Over on the just-arrived Harry S. Truman, fifty Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters, the latest in modern submarine hunting, were lined up alongside the main runway, blades folded, with six just preparing to leave. The U.S. Navy had three hundred of these hovering state-of-the-art ASW specialists, but not one of them had ever been under more steel-edged orders than those received in the Norfolk yards last week.
Admiral Gillmore had left it to the carrier COs to carry out the aircraft exchange, and both Captains had decided on six at a time as the safest method, especially in this weather.
The helicopter maintenance crews were ferried across separately in a Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion assault and support helicopter, transported from Norfolk especially for this phase of the operation. The Sea Stallion was designed to carry thirty-eight Marines, but today, it was to move back and forth between the carriers, laden with spare parts for the Seahawks plus the Navy experts who knew how to fit them. They would also be ferrying the fixed-wing maintenance crews that were returning to the U.S. with the Tomcats and Hornets.
And now the Seahawks were ready. The Truman’s flight-deck controller signaled them away, and one by one their screaming rotors bore them almost vertically into the sky, banking out over the port side of the carrier to form a long convoy that made a wide, slow circular route toward the Reagan.
With six airborne, there was now an open deck for the first of the Reagan’s Tomcats to land. And over on the Battle Group’s flagship there was intense activity. The red light on the island signaled…Four minutes to launch.
The first Tomcat was in position at the head of the runway, the visual checks completed. Two minutes later, the light flicked to amber, and a crewman moved forwards to the catapult and attached it to the launch bar. The light turned green, Lt. Jack Snyder, the “shooter,” raised his right hand and pointed it directly at the pilot. Then he raised his left hand and pointed two fingers…Go to full power…
Then he extended his palm straight out…Hit the afterburners…Immediately, the pilot saluted, and leaned slightly forward, tensing for the impact of the catapult shot.
Lieutenant Snyder, still staring directly at the cockpit, saluted, then bent his knees, extended two fingers on his left hand, then touched the deck. He gestured: FORWARD! And a crewman, kneeling on the narrow catwalk next to the fighter jet, hit the button on catapult one, and ducked low, as the stupendous force of the hydraulic mechanism hurled the jet on its way.
Engines howling, flat-out, it left a blast of hot air in its wake. And, as always, every heart on that deck, every heart in the island control centers, stopped dead. For just a couple of seconds, no one was breathing, as the Tomcat hurtled towards the bow, up the ramp, and out over the water, climbing away, dead ahead, ready to start its 25-mile circle to the flight deck of the Harry S. Truman, which would bear it home to the United States.
Five more times, the flight-deck crew of the Ronald Reagan sent the Tomcats away, up into the lashing rain, before the flight controller, in his fluorescent waterproof yellow gear, signaled that the Seahawks were on their way in.
Back on the Truman, the flight-deck crew anticipated the first of the F-14 Tomcats, which had broken off from the stack of six and circled at 8,000 feet, 20 miles out, heading their way.
It was a 22-ton brute of an aircraft that didn’t just glide in, flaring out elegantly just above a mile-long runway like a big passenger jet, but came bucking in, lurching along in all weathers, at 160 knots, damn near out of gas, and then slamming down onto the deck, the pilot praying for the arresting wire to grab and hold.
If it missed, he would have approximately one-twentieth of a second to ram the throttles wide open and thunder off the flight deck…before $40 million worth of aircraft would hurtle over the side and punch a hole in the ocean’s choppy surface. And there was always the possibility of an outright catastrophe — the hook missing, the pilot’s reaction a shade slow, and the aircraft slewing around, piling into forty others, all within yards of millions of gallons of jet fuel.
However many times a pilot had done it, the exercise of landing a fighter bomber on the heaving deck of a carrier would remain a life-or-death test of nerve and skill.
Right now, on the rain-lashed stern of the Harry S. Truman, the Landing Signals Officer, tall, lanky Texan Eugene “Geeno” Espineli, was in contact with the incoming Tomcat’s pilot, Lt. J. R. Crowell from West Virginia. Geeno’s binoculars were focused as well as they could be in this weather, trying to track the aircraft’s incoming path.
Ensign Junior Grade Taylor Cobb, the Arresting Gear Officer, was calling the shots, bellowing down the phone, above the howl of the wind, to the hydraulics team working below. He was out on the stern in his bright yellow waterproofs, earphones on, his eyes scanning the deck, checking for even the slightest speck of litter, which could suck into the Tomcat’s engine and blow it right out. He was checking for the fourth or fifth time for a broken arrester wire, which could lash back and kill a dozen people, not to mention the absolute certainty of sending the aircraft straight over the bow.
“STAND BY FOR THE TOMCAT…TWO MINUTES!”
The massive hydraulic piston was set to withstand the controlled collision between fighter jet and deck. And now everyone could see J. R. Crowell fighting to hold the Tomcat steady, 2 degrees above the horizontal against the driving rain and unpredictable gusts.
The Truman was pitching through 3 degrees in the long swells, dead into the wind, at 18 knots. She was rising and falling one and a half degrees on either side of the horizontal, which put the bow and stern through 60 feet every 30 seconds — conditions to challenge the deftness and fortitude of any pilot.
“GROOVE!” bawled Ensign Cobb, code for “She’s close, stand by…”
Then, 20 seconds later, “SHORT!”—the critical command, everyone away from the machinery.
Out on the deck, all LSOs edged towards the big padded pit into which they would jump if young JR misjudged and piled into the stern. They could see the aircraft now, screaming in through the rain, engines howling.
“RAMP!” bellowed Ensign Cobb. And with every eye upon it, JR slammed the Tomcat down on the landing surface, and the flight-deck crew breathed again as the cable grabbed the hook, then rose up from the deck into a V. One second later, the Tomcat stopped dead in its tracks, almost invisible in the swirling mist of rain and spray in its wake.
The deck crews came out of the starting blocks like Olympic sprinters, racing towards the aircraft to haul it into its designated parking spot. And out there on the stern, Ensign Cobb, the rain beating off his hood, had already made contact with the second incoming Tomcat…“Okay one-zero-eight…wind gusting at 38…Check your approach line…Looking good from here…flaps down…hook down…Gotcha visual…You’re all set…C’mon in…”
One by one, they repeated the procedure. Then six more Seahawks took off in the failing light. Then six more Tomcats blasted off the deck of the Reagan and headed for the stack 20 miles astern of the Truman. Six at a time. Then the Hornets, six more groups, all going through the same death-defying combat procedures, slamming the jets down on the deck, the aces of the Death Rattler squadron, the Vigilantes, and the Kestrels.