The Intruders (8 page)

Jake keyed the mike: “Five One One is inbound at One Seven, state Seven
Point Six.”

“Roger, War Ace Five One One. Continue.”

At five thousand feet Jake shallowed his descent as Flap called on the
radio: “Five One One, Platform.”

“Roger, Five One One. Switch button One Seven.”

Flap changed the radio frequency. Jake watched the TACAN needle
carefully and made heading corrections as necessary to stay on the final
bearing inbound. Soon he was level at 1,200 feet, inbound. At ten
miles he dropped the gear and flaps. This slowed the plane still more.
He checked the gear and Rap indications and soon was stabilized at 120
knots. Flap read the landing checklist and Jake rogered each item.

Seventy-five hundred pounds of fuel. He toggled the main dump and let a
thousand pounds bleed overboard into the atmosphere. If this worked
out, he should cross the ramp with exactly six thousand pounds
remaining, the maximum fuel load for an arrested landing.

Jake adjusted the rheostat on the angle-of-attack indexer, a small
arrangement of lights on the left canopy bow in front of him. These
lights indicated his airspeed, now a smidgen fast. One hundred eighteen
knots was the speed he wanted, so he eased off a touch of throttle, then
eased it back on.

The indexer came to an on-speed indication. He checked his airspeed
indicator. Exactly 118. Okay.

There-way out there-the ship! It appeared in the dark universe as a
small collection of white and red lights, not yet distinguishable as to
shape. Oh, now he could see the outline of the landing area, and the
red drop lights down the stern that gave him his lineup cues. The ball
on the left

side of the landing area that would give him his glide slope was not yet
visible.

The final approach controller was talking: “Five One One, approaching
the glide slope, call your needles.”

The needles the controller was referring to were crosshairs in a cockpit
instrument that was driven by a computer aboard the ship. The computer
contrasted the radar-derived position of the aircraft with the known
location of the glide slope and centerline. It then sent a radio signal
to a box in the aircraft, which positioned the needles to depict the
glide slope and centerline. The system was called ACLS, automatic
carrier landing system, and someday it would indeed be automatic. Right
now it was just the needles. Jake had to fly the plane.

“Down and right.”

“Disregard. You’re low and slightly left … Five One One, slightly
below glide slope, lined up slightly left. Come a little right for
lineup, on glide path … on glide path . . .”

At the on-glide path call Jake squeezed out the speed brakes and
concentrated intently on his instruments. He had to set and hold a
six-hundred-foot rate of descent, hold heading, hold airspeed, keep the
wings level and this plane coming down just so delicately so.

“I’ve got a ball,” Flap told him at two miles.

The controller: “Left of course. Come right.”

The pilot made the correction, then glanced ahead. Yes, he could tell
from the drop lights he was left. When he was properly lined up again
he took out most of the correction.

Still his nose was pointed slightly right of the landing area.

This correction was necessary since the wind was not precisely down the
angled deck, which was pointed ten degrees left of the ship’s keel.
Except for an occasional glance ahead, he stayed on the gauges.

“Five One One, three-quarter mile, call the ball.”

Now Jake glanced out the windshield. There’s the meatball, centered
between the green datum lights. Lineup looks good too. Jake keyed the
mike and said, “Five One One, Intruder ball, Six Point Oh.”

“Roger, ball. Looking good.” That was the LSO on the fantail, Skidmore.

The ball moved in relation to the green reference or datum lights that
were arranged in a horizontal line. When the yellow “meatball” in the
center moved up, you were above glide path. When it appeared below the
reference line, you were low. if you were too low, the ball turned red,
blood red, a stark prophecy of your impending doom if you didn’t
immediately climb higher on the glide slope. The back end of the ship,
the ramp, lurked in red ball country, waiting to smash a plane to bits.

Yet as critical as proper glide slope control was, lineup was even more
so. The landing area was 115 feet wide, the wing span of the A-6, 52.
The edges of the landing area were defined by foul lines, and aircraft
were parked with their noses abutting the foul lines on both sides of
the deck.

Landing aircraft were literally sinking into a canyon between parked
airplanes.

