A couple of alert readers have mentioned this story to me. (LA Times, so the usual beastly registration process is required. Gomen.)
A young man flew his Super Hornet through the airspace of the local aerodrome near which he had grown up. Nearly supersonic, and at the almost unbelievable altitude of 96 feet. Over land. Over populated land. Where actual people live.
Long time readers in this space will be aware that your humble scribe has had the opportunity from time to time to step just that teensiest bit outside the warm and all-embracing box of Standard Operating Procedures, flight rules, the big blue sleeping pill and yes, common sense. But the only life I ever risked was my own, and if I’d gotten caught, I’d have fessed up and taken what was coming. Because while it’s true that you “rate what you get away with,” the reverse is also true: You don’t rate what you don’t get away with. Kid lost his wings, and now he’ll be finishing off his obligation behind a desk. In Qatar, for the now. It’s a pity, but those are the breaks of Naval Air, and being it was a single seat fighter? There’s only one person he can blame.
Some folks from back in the Vietnam days say that the Navy has changed, and I’ll attest to that. Mostly for the better. We kill a whole lot fewer aviators these days, per our measuring stick of fatal mishaps per hundred thousand flight hours than we used to do in the old days. Break a lot fewer jets too, which is a good thing, as costly as they’re getting.
There’s some talk in the article about the Navy being a zero-fault organization, that you don’t get to make mistakes:
The Navy tradition, he said, is to give a ship’s captain or aircraft pilot a great deal of responsibility and autonomy, but to countenance not even the smallest mistake. The Navy “has a reputation for eating its children…. If you mess up, there are no second chances.”
Which is half true, and half (pardon the expression) horseshit. We do “empower” our people, and we do expect a lot out of them, and frankly we do expect them to make mistakes from time to time. And mostly, so long as no one gets maimed or killed, or no serious damage is done to national treasures, we help them learn from their mistakes and move on. But let’s be perfectly clear here: The young man didn’t make a “mistake.” A mistake is when you reach down to turn the air conditioning up and accidentally vent the cabin pressure overboard. Or when you go to turn the landing light off on the rollout and put the launch bar down instead. Or you think the bandit is tail-on and you go to boresight him, only to find out that he’s head-on with a bag of knots and now you’re a whole lot closer than you’d like to be. A mistake is forgetting to set your radar altimeter. Any one of those mistakes can kill you, and you’d get a missing man fly by and a 21 gun salute, and your friends would speak well of you after.
But this young man didn’t make a mistake. He deliberately set out to do something which he had to know would land him in dutch if he got called on it, and he did it in a fashion almost guaranteed to ensure that he would get called on it. That’s just damned poor judgment. You don’t get to be that stupid and finish flight school, so he either had a “bad things don’t happen to me” attitude, or he just knew that rules didn’t apply to him. Which are two of the world’s most efficient ways to kill yourself graveyard dead in fighter aviation, and maybe take a few innocent civvies along with you. Which is considered very bad form, and not at all what we’re getting paid for. It ain’t the movies, and he’s not Tom Cruise.
Finally:
In regard to his unauthorized flyby, Webb wrote, “No respected fighter pilot worth his salt can look me in the eye and tell me they’ve never done the exact same thing.”
I’m sorry for your troubles, but you can eyeball me, brother. I was a respected fighter pilot once, and I never burned an airfield at 96 feet. Bank.
You can have a lot of fun in this business, and still sail between the buoys. All you have to do is take pleasant satisfaction in doing an exceedingly difficult thing well, rather than a simple and meaningless thing at all.
Funny, it sound like the manuals we have at work contain the same sleeping spores found in NATOPS, very effective right after lunch. In the small town I grew up in (POP. 1000) there was a local product who made the grade as a naval aviator (I thought he was in F-8′s but a high school buddy of his says it was Phantoms)and one early morning before many, if any, were awake, made his very swift passing known to all but the deepest of sleepers. I suppose the house wifes did a little more laundry that day than they had planned for.
[...] Neptunus Lex has more than 14.8 hours of experience in his plane, and more than one deployment flying fighter jets. He’s got the right words for this. But this young man didn?ɬ
[...] Neptunus Lex has more than 14.8 hours of experience in his plane, and more than one deployment flying fighter jets. He’s got the right words for this. But this young man didn’t make a mistake. He deliberately set out to do something which he had to know would land him in dutch if he got called on it, and he did it in a fashion almost guaranteed to ensure that he would get called on it. That’s just damned poor judgment. You don’t get to be that stupid and finish flight school, so he either had a “bad things don’t happen to me” attitude, or he just knew that rules didn’t apply to him. Which are two of the world’s most efficient ways to kill yourself graveyard dead in fighter aviation, and maybe take a few innocent civvies along with you. Which is considered very bad form, and not at all what we’re getting paid for. It ain’t the movies, and he’s not Tom Cruise. [...]
Risk your own life? Sure, if you get away with it and the reward is worth it. Unnecessarily risk the lives of innocent civilians on the ground?
NOT ON.
I’m curious, though, about the ‘zero fault’ organisation. Isn’t that going to breed a generation of aviators who always play it safe, always avoid risk? Is that entirely a good thing among the nations warfighters? Isn’t practising for war in the air inherently risky? Didn’t an obsession with safety gut US Navy Aviation after Korea, resulting in the creation of Top Gun?
Cap’n
Not having Wings of Gold on my uniform, I can only imagine that the young pilot no longer does either. That and losing a healthy amount of hide.
Hopefully torn starting at the top of his pointy little head and proceeding like an apple to the bottoms of his cold little piggies.
