Any way you cut it, an arresting gear engine was one hell of a fine piece of machinery. And Johnny Arbogast was the guy who ran Columbia’s number three, which was pretty darn good, he thought, for a plumber’s kid from Cotulla, Texas, who had had to struggle for everything he ever got.
The engine consisted of a giant hydraulic piston inside a steel cylinder about thirty inches in diameter that was arranged parallel with the ship’s beam. Almost fifty feet in length, the cylinder containing the piston sat inside a large steel frame. Around the piston were reeved two twelve-hundred-foot strands of arresting gear cable, one-and-five-eighths-inch-thick wire rope made of woven steel threads. These two cables ran repeatedly around sheaves at the head and foot of the main piston and squeezed it as the aircraft pulled out the flight deck pennant above Johnny’s head. It was the metering of the fluid squeezed by the piston from the cylinder — pure ethylene glycol, or antifreeze — through an adjustable orifice that controlled the rate at which the aircraft was arrested. Johnny set the size of this orifice for each arrestment as ordered by the talker in Pri-Fly.
To maintain proper tension on the engine cable as the aircraft on the flight deck was pulling it out, two anchor dampners that held the bitter ends of each cable stroked simultaneously. These fifty-foot-long pistons inside cylinders about twelve inches in diameter pulled slack cable off the back, or idle, side of the engine, thereby keeping the wire taut throughout the system.
When he first reported aboard Columbia, the arresting gear chief had impressed Johnny with a story about an anchor dampner that sheared its restraining nut during an arrestment. The suddenly free dampner, as big as a telephone pole, was forcibly whipped through the aluminum bulkhead of the engine room into the 0-3-level passageway where it cut a sailor on his way to chow sloppily in half. The running cable whipped the dampner like a scythe. It sliced through a dozen officers’ stateroom bulkheads as if they were so much tissue paper. When the dampner had accomplished a 180-degree turn, it reentered the engine room and skewered the engine like a mighty spear, exploding sheaves and showering the room, and the operator, with sharp, molten-hot metal fragments. All this took place in about a second and a half. Fortunately the plane on the flight deck was successfully arrested before the now-unanchored cable could run completely off the engine, but the engine room was a shambles and the operator went to the hospital with critical injuries.
As a result of this little story, Johnny Arbogast developed a habit of running his eyes over the anchor dampners after each arrestment. Tonight, after setting the engine to receive an A-6, he saw something that he had never before seen. As the anchor dampners stroked back into battery after the last engagement, the steel cable on one of them had kinked about six inches out from the connecting socket that held the bitter end of the cable to the dampner piston.
A kink, like a kink in a garden hose.
Johnny Arbogast stared, not quite sure his eyes could be believed.
Yep, a kink.
If this engine takes a hit, that cable could break, right there at the kink!
Johnny fumbled with the mouthpiece of the sound-powered phone unit hanging on his chest. He pushed the talk button and blurted, “Three’s foul. Three’s not ready.’
“What?” This from the deck-edge operator, who had already told the arresting gear officer that all the engines were set. And he had delivered this message over a half minute ago, maybe even a minute.
“Three’s not ready,” Johnny Arbogast howled into his mouthpiece. “Foul deck!”
And then Johnny did what any sensible man would have done: he tore off the sound-powered headset and ran for his life.
Up on the fantail catwalk the deck-edge operator shouted at the arresting gear officer, “Three’s not ready.”
The gear officer was still standing on the starboard foul line on the flight deck and he didn’t hear what the operator said. He eyed the A-6 in the groove and bent toward the sailor, who was also looking over his shoulder at the approaching plane, now almost at the ramp.
“Foul deck,” the sailor roared above the swelling whine of the engines of the approaching plane.
The gear officer’s reaction was automatic. He released the trigger on the pistol grip he held in his hand and shouted, “What the hell is wrong?”
Across the landing area on the LSO’s platform the green “ready deck” light went out and the red “foul deck” light came on.
Hugh Skidmore was looking intently at the A-6 Intruder almost at the ramp when he saw the red light on the edge of his peripheral vision. He was faced with an instant decision. He had no way of knowing why the deck was foul — he only knew that it was. A plane may have rolled into the landing area, a man may have wandered into the unsafe zone…any one of a hundred things could have gone wrong and all one hundred were bad.
So Hugh Skidmore squeezed the red button on the pistol grip he held in his hand, triggering a bank of flashing red lights mounted above the meatball. At the same time he roared into his radio-telephone, “Wave-off, wave-off.”
The flashing wave-off lights and the radio message imprinted themselves on Jake Grafton’s brain at the same time. His reaction was automatic. The throttles went full forward as he thumbed in the speed brakes and the control stick came aft.
Unfortunately jet engines do not provide instantaneous power as piston engines do: the revs can build only as fast as the burners can handle the increasing fuel flow, which is me-tered through a fuel control unit to prevent flooding the engine and flaming it out. And power builds with revs. Tonight the back stick and the gradually increasing engine power flattened the A-6’s descent, then stopped it… four feet above the deck.
The howling warplane crossed the third wire with its nose well up, boards in, engines winding to full screech, but with its tailhook dangling.
From his vantage point near the fantail the arresting gear officer watched in horror as the tailhook kissed the top of the third wire, then snagged the fourth. The plane continued forward for a heartbeat, then seemed to stop in midair.
It was a lopsided contest. An 18-ton airplane was trying to pull a 95,000-ton ship. The ship won. The airplane fell straight down.
As he took the wave-off, Jake Grafton instinctively knew that it had come too late. The ship was right there, filling the windscreen. He kept the angle-of-attack on the optimum indication — a centered doughnut — by feeding in back stick while he tried to bend the throttles over the stops.
Somehow he found the ICS switch with his left thumb and shouted to Flap, “Hook up!” but the aircraft was already decelerating. The angle-of-attack indexer showed slow and his eye flicked to the AOA gauge on the panel, just in time to see the needle sweep counterclockwise to the peg as the G threw him forward into his harness straps.
Then they fell the four feet to the deck.
The impact snapped his head forward viciously and slammed him downward into the seat, stunning him.
He got his head up and tried to focus his eyes as cold fear enveloped him. Are we stopped? Or going off the angled deck? Dazed, scared clear through and unable to see his instruments, he instinctively placed the stick in the eight-degree-nose-up position and kept the engines at full power.
The air boss exploded over the radio: “Jesus Christ, Paddles, why’d you wave him off in close?”