And Jake had to monitor his airspeed carefully. The angle-of-attack
indexer helped enormously here, arranged as it was where he could see it
as he flew the lineup and glide slope cues. Any deviation from an
on-speed indication required his immediate attention because it would
quickly affect his descent rate, thereby screwing up his control of the
ball. Running out of airspeed at the ramp was a sin that had killed
many a naval aviator.

Meatball, lineup, angle-of-attack-as he closed the ship Jake’s eyes were
in constant motion checking these three items. Nearing the ship he
dropped the angle-of-attack from his scan and concentrated on keeping
properly lined up, with a centered ball. As he crossed the ramp he
zeroed in on the meatball, flying it to touchdown.

The wheels hit and the nose slammed down. Jake Grafton thumbed the
speed brakes in as he smoothly and quickly shoved the throttles forward
to the stops. The LSO was on the radio shouting, “Bolter, bolter,
bolter,” just in case he forgot to advance the throttles or to
positively rotate to a flying attitude as he shot off the edge of the
angled deck.

Jake didn’t forget. The engines were at full song as the Intruder left
the deck behind and leaped back into the blackness of the night. Jake
eased the stick back until he had ten degrees nose up and checked for a
positive rate of climb. Going up. Gear up. Accelerating through 185
knots, flaps and slats up.

Now to get those six traps.

The radar controller leveled him at 1,200 feet and turned him to the
downwind heading, the reciprocal of the ship’s course. He was stable at
220 knots. Jake reached for the hook handle and pulled it. Hook down.

The controller turned him so that he had an eight-mile groove, which was
nice. As soon as the wings were level he dropped the gear and flaps.
Once again he concentrated intently on airspeed and altitude control,
nailing the final bearing on the TACAN, retrimming until the plane flew
itself with only the tiniest of inputs to the stick to counter the
natural swirls and currents of the air. This was precision flying,
where any sloppiness could prove instantly fatal.

“Five One One, approaching glide slope … Five One One, up and on
glide slope … three-quarters of a mile, call the ball”

“Five One One, Intruder ball, Five Point Six.”

Deep in the heart of the ship in Air Ops, a sailor wearing headphones
wrote “5.6″ in yellow grease pencil on the Plexiglas board in front of
him and the time beside the notation that said “Grafton, 511.” He wrote
backward, so the letters and numbers read properly to the air officer,
the air wing commander, and the other observers who were sitting
silently on the other side of the board watching the television monitors
and occasionally glancing at the board.

Just now the picture on the monitors was from a camera buried on the
landing centerline of the flight deck, which pointed aft up the glide
slope. As they watched the officers saw the lights of Jake’s A-6 appear
on the center of the screen, in the center of the crosshairs that
indicated the proper glide slope and lineup. As the plane closed the
ship the lights assumed more definition.

Up in the top of the carrier’s island superstructure was Pried-Fly, the
domain of the air boss. His little empire was pretty quiet just now
since all the air traffic was being controlled via radar and radio from
Air Ops, but two enlisted men behind the boss’s chair were busy. One
held a pair of binoculars focused up the glide slope. He saw the
approaching Intruder, identified it, and chanted, “Set Three Six Zero,
A-6.” Regardless of a plane’s fuel state, the arresting gear was always
set at the maximum trap weight, in the case of the A-6, 36,000 pounds.

To his left, the other sailor made a note in his log and repeated into a
sound-powered phone that hung from his chest, “Set Three Six Zero, A-6.”

The air boss, a senior commander, sat in a raised easy chair surrounded
by large bullet-proof glass windows. He could hear the radio
transmissions and the litany of the sailors behind him, and noted
subconsciously that they agreed with what his eyes, and the approach
controller, were telling him, that there was an A-6 on the ball, an A-6
with a ma)dmum trap weight of 36,000 pounds.

Under the after end of the flight deck in the arresting gear engine
rooms, all four of them, sat sailors on the PriFly sound-powered
circuit. Each individually spun a wheel to mechanically set the
metering orifice of his arresting gear engine to 36,000 pounds, then
they sang out in turn, “One set Three Six Zero A-6,”

“Two set Three Six Zero A-6,” and so on.

