ease down, losing height, the engines throttling marginally off the piercing high-C shriek which would splinter a shelf of wineglasses. Howell, insulated behind his goggles and earphones, searched the horizon for the hundred- thousand-ton aircraft carrier.
His intercom crackled. “Roger, Tomcat two-zero-one. Your deck is cleared for landing now — gotcha visual… come on in, watch your altitude, and check your lineup. Wind’s gusting at thirty knots out of the southwest. We’re still right into it. You’re all set.”
“Roger, Tower…six miles.”
All Navy and Air Force pilots have a special, relaxed, aw-shucks way of imparting news from these high- speed fighter aircraft, some say copied directly from America’s most famous combat ace, General Chuck Yeager, the first test pilot to break the sound barrier in his supersecret Bell X-1 in 1947.
Talking to the tower, almost every young Navy flier affects some kind of a West Virginia country boy drawl, precisely how they imagine General Yeager might have put it, real slow, ice-calm in the face of disaster. “Gotta little flameout on the ole starboard engine, jest gonna cut the power out there, bring her in on one. Y’all wanna move the flight deck over a coupla ticks, gimme a better shot in the crosswind. It ain’t a problem.”
Lieutenant William R. Howell imitated the general “better’n any of ’em.” And easier. Because he was not really Lieutenant William R. Howell, anyway. He was Billy-Ray Howell, whose dad, an ex — coal miner and Southern Methodist, now kept the general store back in the same hometown as Chuck Yeager — up in the western hollows of the Appalachian Mountains, Hamlin, a place of less than a thousand souls, right on the Mud River, close to the eastern Kentucky border in Lincoln County. Like Chuck Yeager, Billy-Ray talked about the ‘hollers,’ fished the Mud River, was the son of a man who had shot a few bears in his time, “cain’t hardly wait to git home, see my dad.”
When he had the stick of an F-14 in his hand, Billy-Ray Howell
The strategy had paid off too. Billy-Ray had achieved his schoolboy ambition to become a Naval aviator. Years of study, years of training, had seen him close to the top of every class he had ever been in. Everyone in Naval aviation knew that young Billy-Ray Howell was going onward and upward. They had ever since he first earned his engineering degree at the U.S. Naval Academy.
No one was surprised by how good he was when he began his jet fighter training, pushing the old T2 Buckeyes around the skies above Whiting Field, east of Pensacola, in northwest Florida.
And now the voice coming into the flight-control area was nearly identical to that of General Yeager, the steady “up-holler” tone, betraying no urgency: “Tower, Tomcat two-zero-one, four miles. I got somethin’ gone kinda weird on me, right here…landin’ gear warning light’s jes’ flickin’ some. Didn’t feel the wheels lock down. But it might be somethin’s jes’ wrong with th’ole lightbulb.”
“Tower to Tomcat two-zero-one. Roger that. Continue on in and make a pass right down the deck at about fifty feet, two hundred knots. That way the guys can take a close look at the undercarriage.”
“Roger, tower…comin’ on in.”
Out on the exposed and windswept carrier deck, the Landing Signal Officer radioed instructions to the pilot and could see that Tomcat 201 was about forty-five seconds out, a howling, twenty-ton brute of an aircraft, bucking along in the unpredictable gusts over the Indian Ocean, the pilot trying to hold her on a glide path two degrees above the horizontal. There was a big swell on the surface, and the whole ship, moving along at fifteen knots, was pitching through about three degrees, one and a half degrees either side of horizontal: that meant the ends, bow and stern, were moving through sixty feet vertically every thirty seconds. All incoming aircraft would have a hell of an approach into the strong, hot wind, and timing the moment of impact would test the deftness and proficiency of every pilot. That was with landing wheels.
The LSO, Lieutenant Rick Evans, a lanky fighter pilot out of Georgia, was now standing on the exposed port- quarter of the carrier. His binoculars were trained on Tomcat 201. And he could already see the landing wheels were not down — and the flaps weren’t down either. His mind was churning. He knew that Billy-Ray Howell was in trouble. Nonfunctioning landing gear have always been the flier’s nightmare, civil or military. But out here it was a hundred times worse.
