Although the launch valves open quickly, they don’t open instantaneously. Consequently steam pressure rising on the back of the pistons must be resisted until it has built up sufficient pressure to move the pistons forward faster than the aircraft could accelerate on its own. This resistance is provided by a shear bolt installed in the nose gear of the aircraft to be launched, to which a steel hold-back bar is attached. One end of the bar fits into a slot in the deck. The bolt used in the A-6 was designed to break cleanly in half under a load of 48,000 pounds, only then allowing the pistons in the catapult, and the aircraft, to begin forward motion.
The superheated steam expanding behind the pistons drove them the length of the 258-foot catapults of the Columbia in about 2.5 seconds. Now up to flying speed, the aircraft left the deck behind and ran out into the air sixty feet above the ocean, where it then had to be rotated to the proper angle of attack to fly — in the A-6, about eight degrees nose-up.
Meanwhile, the pistons, at terminal velocity and quickly running out of barrels, had to be stopped. This was accomplished by means of water brakes, tubes welded onto the end of each of the catapult barrels and filled with water. The pistons each carried a tapered spear in front of them, and as the pistons reached the water brakes the spears penetrated the open ends, forcing water out around the spears. Water is incompressible, yet as the spears were inserted the escape openings for the water got smaller and smaller. Consequently the deeper the spears penetrated the higher the resistance to further entry. The brakes were so efficient that the pistons were brought to a complete stop after a full-power shot in only nine feet of travel.
The sexual symbolism of the tapered spears and the water-filled brakes always impressed aviators — they were young, lonely and horny — but the sound a cat made slamming into the brakes was visceral. The stupendous thud rattled compartments within a hundred feet of the brakes and could be felt throughout the ship.
Tonight as he sat in the cockpit of an A-6 tanker waiting for the cat crew to retract the shuttle, Jake Grafton ran through all the things that could go wrong with the cat.
The launching officer, Jumping Jack Bean, was wandering around near the hole in the deck that contained the valves and gauges that allowed him to drag steam from the ship’s boilers to the catapult accumulators. The enlisted man who always sat on the edge of the hole wearing a sound-powered telephone headset that enabled him to talk to the men in the catapult machinery spaces was already in his place, staring aft at the two planes on the cats. The luminescent patches on his helmet and flight deck jersey were readily visible in the dim red glow of the lights from the ship’s island superstructure, almost a hundred yards aft.
If anything goes wrong with the machinery below-decks, Jake Grafton knew, the probable result would be less end speed for the plane being launched. A perfect shot gave the launching aircraft a mere fifteen knots above stall speed. A couple knots less and the pilot would never notice. Five off, the plane would be sluggish. Ten off, a ham-handed pilot could stall it inadvertently. Fifteen or more off, the plane was doomed.
Bad, or “cold,” cat shots were rare, thank God. The catapult was very reliable, more so than the aircraft that rode it. They could have an engine flame out under the intense acceleration, dump a gyro, lose a generator, spring a hydraulic or fuel leak… or the pilot could just become disoriented during the sudden, intense transition from sitting stationary on deck to instrument flight fifteen knots above a stall, at night. The blackness out there beyond the bow was total, a void so vast and bleak that one wanted to avert his eyes. Look at something else. Think about something else.
The hell of it was that there was nothing else to look at— nothing else to think about. Tonight Jake was flying a tanker, which was going to be flung off the pointy end of the boat in just a few minutes right into that black void, climb to 5,000 feet and tank a couple Phantoms, climb up to 20,000 and circle the ship for an hour and a half, then come back and trap. That was it, the whole damn mission. Go around and around the ship. Orbit. At max conserve airspeed. On autopilot. The challenge would be staying awake.
No, the challenge was this goddamn night cat shot. The worst part of the whole flight was right at the start — the blindfolded ride on the rabid pig…
The cat crewmen were now taking the rubber seal out of the catapult slot. Steam wisped skyward from the open slot, steam leaking from some fitting somewhere in the cat. They kept the slot seal in between launches, Jake knew, to help maintain the temperature of those eighteen-inch tubes.
The handler had parked the tanker here on the cat, probably so that the miserable peckerhead pilot would have to sit in the cockpit watching the steam wisp up from the cat against the backdrop of the black void while he thought about dying young.
And his life wasn’t going so good just now. First Callie’s jerk father, then Tiny Dick Donovan, the in-flight engagement, that near-midair…
Maybe God was trying to tell him something.
Or maybe those Phantoms this morning hadn’t been there at all.
What if he had just imagined them? Of course the planes passed each other quickly, but there were at least two Phantoms and four A-6s, two guys in each plane. A total of twelve men, and he was the only one who had seen the varmint.
Really doesn’t make sense.
Does it?
“What are you staring at through that windshield?” Flap Le Beau.
“There’s a naked woman out there. If you look real careful you can see her nipples.”
“You look like you’re mentally composing your will. That isn’t good leadership. You are supposed to be impressing me with your self-confidence, calming my fears. The stick’s on your side, remember?”
“What if those F-4s weren’t really there this morning? What if I just imagined it?”
“Are you still on that? You saw ’em. They were there.”
“How come no one else is in a sweat?”
“What do you want me to do, fill my drawers? Slit my wrists? Fate fired a bullet and it missed.”
“You could have the common courtesy to look nervous, sweat it a little.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
“That’ll be the day,” Jake Grafton replied disgustedly.
“Okay, I’m sweating. It’s dripping out of my armpits. Every jerk pilot I ever met has tried to kill me. I’m waiting for you to give it a whirl.”
“How come you got into aviation, anyway?”
“Jungle rot. Pretty bad case. They tell me I’m now a paragraph and photo in a medical textbook. Little did I know when I signed up for this glamorous flying life how much jungle I still had to visit.”
The brown-shirt plane captain standing beside the aircraft waved his wands to get Jake’s attention, then signaled for a start.
Time to do it.
“It could have been worse,” Flap told Jake as he started the left engine. “I could have made medical history with a spectacular social disease. Wouldn’t that have been a trip? For a hundred years every guy going overseas would have had to watch a movie featuring my diseased, ulcerated pecker.”
Six minutes later Jake rogered the weight board and eased the plane forward into the shuttle. He felt the nose-tow bar drop into the shuttle slot and came off the brakes and added power at the yellow-shirt’s signal.