If I may make a comment on the Navy supposed reputation for ‘eating our children’. The Commanding Officer of any Naval Unit is Responsible. Period. The Navy delegates Responsiblity and Authority to accomplish its mission. One accepts those twin burdens with both pride and sincere trepidation. I put my life into the hands of Commanding Officers each time my ships left port. I trusted them to bring us home to our families; but if we found ourselves in ‘Harm’s Way’, I trusted them to ensure we gave good accounting.
It behooves any junior officer possessing command dreams (which should include 100% of JOs) to take those hard learned lessons to heart.
Chris, I guess I didn’t make it clear, but we’re really not a zero-defect organization, certainly not with our lieutenants. But we’re very unforgiving of deliberate buffoonery, of someone knowing what the right thing to do, and then wilfully jeapordizing his craft or lives by doing something else. There’s a huge difference for example, between flying a 500′ low level at 400′, and buzzing an civilian airfield at 96′. If you do that, you’re not only breaking the rules, you’re flouting them, and the organization only has one response. We are trained to take risks, but also trained to evaluate the benefit. This fellow’s stunt was all risk, no pay-off – don’t even mention the hypothetical “recruiting” value. That’s what the Blue Angels are for.
The more senior you get, the less forgiving in some ways, especially as SeniorD points, out, in command. The commanding officer’s authority is absolute – his responsibility is commensurate with his authority. Any CO who had a pathological risk-taker like this kid and didn’t refer him up for discipline would have abrogated his sacred trust and responsibility.
Lex is spot on on this…and I will add that this guy’s attitude would have got him cashiered, even in 1976!
Chap, he might have had only 14 hours in a SuperHornet (real taxpayer value over 90 million a copy) but from what I read, he also had almost a complete tour in Tomcats (2 seaters). He must have pulled the same stunt before, and I’ll bet somebody ain’t talkin’. Were was ‘Leadership’?
His defiant attitude begs “correction” and that same attitude will not get him any support from the ‘older generation’. A blanket party might have done this Maverick some good.
B2
B2, the article says there were two other undefined incidents on his record that were considered in the decision to strip him of his wings. Would I be wise to bet they were flat-hatting related?
As mentioned, huge difference between making a mistake and doing something by design that you know is out of bouns, no matter which community you are in. While out of necessity very demanding (we deal with dangerous and expensive systems after all) the service is hardly zero error. Just about all of us have done something from time to time that has resulted in a session ending in some variation of “don’t do that again” but pulling something deliberately stupid is an entirely different matter. For the readers outside the Navy there is an old axiom that most of the rules are written in blood. This is the sort of situation that one covers.
B2,
By any chance is this youngster the same Aviator responsible for the recent Tomcat flyby the Captain posted?
Captain Lex, your site has been recommended on Air Warriors. http://www.airwarriors.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13403
Lex Sez: “But this young man didn?ɬ
Lex Sez: “But this young man didn’t make a mistake. He deliberately set out to do something which he had to know would land him in dutch if he got called on it, and he did it in a fashion almost guaranteed to ensure that he would get called on it. That’s just damned poor judgment. You don’t get to be that stupid and finish flight school, so he either had a “bad things don’t happen to me” attitude, or he just knew that rules didn’t apply to him.”
Spot on Lex. Bad headwork on Webb’s part and apparently not the first time, either. I’ve seen guy’s get FENAB’d and get their wings pulled for a lot less then what this knucklehead did.
FBL And SeniorD: Sorry folks. I ain’t privy and it wouldn’t be good “manners” to ask Lex.
When I mentioned his Tomcat past I was just digesting the article and conjectured he must have had almost a full tour flying them since at least 2002 (Afghanistan). This equates to, probably, well over 1000 pilot in command flight hours which equals “time to learn” and time to be corrected. No inside info here.
You know? When they made that movie “Topgun” in 1986 they should have cut out that last segment where he flathats the Air Boss (spills coffee for second time) and starts hi-fiving his squadron mates on deck. Moral- he wasn’t a “Maverick” anymore!
Just having fun outside the rules “because you can” just isn’t acceptable (unless of course, you’re Bill Clinton)
B2
You may announce THAT again on the 1MC anytime you’d like B2!
I have a copy of the image originally posted by The Captain. I, of course, could not re-post it in comments. Drat and other comments.
Makes a great screen saver though!
Asshat moves like that are unforgivable. He deserves to have his wings taken, and more. I love your position on this, Lex. It’s been said before, but you’re spot on (as usual).
My personal introduction to the downside of flathatting was in the ’60s. A friend and I were standing at the summit of Mt. San Jaciento in Southern California. Suddenly we were knocked off our feet by a tremendous concussion. I came-to in time to see the tails of two F-4s disappearing into the distance heading towards the Salton Sea. It wouldn’t have been so bad except we were standing right on the edge of a 2000′ cliff! If I ever find out the names of those morons, I will track them down and make a low-level, supersonic fly-by of their heads with a baseball bat (assuming they aren’t already dead.)
‘Flat-Hatting” Royal Air Force Style
Is this the same place as the legendary canyon run, ala Star Wars Deathstar style?
Sort of carries the ‘Sound of Freedom’ to ludicrous lengths.
Has this youth been grounded yet?
Very near by, Chris – the canyon itself is just to the south, as I recollect. You could use it to work your way towards Thumrait, stealthy-like.
Of course, there was the very real chance you’d face a Jag coming at you ’round the bend of the canyon, going the other direction. Which carried some risks.
A buddy of mine flew in a Hunter with an ex-RAF merc – the locals were being taught to fly at 60 feet, and never above 100 feet in a turn. But it is a desert, after all…