whilst I fly the cold northern skies.  Enjoy, it’s one of my favorites. 

Mugger was his name, or his callsign anyway – or very nearly, names having been minimally altered to prevent being placed on somebody’s “People to Kill” list, just in case. He was a drag-knuckle F-14 fighter pilot of the ould mould, flight suit zipped down to his navel, chest thrust pugnaciously out, boots unshined and often even untied, their tongues poking out like labrador puppies from under his pants legs and himself generally displaying but a faint relationship to what was commonly conceived to be a proper and military kind of personal appearance. (I think he was an AOCS graduate.) Never to fret though, for Mugger was thoroughly convinced of his own excellence, implacably certain of himself from tip to top and from long established custom needing little more than a mirror and a little privacy to break down his gruff exterior and have him making soft, cooing noises of appreciation.

Unpredictable he was too, whether that’d be behind the boat, accustomed as he was to throwing slippery madness at the LSO platform in the fond (and often vain) hope that we’d take him aboard regardless, with none of your “eat a joes” lights a-flashing in his beady little eyes for to send him round for another go.

Not entirely ungifted as a fighter pilot though: Distinctly do I recollect that one fine day south of Sunni Pakistan, a place where the ship I had the honor to serve aboard was about to spend four days sampling the very modest, not to say uncertain, pleasures of Karachi liberty two days on:

Consulting their whimsy more perhaps than their geography, Mugger and his wingman shot off, cleaned up, and pooted up to the hazy north, in the general direction of our incipient port visit, of which the less we say perhaps the better. The mission they were fragged for had them run at each other in slow-motion like, a-hanging on the blades at max conserve airspeed over the course of a 1+30 cycle. Mostly they were saving gas for the end, the better for to hack and claw at one another in full grunt for that lovely, crowded moment before it was time once again to tip it the timely and head back to Mother, that sour-faced harridan, always looking at her watch and tapping her feet impatiently should ever you lose track of the moment, occupied in your own devices or the pleasures of the instant and coming home a moment late, God forbid and she’d have your head for it.

East and west they’d split once fairly north of the old battle ax herself, and a couple of leisurely, langorous runs they’d had of it too, their RIOs busily doing that RIO-shit in the back, while the pilots themselves tried to stay awake by humming paeans to their own perfection, as was the F-14 pilots’ favorite sport in moments of distraction and ennui.

Not content with merely being gifted, Mugger was also widely recognized – celebrated even, among his peers – as a cheating bastard, upon whom it was always wise to keep an eye. Out. For. So it didn’t much surprise the wingie on his hot turn for the next run when his RO picked up a contact twenty degrees right of the nose, which nothing wrong with that but at ten miles rather than the prescribed forty or so. “Aha,” said LT Perspicacious to himself, “That cork-sticking gasper is trying to sneak up behind me and trail me to the merge, so he is, but watch what I do next.”

I think it’s safe to say that while it’s not true that every night bombing hop ends up as a fiasco, it’s also true that a disproportionate number of fiascoes seem to occur during night bombing evolutions. There is something about hurling yourself at the ground at a 45 degree dive angle at 500 knots while chasing HUD symbology towards a successful release on a poorly lit target in the absence of any visual reference cues while the altimeter unwinds like a yo-yo in the presence of mountainous terrain that tends to capture a man’s attention pretty comprehensively. Sometimes? Between attack runs?

It can be hard to pull your head out of the merely personal and rebuild the “big picture.”

My first night bombing hop in the Hornet occurred when I was a junior officer going through training in the Fleet Replacement Squadron many years ago, back as the earth was cooling and dinosaurs roamed the lands. Our instructor pilot and flight lead for the event was a former F-14 jock whose call sign was “Legion.”

Actually, no. But it might as well have been.

You see, back when the Hornet was brand new and the writing was not yet on the wall we got two sorts of instructors from the Tomcat community: Hard charging guys who wanted a chance to be on the leading edge of a new program and people whom the F-14 bubbas didn’t mind losing to the “other” team. Some of the latter guys had “personality issues” and others were merely slackers. Legion fell in the second category, a essentially capable guy whose destiny it was not to be named a superior flight lead. We are not all of us called to greatness.

Our mission was a four-ship “heavy” ordnance mission against the Bravo 17 live impact area in Fallon, Nevada. If we three students were mildly (or otherwise) surprised to discover that we’d be dropping live ordnance for the first time – and that at night – we didn’t show it. I mean, these instructors were pros, right? They knew what they were doing. And anyway, questioning their authority when it came to physical safety was considered borderline wanking.

They took points off for wanking.

By lex, on July 20th, 2004

In flight refueling is pretty much a survival skill for a fighter pilot, especially if he’s in the US Navy.

(lots of pics, dial-up readers are forewarned)

All fighter designs are compromises – make a fighter big enough to carry a lot of gas, and you generally pay a performance tax. Building more fuel capacity makes the jet larger, requiring larger, more powerful engines to drive it at high subsonic and supersonic speeds. These engines in turn will generally use fuel at a faster rate, meaning diminished returns on the investment. A larger fighter is also a disadvantage on the carrier, where the real estate cost per square foot is probably the highest in the world.

But having a smaller fuel capacity greatly impacts flight operations, since “short-legged” fighters don’t have the endurance required to support maneuvering the ship during cyclic operations – one of the great advantages that aircraft carriers have over airfields is that you can move them around, hide them and such.

The FA-18, which some of you may know is where I passed most of my time spending your tax dollars, is considered at the lower end of the fuel bearing margin for a naval fighter.

Read more:

 As we approach the anniversary of Lex’s passing I’ve decided to resume the weekly tribute posts to the man who inspired me to start this blog.  Enjoy.

Neptunus Lex – The Flight Physical.

Overstress « Neptunus Lex.

This is one of my favorite Lex stories.

Rivalries « Neptunus Lex.

I must confess that I too hate losing to a girl.

 Measuring the man.