The Ready Room

NTLFF Newsletter #9

Welcome to the NTLFF Ready Room!

In this edition...

 

In this edition of the Ready Room newsletter, we are introducing a new feature entitled "Tailhook Tales."  Occassionally we will feature stories written by naval aviators showcasing some of the great "sea stories" that make up the legacy of Naval Aviation.  Our first Tailhook Tale is written by CDR (Ret) Brandon "Reggie" Hammond.  CDR Hammond's career includes time in both the F-14A Tomcat and the F/A-18F Super Hornet.  Reggie is also one of the key supporters of NTLFF.  We are greatly indebted to him for the work he has done on our behalf.

 

Hook Slap

 

Taking an arrested landing on an aircraft carrier means that the aircraft and the aircrew are within 15 feet of slamming into the back of a 100,000-ton metal object. Ever heard of the law of gross tonnage? If you’ve seen a video of a ramp strike, odds are it was accompanied by a furious explosion, the ejection of the pilot and his unlucky navigator, and what was left of the aircraft drifting off the angle deck in violent and fiery fashion.

 

Most pilots finish their naval career with minor bumps and bruises and maybe a neck or back that requires chiropractic care. Ramp strike victims sometimes live to tell the tale. Then there are the hook slappers. A hook slap is akin to meeting a lion on safari who just ate - he decides to move along and you live to tell the tale.

 

When I joined my first fleet squadron, I was a full Lieutenant, which is odd by today’s standards. Getting through the training command and qualifying in the T-34, T-2 and TA-4J was not always a fast process. Add the fact that I joined Fighter Squadron 101, the Grim Reapers, after getting my Wings of Gold at a time when Tomcats were moving from NAS Miramar to NAS Oceana and the numbers of jets in each squadron was being significantly reduced. Secretary of Defense Cheney had enough of “fighter spirit” after Tailhook ’91 and was shutting down Fightertown, USA, by giving it to the Marines. He also moved TOPGUN to the deserts of Fallon, Nevada, in hopes it would check some of the biggest egos and libidos in the military.

 

Sitting in the Fleet Replacement Squadron for nearly a year before my first F-14A flight on December 24th was a fate worse than waterboarding. “Trust me I know,” but it made for a nice Christmas gift. When I finally finished my Category 1 syllabus and became a fully qualified pilot who was capable of joining the fleet, I had done a little too well at the boat during Carrier Qualifications and was “rewarded” with orders to Fighter Squadron 154 in Atsugi, Japan. I had two weeks to pack my stuff, brief my wife on what I thought she should do with our new house, two cars and two cats, and then “sayonara” with the knowledge that she’d join me when she took care of the hard stuff of being a military spouse.

Upon arrival in Atsugi, I maintained currency by going directly out to the boat for Operation FOAL EAGLE. No doubt some of you are cringing at my use of the word “boat” versus “ship” to describe a capital warship like the USS KITTY HAWK (CV-63), but it is just an aviator’s affectionate way for referring to home. Since we don’t land on submarines it actually works to differentiate between going somewhere to land and going to investigate or support a ship. “Go back ship,” was how we described stumbling back to the carrier from a night of debauchery in port.

 

I quickly gained the trust of my Landing Signals Officers in the Black Knights and Carrier Air Wing FIVE. It was easy for me to get decent landing grades having had plenty of practice in VF-101 just two weeks before arrival in Japan. One day I mentioned as much to my RIO as we were on a BAG-EX, which was just a way of describing a period of flight time where the training objective was to execute numerous catapults and arrested landings. The BAG-EX events helped build proficiency for the newbies in the air wing. I told my RIO I was having fun and it was “good practice.” He was nice enough to remind me, “Well, glad you’re having fun, but it’s not practice, Reggie.” “We’re actually doing it, so try not to screw up.” Good advice.

 

We got home from our two month at-sea workup and didn’t get to sea again until the next March. It is times like this that are most dangerous for naval aviators. Complacency is an enemy that sneaks up on you, sort of like confidence is that feeling you get just before you realize you have no idea what you’re doing. When we got underway again, we had done numerous Field Carrier Landing Practice flights and I had even traveled to Iwo Jima to “practice,” but it wasn’t enough to replace the reality of landing on a postage stamp on a regular basis.

