Colonel Haldane expected his pilots to do their damnedest. Last night he taped a poster to the ready room bulkhead with the names of all his pilots on it. The poster was just as large, just as prominent as the one on the bulkhead that recorded each pilot’s landing grades. You had to be able to get aboard ship safely to be a carrier pilot, but you weren’t much use in combat unless you could hit the target when the chips were down. Haldane said as much. He went further:
“In this squadron, after the upcoming Hawaiian ops period, the pilots who are going to lead sections and flights are the pilots with the best bombing scores. I guarantee you, your bombing scores will appear on your fitness report. I expect each and every one of you to earn your pay on the bombing range.”
First Lieutenant Doug Harrison couldn’t resist. “Hey, Skipper. You can fly on my wing.”
“If you can out-bomb me, I will,” Haldane shot back.
Harrison was number four today, flying on Jake’s right wing. You had to admire Harrison, for his chutzpah if nothing else. Haldane had spent years in Vietnam dive-bombing under fire and Harrison was just a year out of flight school. No fool, Harrison well knew how good the experienced professionals were and risked ignominy anyway.
Although he was less vocal about it, Jake Grafton took a backseat to no one when it came to pride in his own flying skills. He had seen his share of flak and dropped his share of bombs. His name would be at the top of that ready room poster if it were humanly possible to get it there.
Major Bartow pumped his fist at Jake, who scooted farther away from the lead plane. Number two, Captain Harry Digman, came under the lead, his canopy just a few feet below Haldane’s exhausts, and surfaced where Jake had been. Now the formation was in right echelon.
Colonel Haldane did the talking on the radio. Cleared into the target area as a flight of F-4s were leaving, he led his echelon down in a gentle, sweeping left turn to 15,000 feet, then straightened out for the run up the bearing line. Over the target he broke to the left. Ten seconds later the second plane broke, and Jake ten seconds after that.
Around they came, now strung out, each pilot verifying his clearance from other airplanes, then concentrating on the target and flying his own plane.
The first essential for a successful run is to get to the proper roll-in point. This is that location in space from which you can roll in and arrive on the proper run-in heading at the preselected dive angle, today forty degrees. Practice targets, with run-in lines bulldozed into the earth and marks gouged out as reference points, help the pilots develop a feel for that correct, perfect place to roll in.
And “roll in” describes the maneuver. Today Jake approached the bearing line obliquely, at about forty-five degrees off, waiting, watching the target get nearer and nearer as he ran the trim to one degree nose-down, the 500-knot setting, while he held the plane level with back stick.
Now!
He slaps the stick sideways and in a heartbeat has the A-6 past the vertical, in 135 degrees of bank. Now the stick comes sharply back and the G’s smash them into their seats as the pilot pulls the nose of the aircraft to just below the target while he adjusts the throttles. Since he is carrying low-drag practice bombs today, Jake sets the throttles at about eighty percent RPM.
G off, stick right to roll her hard to the upright position.
Flap flips on the master armament switch and makes the radio calclass="underline" “War Ace Three’s in hot.”
If the pilot has rolled in properly, the plane is now in a forty-degree dive, the pipper in the bombsight below the target and tracking toward it. This is where Jake finds it now, although just a little too far right. He corrects this instantly by forcing the stick to the left, then jerking the wings back level. This is no place to try to be smooth — it is imperative that he quickly get the plane into the proper dive with the pipper tracking so that he will have as many seconds as possible to solve the drift problem. Jake flies his dives with both hands on the stick, muscling the plane to the position he wants.
A glance at the airspeed — over 400 and increasing — now the altimeter. Flap is calling the altitudes: “Fourteen…thirteen…forty-one degrees…twelve…”
The wind is drifting the pipper leftward. Jake rolls right and forces the pipper back to the right. He wants the pipper to the right of the bearing line and drifting left toward it, yet at the moment of release it must still be slightly right of the bull’s-eye. The bomb will continue to drift during its fall.
And he is steep. He must release with the pipper just a smidgen short of the target to compensate for that.
“… Ten…nine…eight…”
Coming down with the pipper tracking toward the bull’s-eye, today a painted white spot in the middle of a white circle, he glances at the G-meter. Steady on one. He releases his death grip on the stick so that he can feel the effect of the trim. Coming toward neutral, which means he is getting toward 500 knots true airspeed, 465 indicated. The briefest glance at the airspeed indicator—445 and increasing…
“Seven…”
And since the target is several hundred feet above sea level and he has synchronized the movement of the pipper with the descent, he releases the bomb two hundred feet above six thousand feet with the pipper at a five o’clock position on the bull.
And pulls.
Wings level and throttles forward to the stops, pull until the G-meter needle hits four, then hold it there. He reaches for the master arm switch with his right hand — his arm weighs a ton with all this G on — and toggles it off.
Flap again on the radio: “War Ace Three’s off safe.”
With his nose passing the horizon Jake Grafton relaxes the G and scans the sky for the airplane in front of him. There! And farther around, the skipper. Okay. Nose on up and let her soar, converting that diving airspeed back into altitude.
The spotters on the ground are calling the hits. The skipper’s first one was seventy-five feet at seven o’clock. His wingman gets a called score of a hundred-ten feet at twelve. Jake gets a score of fifty feet at five.
“Overcompensated for the wind,” he mutters to Flap, who has no comment.
Now they are back at 15,000 feet and he pulls the throttles back, steers a little wider as he makes his turn. He glimpses the flashing wings of the plane ahead as it rolls into its dive.
“War Ace Four, your hit seventy-five feet at nine o’clock.”
“Harrison’s holding his own with the colonel,” Jake tells Flap, and chuckles.
He checks the drift of the puffs of smoke from the practice bombs. He eyes the clouds, glances behind to see where Harrison is, checks his fuel, checks the annunciator panel for warning lights, then eyes the target to see where he should go to get to the roll-in.
Master Arm switch on, roll and pull!
“Don’t you just love this shit?” Flap says between altitude calls on their second dive.
“Bull’s-eye,” the target spotter says as Jake soars upward after release, and he reaches over and slaps Flap on the thigh.
“With a spoon, Flapjack!” He slams the stick sideways and the aircraft spins on its longitudinal axis. He stops it after precisely 360 degrees of roll.
“Okay, okay, you’re the best in the west,” Flap says. “Just keep popping them in there.”
After their sixth dive, it was Flap’s turn. He had the radar and computer ready. This time as Jake rolled he had to point the fixed reticle of the bombsight exactly at the target. Then he squeezed the commit trigger on the stick and began to fly the steering commands on the vertical display indicator, the VDI, in the center of the instrument panel in front of him.