As Eric pointed out, it is the season for re-runs…
The “Laws of the Navy, ” are nearly universally known among naval officers in the Anglo-American sphere, but hardly anywhere else outside that fraternity.
Of these laws, the most famous, and most often quoted for its quality of stern deterrence, is the third law:
“Take heed what you say of your seniors,
Be your words spoken softly or plain,
Lest a bird of the air tell the matter,
And so shall ye hear it again.”
No truer words were ever spoken, or put to rhyme (no matter how inelegant the scansion). Most of us learned this by heart from the time we were midshipmen, and breaches afterward are most often observed through ignorance rather than willfulness.
Which brings me to my story:
When I was starting FA-18 training, the aircraft was relatively new – there was no pool of highly experienced instructors with thousands of hours in type to learn from. Our instructors had, until very recently, flown the A-7 Corsair II, F-4 Phantom, and more rarely, the F-14 Tomcat. But their lack of experience in the FA-18 meant nothing to me, as a transition student – however many hours they had in the Hornet was (X – 1.5 hours) more than I had, where X tends to infinity. And they were instructors, all-powerful, all knowing. Your future and your career were subject to their whims and fancies, your very life was in their hands.
The first flights in any aircraft, before you proceed to more advanced tactical training, are familiarization flights, or FAMs. My second ever flight in an FA-18 was with an easy-going lieutenant, whose last name was “Kivette.” In the nature of things, his callsign, his radio “handle,” ended up being “Space.”
“Space Kivette.” Get it?
Sigh.
Anyway, that sort of thing is what passes for elevated humor, in the fighter pilot ranks.
So Space finished his brief to me on FAM-2, telling me what we’d be doing, where we’d be doing it and explaining the expected performance standards. We had a little time left before we walked to the jet, so he asked me what my background was, since as a full lieutenant myself, I was clearly not fresh out of flight school.
I explained to him that I had been a SERGRAD, or “selectively retained graduate” after flight school. Airline hiring had so thinned the ranks of qualified instructor candidates, that certain recent flight school graduates were themselves retained as instructors to teach flight students only a few months behind us in their training.
I asked him where he had been, and what he had flown. It turned out that he had been an F-4 pilot in Japan aboard the USS MIDWAY, the last ship to fly Phantoms on the line (she was too small to carry Tomcats).
I thought the Phantom was a cool-looking jet. In fact, my first exposure to naval aviation had been at an air show at Andrews AFB at the age of seven, where I had seen the Blue Angels flying Phantoms – all that noise and speed were certainly impressive, and I was hooked.
By way of breaking the ice, I also told him that I had been stashed for temporary duty while between training schools at NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, back when I was an ensign. The squadron I was stashed with had two-seat A-4 Skyhawks as adversary aircraft, and I’d often took the opportunity to bag backseat rides in the Scooter. We often flew against the F-4 training squadron, the last one in the Navy.
One day, I told him, while waiting at the hold short in a pouring rainstorm, too ignorant to be concerned about the weather, I’d seen a mishap. It turned out that an F-4 coming back to land in the bad weather broke out of the overcast on an non-precision approach poorly set up to land. He had a pretty significant offset from the runway, whether through flawed airmanship or a poor approach controller I never learned. The pilot made a play rather than go around for another approach, and landing on the slick concrete in a right-to-left drift, had gone off the runway into the soft turf, shearing off his nose landing gear in the process, and collapsing his left main landing gear mount.
Although no one got hurt, thankfully, this was pretty exciting to watch.
My pilot was then cleared for take-off on the other runway (since there were aircraft pieces littering the one the Phantom had just traversed), and off we went, into the goo.
“So anyway,” I finished, “who was that knucklehead?”
Can you, gentle reader, guess who that knucklehead was?
As soon as I finished my last statement, but before he could reply, I did the math quickly:I had been in flight school as a student and instructor for three years.
A fleet tour is three years long.
Which meant he had been at Oceana, in the last F-4 training squadron in the Navy, at the same time that I had been stashed there as an ensign.
And before he could open his mouth and say anything, I knew. I knew that I had just impugned the abilities and headwork of the guy that was going to take me flying, holding my future, career and life in his hands.But then again, what were the odds? I mean, there were dozens of students there. It could have been any one of them…
“That was me,” he replied, “let’s go fly.”
D’OH!
The military world has it’s own set of
Laws. But it is
a different
Legal
world for civilians. An online form finder can help you find a specialist for the right legal forms.
Ouch!
Open mouth, insert foot.
Lex, awesomely funny story! How did the rest of the flight go? You must have very good compartmentalization skills to fly well after that one. Too classic!
LOL Damn funny.
Any stories on flying the F-21?
Let he amongst you who is without sin, cast the first stone. He survived. So did you.
So why must we shoot our youngsters when they make mistakes? The last perfect aviator flew with nailholes in his hands and feet.
Respectfully, CAPT Lex, I have found it is preferable to cut youngsters some slack when they make mistakes (less serious ones, of course) by correcting them, and not holding a grudge. I assume he did so with you. As I am sure you have done so with other young Men.
Good story. Fine lesson.
Subsunk
Glad he wasn’t a mean-spirited sort, Cap’n, else you wouldn’t be sharing this poignant episode from your past;)
So, the flying Navy is a bit different than the floating Navy?? Isn’t the rule for ship drivers that if you run it aground or into something hard you lose your ride? Not so for pilots?
Glad the guy was Ok, and glad he was honest enough to fess up – maybe a good sense of humor about life and its downside. A good trait for an instructor.
