deck. Misting rain and water trickling down the glass distorted the planes and men on the flight deck and made them look grotesque in the weak red light.
He turned and watched the aircraft handling officer, the “handler,” who was seated in a raised chair, direct the spotting of the planes that were landing. As each aircraft announced its arrival on deck with a full-power bellow of its engines as the arresting gear dragged it to a halt, a sailor wearing a sound-powered telephone headset placed a cutout of the plane in the landing area of the table-sized model of the ship, which stood in front of the handler’s chair. Taxiing out of the landing area, the pilot visually signaled the aircraft’s maintenance status to a man on the deck, who relayed it by radio to another sailor here. This man placed a colored nut or washer on the model aircraft. The handler then announced the parking spot, which other sailors wearing radio-telephone headsets relayed to the taxi directors on the flight deck.
Four sailors wearing headsets surrounded the table and pushed the aircraft models around it in response to the observations of spotters stationed high in the island or on the hangar deck. The scale model and the cutout aircraft allowed the handler to instantly ascertain the location of every aircraft on the ship. Although he had four and a half acres of flight deck and two acres of hangar to work with, the handler fought a never-ending battle against gridlock.
Against the far wall the squadron maintenance chiefs shouted into their headsets and intercom boxes and wrote with grease pencils on a large plexiglas board that showed the maintenance status of every aircraft on the ship. Almost everyone was shouting, at someone else or into a mouthpiece, and the muffled whine of engines at idle or full power provided symphonic background. The airmen in flight gear waiting to man the alert aircraft crammed the rest of the space. Grafton turned back to the window when a sailor near him lit a cigarette.
“Okay. That’s the last one,” the handler finally roared over the hubbub. “You alert guys give me your weight chits and man ’em up.”
Grafton passed him a printed form with his aircraft’s weight computation penciled in. The launching officer would need this weight to calculate the proper setting for the catapult in the event the alert birds had to launch.
The handler glanced at the form, ensuring it was signed by the pilot, then scribbled the number in grease pencil on a status board beside him. The crews donned their helmets and waddled toward the door in pairs — it was hard to walk normally wearing forty pounds of flight gear and a tight torso harness that impinged upon your testicles.
Grafton opened the hatch to the flight deck and stepped through. He and Reed walked between two aircraft and stopped at the foul line, the right edge of the landing area. The wind and misty rain gave the air a chill, and Jake shivered. The rescue helicopter, the “angel,” came out of the gloom over the fantail and settled onto the forward portion of the landing area. The crewman tumbled out the side door of the SH-3 and began installing tie- down chains as flight deck workers in blue shirts rushed in to help. In moments the chains were installed and the engines died. The rotors spun slower and slower, until finally they came to rest.
A yellow flight deck tractor towed an F-14 with wings swept aft past the helicopter and spun it around into the hook-up area of Number Three Catapult. When the blue-shirts carrying chocks and chains had it secured, the tractor was unhooked and the nose tow-bar removed. In a few moments another tractor came aft from the bow towing the A-6E that Jake and Reed were to man and parked it just short of the foul line on the port, or left, side of the landing area.
Tonight the alert aircraft consisted of the two F-14 Tomcats spotted just short of the waist catapults and two A-6 Intruders spotted clear of the landing area. Only one aircraft was aloft now in the night, an E-2C Hawkeye early-warning radar plane. This twin-engine turboprop could easily stay airborne for four hours. The radars aboard the various ships would also be probing the night, but the Hawkeye’s radar, from its vantage point six miles up, had a tremendous range advantage. The information from all these radars was data-linked to the NTDS computer and displayed in the Combat Information Centers aboard every ship in the task group. In the half-light of computer- driven display screens, amid the murmur of radio speakers, the CIC watchstanders coded, analyzed, and identified every object within hundreds of miles. And if any unidentified plane appeared whose course might take it so near the task group as to constitute a possible threat, the alert fighters would be launched. If the bogey was an unidentified surface target, a ship or boat, the A-6 bombers would follow the fighters into the air.
