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Ah, MemoriesYou miss a lot of things about flying a fighter off a carrier deck. Some things, you miss a great deal less. When the sun goes down, the music changes. Update: Repost? Update 2: And it all started 98 years ago today. 33 comments to Ah, Memories |
Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Relocating? SponsorsNearly 60k hits and 130k page views per month - low rates! Advertise with Lex! Stinkin' Badges For the Effort!PopularPagesTags1st Amendment afghanistan Araby army Blogging buffoonery china culture economy education Flying Friday Musings geopol GWOT Headlines History iran iraq Israel issues media Memory Lane Military Navy norks Oz pakistan people piracy politicians politics Politics and Culture pundits Russia seals sea stories silliness Small Stuff SoCal technology UAVs UK usaf usmc weapons WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better. Spam Blocked |
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Video is dated August 9th, 1300. A little early for jets, wouldn’t you say? A little early for anybody but those living there to have known of Australia, come to think of it, Magellan’s voyage having reached that area in 1521.
Oh, maybe they mean 1300 *hours*. Yeah, that makes more sense. Quit work at 1300, debrief takes you up to 1400, by the time you finish up the days’ paperwork, have a shower, why, it’d already be time for chow! Work work work, rush rush rush. Not like you’re on banker’s hours, knocking off just after lunch. No sir!
All kidding aside, anybody else been in seas like that and have some large Chief who apprenticed as a Bo’sun under Noah jump 10′ up and hang from some pipes running along the overhead? It’s one of those things that, logically, makes sense, but the brain is just incapable of believing what it has just seen.
– Max
Pucker power indeed. I was always (and still am) in awe of our ability to operate in high winds, heavy seas, frozen decks, blistering heat, pitch-black blinding rain, EMCOM; it never mattered. To train to prove it can (still) be done in the event it must. Small-boy RAST, 46/53 vertrep, ship refueling, all of it, anytime baby, ad infinitum.
The machines? Sure, we’re pretty dang good. The people? Ain’t none better. NAVAIR ROX!
Man, and I thought this morning’s CAT II was sporting.
At least that runway stays in the same place.
“Some things, you miss a great deal less.”
Like the time when one of the bubbas puts a portion of a main strut through the wing…or w/c 120 gets called out to ‘take a look’ at the, ummm, ‘minor crack reported by pilot’ on 202’s port wing…
yeah, days like that…
Not to be bitchy, but the boarding rate sucked in this video.
And for the money they get paid to do this…’sigh’…
Isn’t this why God invented MOVLAS?
Too much ANGLE in the Angled Deck I reckon.
Besides due to Coriolis Effect everything rotates backwards down under. Gurgle gurgle. Time is affected also.
http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/visualizations/es1904/es1904page01.cfm
Thank God I never had to look at a deck pitching that bad. Holy crap! Must have been a blast that night.
Yak, what the hell kind of avatar is that?
do you at least get partial credit if you snag the catapult with the hookie thing?
Byron,
It’s the head of my toon in Worlds of Warcraft.
I had the same thought as Mongo: these guys can’t trap worth beans. If I were to be in a YouTube vid, I’d want it to be doing some of that cool pilot s#!t, not doing waveoffs.
Then I saw the sea state. . .and realized I may not want to fly E-2s after all. . .
H1390,
Too bad also that your first traps wouldn’t be on a 27 alfa or charlie deck with about 1/4 the area to relax in. Did I say they pitched and rolled a bit more, and a lot faster? Course, we were going a lot slower. NAVAIR has always had a degree of sport in it. Go 4 it!
Ahh, that ol’ Midway Magic!! The things you can do when you change the natural freq of your vessel to match nominal swells in the South China Sea.
Take a closer look at the sea state. No foam and spray, let alone large swells and breaking crests. Heck, you have to look really hard to even see ripples out there. And yeah, MOVLAS was in use.
The scary part is that that wasn’t our worst day, and it doesn’t show those aircraft that didn’t have HUDs and auto-everything, and it doesn’t show the joy that was involved in simply taxiing around the deck. Couldn’t go uphill even at mil, couldn’t really stop going downhill, and getting chocked every time your tires stopped. On account of the sliding sideways that seemed to happen with alarming regularity.
As far as night goes, you have the wrong music, Lex. This is more like it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq3rp1tU1qA
I have a wonderful tape made by our Chaplain from Vulture’s Row, and between the cluster in the pattern and his clueless prattle, it is quite amusing, in a Buster Keaton sort of way.
Geez, I take it all back. Couldn’t be the Midway, there are four wires ( or would be if they hadn’t removed #4). No wonder those rolls didn’t look as big as I remembered them. Still brings back memories.
Looked like at least one of those misses was the squadron commander’s aircraft – that’s the one that gets the decorated tail, right?
Or are all of them getting the tailjob and just the Sq. Cdr’s bird get an all-over job?
Typically, the CO’s jet (x01) gets one highlight – the Shrike on my jet was blaze orange, whilst everyone else’s was a darker shade of tactical gray – and the airwing commander’s jet (x00) get’s the full custom van treatment.
But as you know, each pilot flies whatever jet gets assigned to him by maintenance control. (Side note, there is a false, positive correlation between aircraft side number and landing performance, since maintenance tends to naturally assign the lower number jet to the typically more experienced flight leader and the higher number to the less experienced new guy, e.g. the section lead is assigned 305 and his nugget wingman gets 310.)