Was that VF-43 (my dad was 43′s CO back in the mid 70′s) or (then) VC-12? I was stashed with the Omars (VC-12) for a couple of months back in the summer of 86. Let’s see….Ron Gollhofer, Mike “Snively” Evans, John Totushek had just left as CO, I think (eventually becoming chief of the naval reserve). Checking my logbook, they didn’t put names of the pilots there – just a bunch of “TDU Transit”s and “AIC”. Still, bagged about an additional 40 or 50 hours in that time, so when the F-14 RAG started, I had a pretty kick-ass head’s up on course rules and general flying around Oceana. I still managed to screw something up (but that was at Key West), though, but that’s a different story.
Enjoying a burger at the airport restraunt after a few touch & go, I was chating with Mr. Somebody at the counter. He recounted that about a hlf hour ago he saw a C-172 doing some stupid stunts in the pattern, during climb out no less. Looked like this idiot was trying to do an aileron roll at 250 feet and hadn’t even cleared the end of the runway yet!
So, I told him that would be ME and I was actually caught in the prop wash of the airplane in front of me, and was having a hell of a time keeping my wings level and maintainting a positive rate of climb. He looked stupified got up and left the remainder of his fries which I finished for him.
as a “cone” in the rag right now, we sort of had an incident like yours. now being new to the rag, we had no idea of the conduct of the students above us. one friday we noticed that all cones were scheduled for a meeting at 1600 with the opso. knowing that an ass chewing was to be had, i wasn’t surprised when it came and came hard. all sdo’s were to wear khakis at watch for a while as punishment. after the meeting, being a friday, some fellow cones and i went to pick up some beers at the local grocery store. doing what young jgs and ens do, especially after a verbal lashing, we whined about the boss. well, wouldn’t you know, it just so happened that the opso’s wife was standing behind us in line the whole time….
lesson learned. especially in such a small city such as cow town.
Lex,
That isn’t as bad as one of my close family friends use to be an A-6 avionic maintainer. He got picked up for BOOST and ended up back in the fleet as a B/N for an A-6 squadron. First flight as the FNG for the squadron the Skipper (who use to be the lead instructor for the RAG and wrote the training syllabus for the then new A-6E) took him up to see how he would preform. The plane left the deck and the skipper ,who had ton of hours in airframe, caused the radar to dump and his Vertical display indicator to dump as well. The skipper decided to end the flight and come home. My friend said, “Skipper you just need to do this and this and this to bring it back to life.” and all the while leaning across the cockpit to do so. Then he turn and made the comment to the effect that this information is in the NATOPS. The skipper still downed the flight, wrote the downing gripe and my friend went into hack for the next 30 days as the SDO. He learned that there is a time and place to charge against the windmills, in the cockpit with the skipper isn’t one of them.
It’s a bunny trail story, but this reminds me of a time when I was a 21-year old clerk in an old style drug store. One of our frequent customers was a young woman who was stunningly unattractive, but sweet as a lamb. Each time she came into the store, every one was especially kind and friendly, and happy to see her. One day, after she’d left, I took a breath to remark to my co-worker Judy on the extraordinarily ugly attributes of this woman, but Lord God Jesus took the words right out of my mouth, and I didn’t say a thing. A few days later I found out that she was Judy’s DAUGHTER. Oh, it’s too horrible to think about, if I had said what was on my mind that day.
That was one lesson I learned the easy way, 34 years ago, to keep my unkind remarks to myself.
Karma, dude, karma.
If you are going to go around watching every thing you say, you’ll get nothing said. I remember that mishap as well as watching Phantoms CQ on Satan’s flagship……….(with an instructor RIO who held up a Teddy bear after the trap…….I don’t know why….).
The Phantom was a great aircraft though. I alwasy wanted to fly in one………
Skippy: Satans flagship?
I have a rule in my law office that nothing leaves the same day it is written. I stole this rule from an XO I greatly admired. I see where he got it.
Dost think in a moment of anger
‘Tis well with thy seniors to fight?
They prosper, who burn in the morning,
The letters they wrote overnight.
This might be one of the sources of the incivility on the internet you commented on above. Posters can’t let their posts sit and strike out the fustian retoric the next morning.
Oh, the flight went fine. Space was a great guy all the way around, and took it all in stride.
Satan’s flagship: Ranger?
Fontessa – your story reminds me of the time I met a classmate and his wife about a year or so after their first child was born. She was obviously pregnant again, and I was on the very point of asking her, “When is your new baby due?” when I remembered that she had always fought a weight gain problem while they were dating. I changed the words even as I was speaking into, “So, when are you guys planning on having another?”
“Oh, not for a long, long time,” she answered. Whew.
Pinch, that was at VC-12 – the Fightin Gomars. Or Fighting Omars. One of the two. Good fellas. Learned there how to behave at the O’Club, including how to properly execute a “dead bug.” Or not.
Steve, breaking jets is considered bad form, but there’s a bad way to do it, and a worse way to do it. The Phantom was no plaything on final, and Space was new in the jet as a student. His RO probably took a bigger professional hit for letting him continue the approach when he wasn’t set up for it. Ultimately, we expect guys to stay inside the lines, and if you break a jet knowingly in violation of SOPs, FARs and NATOPS, then it’s going to go hard on you.
OTOH, merely being a plumber as a junior guy – while lamentable – is not an automatic career ender.
Satan’s flagship: USS America CV-66(6)!
Our not so affectionate name for the carrier I have 5 cruises on…….
The construction and implicit cadence of both verses put me in mind of Kipling.
The b/w photo of the Phantom is an F-4S. A/C 203 from my first squadron. VF-202 the Superheats. Stationed at the now closed NAS Dallas.
I was a young AME-3 back then.
Great to see one of the birds I worked on after all these years.