 

The trick about going to the boat is to remember that it moves. An airfield doesn’t. There is a part of the human brain that the pilot must learn to ignore. The part that sees the ship moving, registers that you are about to fly into it at a vertical descent rate of around 11 feet per second, and if you can, you do not flinch. This is where you really learn to trust your instruments. If you fly at the correct angle of attack, airspeed and vertical speed, things should generally work out if the aircraft carrier’s landing aids tell you the aircraft is close to being on glidepath and centerline. Where things go to hell is when you think everything’s good but it’s not or you can’t ignore the visual sensory cues that sometimes lie to you (like the ship looking flat when the bow pitches up in heavy seas and the moon illuminates the deck bigger than s#&t). These moments are called having “bad situational awareness.” The Landing Signals Officer is there to guide you to a safe landing and will call for a waveoff if the flight deck is pitching around in a manner that is unsafe. What the LSO can’t control is what is recognized as the most dangerous landing - a pilot trying to correct from a high approach by subtracting too much power in close and pulling the nose up rather than adding power to arrest a significant rate of descent.

 

My first landing at night at the beginning of my first real “cruise” (6-month deployment) was this kind of pass. The LSO on the platform knew it was me at the controls and could see I’d gotten to a reasonable start and my motors were fanning normally (RPM going up and down to keep the engines from being over-powered and maintain a rate of descent that will allow me to land.) I can’t describe what happened other than to say that occasionally the mind shuts off in extremely stressful situations like a night landing on an aircraft carrier. The five seconds that my brain stopped talking to my left hand resulted in an under-powered condition and the only way I was staying near the correct glidepath was by holding my nose up with aft stick.

 

One of the cardinal rules of ball-flying is, “get slow and you’ll go low.” Luckily, my RIO, Sassy, was scanning airspeed like a hawk and as soon as he saw I was over two knots slow he said, “Power.” This isn’t something a RIO normally says to his pilot, but thank God he did. I added a shot of power as my brain kicked back on, just in time to hear the LSO say, “Power, POWER, WAVEOFF, WAVEOFF!”

 

The F-14 engine intakes had a complex series of ramps that moved up and down at subsonic and supersonic speeds to ensure airflow was presented to the turbine section at the front of the engine at the subsonic speeds it required so no damage was done to the motor. Fluid Dynamics are fascinating and the Tomcat was a complex machine. With the landing gear down the engine did not have a high stall margin so if the pilot selected afterburner, the Mid-Compression Bypass (MCB) would open up a door and spill air from the compressor over the wing to keep air pressure from building up and resulting in a compressor stall or afterburner blowout. This reduction in pressure meant that a TF-30 Pratt & Whitney “reliable engine” produced as much thrust in military power (maximum basic engine power) as it did in full afterburner when the landing gear were down. Good for stall margin, not for producing lift. Believe it or not my training was effective and I didn’t bother with afterburner as we descended like a freight train towards the deck.

 

Sadly, my brain freeze had also caused me to lose track of lineup and now I was pointing straight at the LSO platform on the left side of the ship’s stern. A buddy of mine, Smitty, was a backup LSO that night and told me later that it was the one time in his “waving” career he had thought about jumping into the safety net that is outboard of the platform. Whoever was on lineup must’ve wanted to live, because he gave me a “right for lineup” just as my engines started to spool up again.

The issue with lineup corrections is that the F-14 used spoilers to help turn the jet since it was such an unwieldy beast with its 64’ wingspan at high angles of attack where the ailerons had limited effectiveness. Spoil lift to drop the right wing to turn and “guess what?” - you go down faster.

Next thing I know we are pranging down onto the deck and catching a wire. Based on where the arresting cable pulled out to, it looked like a 2 or 3-wire because we were next to the island and I could still see flight deck in front of me. With a 4-wire pull out you felt like you were over water because the nose would approach the end of the angled flight deck. With a 1-wire, we’d have been looking forward at the island and conducting the “taxi of shame,” towards the bow versus just making a right turn to exit the landing area.

