Her watch alarm began beeping, and she tapped it off before checking the time. Zero-four-thirty. She let out a breath.
“Yeah, I know. Time to go fly.”
5
The shadowy silhouettes of two US Navy destroyers appeared on the horizon.
Victoria said, “Stockdale in sight.”
“Roger, Skipper,” replied her copilot. He was a freshly promoted lieutenant commander, and a new arrival to Victoria’s squadron. On paper, he was one of her most promising department heads. The perfect choice to replace someone getting fired.
A ship controller spoke over the UHF radio. “VIXEN seven-zero-five, Stockdale control, radar contact, ten miles out. Flight quarters is set.”
Victoria keyed the microphone. “Roger, Control. Kicking to Deck.”
Her copilot reached over and changed the UHF frequency, giving her a thumbs up. This allowed her to keep her hands on the controls while she flew.
“Deck, VIXEN 705, how copy?” By now the ship’s aviators should be manning the Landing Signals Officer shack, checking their own communications.
“Lima Charlie, VIXEN. Have numbers when you’re ready.”
“Send ’em,” Victoria said. Her helicopter was close enough that she could make out the wake of the ship, and she maneuvered to follow the trail of white water toward her landing spot.
“VIXEN, Deck, numbers are as follows…” The pilot manning the USS Stockdale’s LSO shack passed the ship’s course and speed, pitch and roll, and winds. He then said, “You have green deck for landing.”
“Roger, green deck for one approach, one landing.” Victoria switched to the internal communications circuit. “Landing checks?”
“Complete,” her copilot responded, followed shortly by the aircrewman stationed in the helicopter’s rear cabin.
She scanned her instruments, maintaining her speed until the distance measuring equipment indicated she was half a mile away from the USS Stockdale. Then Victoria began pulling back on the cyclic with her right hand while lowering the collective power lever with her left. Her scan switched to mostly outside the aircraft, only spot checking her instruments every few seconds. The aircraft pitched up, bleeding off airspeed while keeping its altitude as she drove up the ship’s wake.
Her copilot called out, “Point-four. Fifty knots. Point-three. Thirty-five knots. Twenty-five knots. Altitude fifty feet.”
“Crossing the deck edge,” called out her aircrewman.
“Roger, radar altimeter hold off.”
Her copilot depressed the switch and gave her a thumbs up. He had the good sense to keep his hands near the controls without actually touching them.
Victoria felt the helicopter’s vibrations grow more intense as it slowed below translational lift and came to a hover over the destroyer’s flight deck.
The ship heaved, pitched, and rolled in the ocean below them. Victoria kept her aircraft in a steady hover over the center of the flight deck. She was aware of, but not reacting to, each movement of the flight deck. Her landing spot would never remain still, and chasing it was the worst thing she could do. Instead, Victoria used her peripheral vision to monitor the horizon, making nonstop micro-adjustments to her flight controls as she inched forward in a slow hover-taxi. Her job was now to maneuver the 20,000-pound helicopter precisely over the trap, lining up the one-foot-long metal probe extending from the bottom of her helicopter.
Her aircrewman began guiding her toward the square metal trap that would lock her helicopter into place.
“Easy forward five… easy forward four… three… two…”
A constant flow of wind whipped around the superstructure, kicking her aircraft with turbulence as the ship’s steel flight deck took another big roll beneath her.
“Little squirrely today,” was all Victoria said as she maneuvered the aircraft to a rock-solid hover right over the trap.
“In position,” called her aircrewman.
Victoria kept her head on a swivel as she crouched forward while holding the controls, keeping her yaw steady with her foot pedals, and patiently waited for that perfect moment. Timing the roll of the waves. Wait for it… here it comes… She started her arm movement when the ship was still angled in a roll. To the casual observer, it would look like the worst time to land. But Victoria knew that the ship was about to swing back the other way like a pendulum.
She reduced power by lowering the collective lever all the way down, making rapid, precise inputs with her right hand on the cyclic as she did so. Each movement of her cyclic transferred inputs to the rotor disk above her, correcting for drift in the seconds that mattered most. As a result, her aircraft came straight down, landing on its large wheels with a thud like a pickup truck coming down hard over a grassy hill, the helicopter’s shock struts earning their keep.
“In the trap… trapped,” the LSO called over the radio. The beams’ metal jaws closed on the helicopter’s probe.
“Chocks, chains,” said Victoria. Her copilot made a rolling motion with his fists, followed by inward-pointing thumbs joining together. The plane captain, one of the ship’s sailors who bravely stood just forward of the spinning rotor, acknowledged the signal and then directed the flight deck crew to put chocks and chains on the aircraft. They immediately began running into the rotor arc from either side, helping to further secure the aircraft to the rolling ship.
As she waited for the crew to tie her aircraft down, she felt two familiar but uncomfortable sensations. One was the roll of the ship. These smaller warships rolled a hell of a lot more than the big deck she was currently deployed on. The second was being angled down toward the hangar. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were great ships, but aviators hated their flight decks’ forward angle. In a hover, your nose was angled up. When you landed, your nose was actually pointing down a few degrees. Victoria once heard that the designer wanted to make sure the helicopter didn’t fall off the ass end of the ship if the parking brake slipped. She guessed no one worried about the rotors chopping through the hangar if that happened.
Victoria and her copilot requested permission to shut down the aircraft and then went through their checklist to do so. Within minutes, the aircraft engines were off, and she had applied the rotor brake, bringing the four rotors to a stop.
“We’ll ask the 2-Ps to get the water wash,” she said to her copilot, snapping the black cord that connected her helmet to the helicopter’s internal communications system. Carefully swinging her right leg around the flight controls so she wouldn’t accidentally kick them, she inched out the door, one hand on her seat for balance, the other on the door so it wouldn’t blow off its hinge. The doors were made to come off easily, in case of a crash.
She closed and locked the door, still feeling the waves rolling beneath her feet. After being aboard a big deck ship, the USS Wasp, she needed to get her real sea legs back. Balancing herself, she walked slightly aft, scanning every inch of the aircraft from the tail rotor gear box then forward along the tail boom, bending down to check underneath, then up to scan the main rotor, and on and on. Her eyes took mental snapshots of every section, checking every rivet, every inch of metal and comparing it to what she had seen during her thousands of previous helicopter inspections. Good aviators didn’t pass on a chance to evaluate their aircraft, even post-flight.
Victoria walked forward on the flight deck, saying hello to the maintenance men, aircrewmen, and junior pilots from her squadron that she hadn’t seen in months.