PG – that Midway Magic is right – did you ever stand back at the round-down and look forward to watch the bow motion? Figure 8’s, even in calm seas.
Late in cruise that deck was slicker than owl s**t too. Had many nights where events post-trap were more exciting than the approach with a nugget driving. Especially loved when they’d shut us down and then try to push us back tail-over-water with the tractor and the plane sliding all over the place. Sure appreciated that lip at the deck edge. Really didn’t want to be in the first E2 to be pushed over the side by accident.
Still, it beat the hell out of wearing a nifty scarf and landing on 10,000′ runways. No adventure in that.
Brian,
On the Prowler, I really hated the nosewheel-to-the-combing parking job, because then we had to climb out onto that little platform they gave the front-seaters, with nothing between us and Davey Jones. After a colorful approach by my highly trained chauffer, I found myself a little unsteady at times.
PG – know what you mean about colorful approaches – we considered adding a crowbar in the back for seat cushion removal after some of those approaches.
Maybe we should’ve tagged a one of those guys with that callsign – “Crowbar.” Come to think of it, “Cushion” would’ve been better.
We used to preflight with the plane parked TOW and part of the preflight was to walk out on the tail and inspect the rudders. It sure looked like a long way to the water from there.
Brian,
I always wondered what you Electric types were doing out there on pre-flight. Best answer I could come up with was that all those stray trons had fried some RAM chips in the AN/ANY-EA6B ComSense computer between your ears…
Sorry Yak – I was an E2 mole…plenty of stray ‘trons back there too. My wife would attest to the fried RAM though – especially the short-term variety.
I guess my attention to detail ain’t what it used to be – or I would have noted the “s” just abaft of the word “rudder.”
So, were they “stray trons” or “spay trons”?
Nevermind – TMI and all that.
Someone call for a “tron?”
Present.
Lex,
So howz that deck compare to NorPac ‘87?
Em. You could see it from outside 1/2 mile?
Those were hard days.
A long time ago in the far reaches of the Norwegian Sea………The Good Ship Independence CV62 and CVW-7 did some Bear baiting about 65-70 miles north of The Arctic Circle. Some days were rock and roll and the occasional green one at the bow. Some days were pretty normal, as in the presented vid. The common thread was the cold. It was November, folks.
Prior to leaving good ole’ pier 12 the JC Penney at Military Circle Mall and the Kmart up the road had a run on long handled underwear and toques.
BTW, Yak, Is you AQCS from 128 circa 82-85?
AMH1,
Nope. I was an S-3 NFO, VS-22 (1978-1981) and VS-32 (1985-1987). I was at FLEASWTRACENTLANT in Norfolk from 1983-1984. Last tour before retirement was on the INDY (1992-1994) when she was the “forward deployed” boat out of Yokosuka.
P.O.C. No Dutch Roll added in straight up/down!
If’n you listen to your “buddy” (1/2 a word) and fly what he’s showing you, and immediately execute what he tells ya you won’t even notice the deck…
If’n you believe that I have a bridge to sell ya!
In a total Hornet airwing with Hornet tankers I imagine flight ops like that are the exception rather than the routine….Another innovation!
b2
Thanks Yak.
Served with AQCS Joachim P. Yakovleff at Atkron One Two Eight. Made a pile of El Centro VisWeps Dets with him. When I got married(2nd and current in 83) he made me bring a note from my mother. What a guy!!!!!
He could eat a LARGE jar of kim-chee at one sitting and use a case of Rainier to wash it down with.
Large jar?
Ouch! Sounds like some great stories to be told there – and some that probably should never see the light of day…
alright aviator types,
As one that will never trap on a ship, how do you get aboard on such a rough day? Do you fly a consistent glide slope and try to time it just right catch a wire, or do you bob up and down in your glideslope to synch with the ship’s movement? Do you adjust the pitch attitude of your jet to have a proper angle to the deck, or do you risk landing a little flat if the deck is pitched in an up angle? I’ve only landed on solid, nonmoving pavement.
Really, the best you can do is fly a good pattern to a reasonable start on final and hope for the best. Keep your VSI nominal in the groove (in the Hornet the velocity vector on the HUD served as a VSI proxy), respond to what the LSO is showing you on the MOVLAS (Manually Operated Visual Landing Aid System) and hope that you get lucky on your approach. You can’t monkey with pitch attitude in a Navy jet on final since it’s linked to optimal AOA; over the nose visibility, aerodynamic/engine performance and hook-to-ramp clearance.
Sometimes, especially in long-period seas like those shown in the video, the deck settles down for a bit before playing the fool again. If that happens, you get to land aboard ship, if you can steady your nerves. Otherwise it’s wave-offs and long bolters. Typical day boarding rates are 98%. When the deck starts to move around like in the video it falls below 50%. It really gets sporty at night, and I’ve always admired the alert tanker crews who launch into that kind of mess knowing 1) what they’re going to face, and 2) the fact that when they land, there won’t be any tanker up there for them. Of course, I never told them that. On account of they were tanker pilots.
The embedded link at the “repost” line has another story about what can happen at night when a guy gets low and the deck goes up. I’ve actually been on the LSO pickle at night and waved a guy off (he later made flag) who was out-of-tolerances high when the deck reached up and dragged him down. He was at full power and starting to climb when suddenly there he was in the wires.
That kind of stuff will make you old.
[...] has video showing just how much the deck of an aircraft carrier can move in rough seas in “Ah, Memories“. After watching that, be sure to read his post “On being a landing signal officer in [...]
Thanks Lex!