Fat chance, he told himself. The thought of another refueling like the last one was the best inducement he’d ever had for getting his landing right the first time.
He reduced speed to 250 knots, overriding the flight computers attempts to extend the aircraft’s swing wings to their full wing-forward position. The Tomcat’s sleek lines wouldn’t be visible in the darkness, but Tombstone, like most aviators, made it a point of pride to keep the wings back and the F-14 looking its best all the way down.
The action brought back an old memory of a young RIO who had referred to the forward wing position as “goose mode” because it made the Tomcat look like an awkward goose flaring out as it landed on some still lake.
As the seconds ticked by he checked his airspeed and angle of approach on the Vertical Display Indicator in the center of his control panel, carefully lining up the Instrument Landing System cross-pointers on the glowing cursor that represented the Jefferson’s location with built-in corrections for wind direction and speed. He didn’t like flying by the ILS, but it was the only way to make a carrier landing approach at night. Except in the brightest moonlight, sea and sky tended to merge into a featureless black cave, and without reference points a pilot could quickly lose his orientation. Vertigo was one of the milder problems associated with trying to fly when it was impossible to judge distance or direction. When traveling at nearly three hundred miles per hour, it only took an instant’s confusion to end up a casualty.
At best the carrier itself would be no more than a tiny dot of light set in an otherwise featureless gloom, and that only at comparatively close ranges. That made the ILS essential.
Once the cross hairs were centered Tombstone kept them precisely in position. Luckily, the throttle on a Tomcat adjusted speed automatically, allowing him to concentrate on course corrections and his angle of attack. The F-14 covered ten miles — half the distance between the carrier and the final fix that had been the jump-off point for the approach — in just over two minutes, dropping two thousand feet per minute. Magruder kept his attention focused on the VDI, resisting the temptation to look through the canopy and try to spot the Jefferson.
When the range indicator on the display indicated ten miles he “dirtied up” the Tomcat by hitting the switches that dropped landing gear, flaps, and tail hook. He was flying level now, at twelve hundred feet, with airspeed dropping. The ILS cross-pointers were centered near the top of the display, but they crept toward the middle of the screen as the Tomcat continued its approach.
Three miles out he started his descent again, still entirely dependent on instruments. It took experience to handle this part of a night approach, a precise knowledge of just how much to compensate for tiny course deviations. The carrier wasn’t a stable, motionless platform, but a moving target plunging through wind and wave at better than twenty knots. And wind was only one of many factors that were making the Tomcat drift off the mark. Correcting for drift was a constant thing, and the closer the fighter got to the carrier the more Tombstone had to anticipate the behavior of the aircraft so his corrections could be applied in time.
His two years away from constant carrier ops had left him rusty, but he found all the old instincts coming back to him. Man and machine worked as the perfect team.
“Two miles out,” Jefferson’s radio controller said. “Left one, slightly below glide path.”
He corrected automatically, almost before the radio call.
As the range indicator showed one mile left, he looked up from the VDI and saw the carrier immediately. It was like a tapering box outlined in white lights, bisected by a centerline that projected out of the bottom edge of the box. Orange lights at the end of the centerline marked the drop line hanging down the stern of the ship, indicating the edge of the flight deck.
He picked out the tiny rectangular shape of the optical glide-path indicator to the left of the white lights, the “meatball” that helped aviators estimate their height and approach path as they made the final drop to the deck. It was still indistinct at this range, and not very reliable until the range was considerably shorter. But visual acquisition of the meatball meant that Tombstone was ready to bring the Tomcat down.
“Mercury One-oh-nine,” he said over the radio. “Tomcat ball. Four point eight.” The signal told Jefferson who he was, what kind of plane he was flying, and signaled that he had visual sighting of the meatball with 4800 pounds of fuel remaining.
“Roger ball,” the Landing Signals Officer said. “Deck’s going up. You’re looking good.”
The meatball was designed to give the approaching pilot a visual indication of his position relative to the deck. If the center of the five Fresnel lenses was illuminated, the approaching aircraft was right on its glide path. It was high if one of the upper lenses was lit, too low if a lens below the midpoint glowed. But at a mile out one notch of the meatball represented thirty-two feet of altitude, so it wasn’t the most accurate way to judge the approach. Tombstone kept his descent constant at five hundred feet per minute and relied on the advice of the LSO, a veteran aviator with a much better perspective on the approach than Magruder had himself, to keep him on track.
“Remember, you’ll tend to fly low,” the LSO went on. The best LSOs were the ones who dropped hints without giving detailed instructions. If Tombstone screwed up the approach enough to become a real danger, the laid-back, friendly tone would change. Right now the LSO was simply a calming voice who worked with the pilot, not against him.
The square of white lights that defined the flight deck was like a hole opening up in front of the Tomcat. There was a tendency for pilots to feel they were too high at this stage of the approach, but it was an illusion. Tombstone eased up on his descent rate, conscious of the other potential hazard, that he would over-correct and come in too high. It might result in an embarrassing fly-by … or, if his hook caught a wire even though his landing gear wasn’t on the deck, it could end up in a messy crash.
Nearing the half-mile point, Magruder could see the carrier taking on a ghostly shape for the first time. Now he could use the visual clues that simplified carrier landings, including the meatball. There was the usual burst of confidence, and the usual quick realization that there was nothing to be confident about yet. As the last few seconds of the approach ticked away the impression that the deck was really just a square hole came back stronger than ever.
“Come down, Stoney. Down a little,” the LSO said urgently. Magruder could picture him getting ready to punch the button on the “pickle switch” in his hands that would signal a wave-off and send the Tomcat back in the air for another run. Tombstone compensated, knowing that too much correction could slam the plane into the ramp.
The landing gear hit hard as the Tomcat touched down, and Tombstone realized instantly that he had overshot the ideal touchdown point. Four arresting wires stretched across the deck, and the optimum landing was one that snagged the number-three wire. The F-14 had been high, and missed that one.
He shoved the throttle full forward, according to standard procedure, so that the Tomcat could get airborne again if it missed the “trap.” Even though it was common enough to botch a night landing he felt his face turning red with anger and embarrassment. For Tombstone Magruder, the great naval hero and the new Deputy CAG, to pull a bolter on his first approach …
But sudden deceleration caught him by surprise as the tail hook caught the four wire and the Tomcat jerked to a halt. “Good trap! Good trap!” he heard in his headphones.
They were down.