 

I immediately said to my RIO, “Well, I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought.” We taxied nonchalantly to the on-deck spot for catapult one on the starboard side of the bow. Time to do it again. For night carrier qualification, I needed to log four decent traps. I slowed my breathing and after the Hornet in front of me launched off into the dark abyss, it was my turn. As we taxied across the Jet Blast Deflector and into the shuttle, thankfully the LSO from my squadron was paying attention. He came up on the radio and issued the depressing news, “Boss, spin the Tomcat off CAT 1, he’s going to need a post-flight inspection.”

I slowed my breathing and after the Hornet in front of me launched off into the dark abyss, it was my turn. As we taxied across the Jet Blast Deflector and into the shuttle, thankfully the LSO from my squadron was paying attention. He came up on the radio and issued the depressing news, “Boss, spin the Tomcat off CAT 1, he’s going to need a post-flight inspection.”

I thought it was a hard landing or I was going to need some remedial training before going back out the next night and “post-flight inspection” was code for letting me change my shorts. When I got into the Ready Room, the LSO was waiting for me and looked sick. He grabbed Sassy and I and said, “Let’s go to my stateroom to debrief.” He had a VHS tape in his hand. The cameras on the ship capture almost everything that occurs on the flight deck. When we got to his room, he plunked the tape into his VHS player, hit rewind, opened his refrigerator and pulled out a handle of Jack Daniel’s finest swill. After Sassy and I both had a shot, he pressed play and showed us our “hook slap.” I’d never even heard of it before, but you could tell from the sparks flying everywhere that our hook had drug along the flight deck for a while before catching the 3-wire.

It was hard to tell from the video, but my LSO was a dangerously close witness to, my main landing gear cleared the back of the ship by a foot and my tailhook had struck the “round down,” which is a curved area on the back of the ship that is painted bright white in stark contrast to the battleship grey of the flight deck. We were lucky the hook hadn’t snapped.

Had we catapulted again and came around for another trap, it’s entirely possible our hook point would have come off or the tailhook might have sheared in half under the stress after the blow dealt by the hook slapping the back of the ship. The arresting cable was designed to pay out and gradually arrest the 54,000-pound Tomcat vice trying to stop it instantly. When a cable snaps a hook that isn’t up to specs, the aircraft has a significantly reduced amount of energy and typically doesn’t get airborne again. It has a tendency to dribble off the angled flight deck into the ocean.

 

After taking a nap and returning to the Ready Room, I found out that a Warrant Officer from the ship’s crew had stopped by to drop off a 3”x4” paint chip that had fallen off the ceiling onto his desk thanks to my “landing.” He wrote, “Nice job, Nugget” on it. Upon inspection the next day, I found a horseshoe-shaped stamp about 4 feet down on the round down. But hey - at least it was on centerline! Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Our Mission:

“Maintaining the proud legacy of Navy Tailhook Aviation by keeping it alive and sustainable.”  

 

It is our mission to return Navy Tailhook Legacy Flights to the air show circuit across all of North America. There has not been a Navy Tailhook Legacy Flight with warbird and F/A-18 aircraft since 2012. As F-35C Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Initial Operational Capability (IOC) approaches, our goal is to have the budget in place to return these flights to the skies in 2017 and beyond. YOUR support is the key. Without you we cannot accomplish this mission.

How can you keep Navy Tailhook Legacy Flights alive and sustainable?

 

By donating to the Foundation, you are ensuring future generations will see these flights back in the air where they belong as a testament to the proud history of Naval air power.  You can visit our website by clicking the link below to donate or purchase items through our online store.  We also eagerly anticipate participation with VFA-125, the U.S. Navy’s F-35C replacement squadron, when it reaches IOC in the 2020 timeframe at Naval Air Station (NAS) Lemoore, CA.  Keep informed via our Facebook page and Twitter account of our latest news.

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