Tonight the handler had his alert bombers spotted clear of the landing area, so he would only have to respot the two alert fighters when the time came to launch another Hawkeye and trap the returning one.
Jake Grafton began his walk-around inspection as the tractor backed up to the starboard side of the aircraft and a high-pressure air hose was attached to the plane. Another man dragged a power cable across the deck from the catwalk and plugged it into the aircraft.
Jake examined the ordnance hanging on the A-6’s wing stations. A Harpoon air-to-surface missile was mounted on the right inboard wing station, station four; a pod of flares hung on the left inboard wing station, station two; and four Rockeye cluster bombs hung on each of the outboard wing stations, stations one and five. The centerline station, station three, contained a two-thousand-pound belly tank, as usual. He checked each weapon to see that it was properly mated to the rack and the fuses were correctly set.
Jake also examined the grease-penciled numbers in the black area on the port intake to ensure the plane captain had written in the proper weight of the aircraft, including fuel and ordnance. This was yet another check for the catapult officer, whose calculation of the catapult launch valve setting had to be correct or the aircraft would not get enough push from the catapult to get safely airborne.
One mistake, Jake mused, by any of the dozens of men involved in a launch, if not detected and corrected, would be fatal to the men in the cockpit. Every man had to do his job perfectly all the time, every time. The launching ballet had come to symbolize, for Jake, the essence of carrier aviation.
Satisfied at last, he mounted the ladder to the cockpit, preflighted his ejection seat, removed the safety pins and counted and stowed them, then maneuvered himself into the seat. The plane captain scurried up the ladder to help him strap in. Reed was busy strapping into the bombardier-navigator’s seat immediately to Jake’s right. Unlike most military planes where the crew sat in tandem, in the A-6 they sat side by side, although the BN’s seat was several inches aft and slightly lower than the pilot’s.
The pilot’s hands flew around the cockpit arranging switches for the start. All the cockpit lights and dials came alive as electrical power was applied to the plane from the deck-edge cable. As the plane captain twirled his fingers and the huffer bellowed, Jake cranked the left engine. When it was at idle, 60 percent RPM, the plane captain disconnected the huffer, which supplied high-pressure air to the plane, and advanced the left engine to 75 percent. Now he started the right engine using bleed air from the left one. With both engines at idle, he turned on both of the A-6E’s radios and watched Reed complete his set up of the computer and inertial. Finally he gave a thumbs-up to the flight deck bosun who stood in front of the aircraft. The bosun cupped his hand around a lip mike on his headset and informed flight deck control that the alert bomber was ready. Then the engines were shut down and the plane captain closed the canopy and snapped the pilot’s boarding ladder up into the fuselage.
Now the crew relaxed. They would sit here like this for two hours until they were relieved by another crew. Unless the alert planes launched, it was all very boring, a typical military exercise in hurry up and wait.
Jake surveyed the cockpit as if it were the front seat of a familiar and treasured automobile. The A-6 had changed significantly in the years since he flew the A-version in Vietnam. The search and track radars of the A-6A had been replaced by one radar that combined both search and track functions. The rotary drum computer was gone, and in its place was a solid-state computer that rarely failed. The old Inertia! Navigation System (INS) had also been replaced by a new system that was more accurate and reliable.
Above the bombardier-navigator’s radar scope was a small screen much like a television screen. This instrument displayed a picture from a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera mounted in a turret on the bottom of the fuselage, in front of the nose gear door. Also in the turret were a laser ranger designator and receiver, which the crew could use to obtain very precise range information on a target within ten nautical miles.
Jake used a rheostat to adjust the level of the cockpit lighting, then he looked around at the other airplanes and the men moving around the deck on random errands. He had difficulty distinguishing features of the other aircraft and the colors of the jerseys worn by the men on deck. He squinted. The island floodlights didn’t seem to help much.
This is just an alert, he told himself. Nothing will happen. We won’t launch. He breathed deeply and exhaled slowly, trying to relax.
“So why do you want to turn in your wings?” he asked Reed over the intercom system, the ICS, as he