A fighter plane does not come in along the near flat path followed by civil jetliners, which glide, and then “flare out” a few feet above mile-long runways. Out here there’s no time. And not much space. Navy fliers slam those twenty-two-ton Tomcats down at 160 knots, flying them right into the deck, hook down, praying for it to grab the wire.
The downward momentum on the landing wheels is astronomical. They are monster shock absorbers, built to kill the entire onrushing weight of the aircraft. If the hook misses, the pilot has one twentieth of a second to change his mind, to “do a bolter”—shove open the throttle and blast off over the bow, climbing away to starboard with the casual observation, “Comin’on in again.”
The slightest problem with the locking mechanism aborts the landing, and, almost without exception, writes off the aircraft. Because the Navy would rather ditch a $35 million jet, on its own, than kill two aviators who have cost $2 million apiece to train. They would also much prefer the aircraft to slam into the ocean, and avoid the terrible risk of a major fire on the flight deck, which a belly-down landing may cause. Not to mention the possible write-off of another forty parked planes, and possibly the entire ship if the fire gets to the millions of gallons of aircraft fuel.
Everyone on the flight deck knew that Billy-Ray and Freddie would almost certainly have to ditch the jet, and blast themselves out of the cockpit with the ejector, a dangerous and terrifying procedure, one which can cost any pilot an arm or a leg, or worse yet, his life. “Holy Christ,” said Lieutenant Evans, miserably.
By now the LSO and his team were all edging toward the deep, heavily padded “pit” into which they would dive for safety if Billy-Ray lost control and the Tomcat plummeted into the carrier’s stern. All fire crews were on red-alert. “Conn-Captain, four degrees right rudder. Steer two-one-zero. I want thirty knots minimum over the deck. Speed as required.”
Everyone could now hear the roar of the engines on the incoming Tomcat, and the bush telegraph of the carrier was working full tilt. Most everyone had a soft spot for Billy-Ray. He’d been married for only a year, and half the personnel of the Naval Air Base on the Pax River in Maryland had been at the wedding. His bride, Suzie Danford, was the tall, dark-haired daughter of Admiral Skip Danford. She’d met the curly-haired, dark-eyed Billy-Ray, with his coal-miner’s shoulders and sly smile, long before he had become one of the Navy’s elite fliers, while he was completing training at Pensacola.
And now she was alone in Maryland, waiting out the endless six months of his first tour of sea duty. Like all aviators’ wives, dreading the unexpected knock upon the door, dreading the stranger from the air base calling on the phone, the one who would explain that her Billy-Ray had punched a big hole in the Indian Ocean. And there was nothing melodramatic about any of it. About 20 percent of all Navy pilots die in the first nine years of their service. At the age of twenty-six, Suzie Danford Howell was no stranger to death. And the possibility of her own husband joining Jeff McCall, Charlie Rowland, and Dave Redland haunted her nights. Sometimes she thought it would all drive her crazy. But she tried to keep her fears silent.
She did not know, however, the mortal danger her husband was now in. There are virtually no procedures for landing gear failure. Nothing works, save for a touch of blind luck if the pilot can jolt down and then up, and the gears slam down and lock, putting out the warning light. But time is short. If that Tomcat F-14 runs out of gas it will drop like a twenty-ton slab of concrete and hit the long waves of the Indian Ocean like a meteorite…. “Billy-Ray Howell and Freddieare in trouble”…the word was sweeping through the carrier.
On the tower side of the flight deck, Ensign Jim Adams, a huge black man from South Boston, dressed in a big fluorescent yellow jacket, was talking on his radio phone to the hydraulics operators on the deck below who controlled the arresting wires, one of which would grab the Tomcat, slowing it down to zero speed in two seconds flat, heaving the aircraft to a halt. Big Jim, the duty Arresting Gear Officer, had already ordered the controls set to withstand the Tomcat’s fifty-thousand-pound force slamming into the deck at 160 knots precisely, with the pilot’s hand hard on the throttle in case the hook missed. But Jim knew the problem…“Billy-Ray Howell’s in big trouble up there.”
