The entire procedure of the upwind leg turn to downwind and approach to landing was repeated. This time I cheated a bit and took a longer interval on the plane ahead. Canopy open, wheels down, hook down, flaps down, low prop pitch, and watch the LSO. After a flurry of signals to slow down, increase turn, and reduce altitude, the LSO brought me in low over the ramp and gave me the cut signal by running his right paddle across his throat. There was a mild but definite jolt and I was on the deck. A second later I was thrown against the shoulder harness as the arresting hook engaged a cross-deck pendant — the tail hook caught a wire. I kept my feet off the brakes as the deck-edge wire operator retracted the arresting cable. This pulled the plane back ten feet, over the crash barriers, which were lowered down flush with the deck. The yellow shirts, athletes that they were, were out on the deck immediately. The plane director, now visible off the plane’s nose to port, signaled “Hold brakes.” The hook men disengaged the now-slack wire from the arresting hook tip. The director signaled “Taxi forward,” and as the SB2C rolled out of the arresting gear area, the crash barriers rose up behind me. Ahead was Fly One again with his little yellow flag. Within thirty seconds I was again airborne, with one successful carrier landing in my record.
Again I followed the landing sequence: canopy, gear, hook, flaps, props, and follow the LSO’s signals. I was looking good at the cut. I yanked off the power, leveled off in a three-point altitude, and twang. Then sudden silence. I was in the crash barrier. The engine had stopped immediately, as the barrier cable was wrapped up in the prop. The crash yodel alarm, the worst noise in the world, was now deafening. A foam nozzle appeared over the cockpit coaming. The asbestos-suited “hot papa” was ready to spray at the first sign of smoke or fire. Then a head in a white helmet with a red cross appeared — the crash crew hospital corpsman was on the wing.
“Are you hurt?” he shouted.
“Just my ego is badly bruised,” I replied.
“Your what is what?” he asked anxiously.
I told him I was fine, and he climbed down, just a little bit disappointed, I thought. As I was helped out of the cockpit, the crash crew had already cleared the prop and attached a tow tractor to pull the plane to the hangar deck. The Beast was otherwise undamaged. As I walked into the island structure, I was met by my new skipper, Lieutenant Commander Badger. He put his arm around me and said, “Don’t feel bad, Jim, there are only two kinds of carrier aviators. Those who have gotten a barrier and those who are going to get one.” He sent me down to the ready room for a cup of coffee. “A barrier doesn’t even rate a medicinal brandy,” he continued. “Besides, you’ve got to fly this afternoon and get your four more arrested landings. I’ll see you up on vulture’s row.”
After a check on the aircraft — no damage except for a prop change — and a cup of coffee to decompress, I made my way topside to what is known to carrier types as vulture’s row. This is a narrow space on the carrier’s island aft of the primary air control station, itself a glassenclosed perch sixty feet above the flight deck where the air officer and his two assistants control the plane handling on the flight deck. Spectators line up along the railing on vulture’s row to watch, and of course critique, the carrier landings. I had just arrived on the row after climbing three sets of ladders and joined the skipper when the emergency klaxon went off with its ominous yodel and the bullhorn blared out, “Plane in the water.” I asked Badger what had happened — I could just see the tail end of an SB2C-5 sticking out of the water one hundred yards astern of the carrier, going down fast. He replied, “A Helldiver just stalled out in the landing approach and the plane went in. Looks like the pilot didn’t get out.” No head had reappeared. By now the plane guard destroyer had arrived and was backing both engines, slowing down to put a whaleboat in the water. The air officer had waved off the following SB2Cs in the landing pattern and sent them up to one thousand feet to join up and circle the ship. The carrier never slowed down. The pilot was one of our VB-3 ensigns, a former aviation cadet who had just received his wings and reported aboard the squadron the same week I had.
Badger was working his way through the crowd forward on vulture’s row to the navigation bridge, where he would report to the captain of the ship. I asked the lieutenant standing next to me what had happened. The pilot, the lieutenant said, was a little low and a bit slow. The LSO signaled him to increase his bank to avoid overshooting the groove — the landing straightaway — and to add power. The pilot answered the signals but put on the power too late. The steep bank with the nose-up attitude stalled him out before he could add power, and he spun in. Going in at ninety-five knots from a sixty-foot altitude was too much for the pilot. He must have been unconscious and unable to unhitch his seatbelt and harness to get out of the plane.
Forward of vulture’s row, the air officer stuck a flag pole with a green flag in a socket and the signal bridge ran up the “Fox” flag (the letter F signal flag, indicating that a ship is conducting air operations) on a halyard. The bullhorn blared, “Clear deck, commence landing aircraft.” With the order repeated by radio from Air Operations, four SB2Cs flew by on a parallel course to the right of the ship in a tight echelon at three hundred feet. Their hooks were down. As the first plane passed the bow of the carrier, it turned left in a steep bank to enter the landing pattern. The approach was normal until the plane rolled out on a short straightaway final. The LSO signaled the pilot at the last moment to lose altitude and turn left to line up to land. As the plane came over the ramp (the rear end of the flight deck), the LSO gave the cut signal, but the pilot was too low. When he dropped the nose at the cut — and even I could see it was too much — the left wheel hit the deck and the plane bounced back into the air in a right turn. The pilot pushed the plane’s nose down again to return to the deck, the tail went up, the hook missed the wires, and the Helldiver crashed into the 5-inch gun mount on the carrier’s starboard side, the nose going between the twin 5-inch gun barrels. Parts flew off, the massive propeller, turning at a thousand rpm, disintegrated, and the tank full of high-octane aviation gas ignited in a huge fireball.
The crash crew rushed to the scene, but the flames were so fierce that the hot papas in their asbestos suits were literally blown backward by the heat. Somehow the pilot, Bill Spiegel, our VB-3 executive officer, the second in command, was able to unhitch himself from the cockpit entanglements and jump from the plane’s wing to the ship’s deck. But even with his miraculous escape, the brief exposure to the searing flames resulted in terrible burns to his face and hands.