When the fourth and last engine operator had reported his engine set,
the talker in Pried-Fly sang out, “All engines set, Three Six Zero A-6,”
and the air boss rogered.

On the fantail of the ship directly aft of the island, on the starboard
side of the landing area in a catwalk on the edge of the deck, stood the
sailor who retracted the arresting gear engines once they had been
engaged. He too was on the Pried-Fly sound-powered circuit, and when
the fourth engine reported set, he shouted to the arresting gear officer
who stood above him on the deck, right on the starboard foul line, “All
engines set, Three Six Zero A-6.”

The gear officer looked up the glide slope. Yep, it was an A-6. He
glanced forward up the deck. The landing area was clear. No aircraft
protruded over the foul lines, there were no people in the landing area,
so he squeezed a trigger switch on the pistol grip he held in his right
hand.

This switch operated a stop-light affair arranged twenty feet or so aft
of the landing signal officer’s platform on the port side of the landing
area. The LSO waving tonight, Hugh Skidmore, saw the red light go out
and a green light appear.

“Clear deck,” he called, and the other LSOs on the platform echoed the
call.

“Clear deck!”

This entire evolution had taken about fifteen seconds. The ship was
ready to recover the inbound A-6. Now if Jake Grafton could just fly
his plane into that little sliver of sky that would give him a three
wire …

He was trying. He was working the stick and throttles, playing them
delicately, when he slammed into the burble of air disturbed by the
ship’s island. The plane jolted and he jammed on some power, then as
quickly pulled it off as he cut through the turbulence into the calm air
over the ramp. On he came, aiming for that eighteen-inches-thick window
where the third wire waited, coming in at 118 knots in an eighteen-ton
plane, the hook dangling down behind the main gear, coming in …

Hugh Skidmore strode about five feet into the landing area, inboard of
the LSO’s platform. Against his ear he held a telephonelike radio
headset connected with the ship’s radios by a long cord. Forward of the
LSO’s platform was a television monitor, the PLAT-pilot landing
assistance television-which he checked occasionally to ensure the plane
in the groove was properly lined up. He could hear the approach
controller and he could hear and talk to Jake Grafton. Yet there was
nothing to say. The A-6 was coming in like it was riding rails.

Then it was there, crossing the ramp.

Jake still had a steady centered yellow ball as the wheels smashed home.
The ball shot off the top of the lens as he slammed the throttles to the
stops and the hook caught, seemingly all at the same time. The
deceleration threw the pilot and bombardier forward into their
harnesses.

The A-6 Intruder was jerked to a halt in a mere two hundred and sixty
feet.

It hung quivering on the end of the arresting gear wire, then Jake got
the engines back to idle and the rebound of the wire pulled the plane
backward.

The gear runner was already twenty feet out into the landing area
signaling the pilot with his wands: hook up. When he saw the aircraft’s
tailhook being retracted, the runner waved one of his wands in a huge
circle, the signal to the arresting gear operator in the fantail catwalk
to retract the engine.

Obediently the operator selected the lever for numberthree engine and
pulled it down. Since the lever was connected by a wire over three
hundred feet long to a hydraulic actuating valve on the engine, this
pull took some muscle.

When he had the yard-long lever well away from the bulkhead, the sailor
leaped on it with his feet and used the entire weight of his body to
force the lever down to a ninetydegree angle.

By now the A-6 that had just landed was folding its wings as it taxied
out of the landing area. By the time the tail crossed the foul line,
the third engine operator said “battery,” and the retract man got off
the lever and let it come back to its rest position. As he did he heard
the Pried-Fly talker sing out, “Set Two Seven Zero A-7.”

On the LSO platform Hugh Skidmore leaned over to his writer, tonight the
Real McCoy. “Give him an OK three.

Little lined up left at the start.”

McCoy scribbled the notation in his pocket logbook like this: 511 OK3
(LLATS).

Then both men turned their full attention to the A-7 in the groove as
they waited for the clear-deck light to illuminate.