Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
September 21, 2008
By Matthew Jones, The Virginian-Pilot
ABOARD THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT--The mission ends in the dark, alone. The pilot is on his radio, listening to his own breathing and to his colleagues safe and sound on the aircraft carrier deck, somewhere in the blackness before him.
He checks his instruments, trusting them to keep him out of the ocean below. Then a faint light appears, wavering in the night.
As he closes in, the light brightens and others appear, all so impossibly small, all moving away from him.
He's talking to the landing signal officer on the deck now, adjusting his speed, altitude and position, rechecking his instruments.
The lights grow and take shape as the rectangular landing box materializes, still several miles ahead.
He squares up with the drop line of lights hanging off the carrier's stern, levels his wings. Now he's within a mile of the ship and he's off his instruments, talking to the landing signal officer, watching the optical landing system to the left of the runway, tweaking his position as the plane sinks toward the sea.
He hits the deck hard at 150 mph, then guns the engine in case he has to take off again. He doesn't know he's safe until he's thrown forward in his seat, his captured plane struggling to break free of the arresting wire.
For the past several years, the Navy has sought space for a second outlying field, where pilots can practice their landings before heading to sea.
This quest has been beset by delays and controversy, as the Navy and its opponents spar over how such a facility would affect the economy, the environment and residents' quality of life around five proposed sites in rural Virginia and North Carolina.
The Navy argues that the field, which would augment Fentress Naval Auxiliary Landing Field in southeast Chesapeake, would be a win-win both for the residents, who could gain jobs and tax revenue if compatible businesses are attracted, and for the pilots, who would be able to train locally and more realistically.
Many opponents say they don't care what the economic benefits might be - they're not interested in changing their quiet country life.
One perspective that tends to get lost in all the debate is that of the men and women whose lives depend on rigorous preparation for the hardest job in naval aviation: landing a plane on a carrier at night.
"No matter how many times you do it, no matter how seasoned you are, it scares the hell out of you," said Lt. Matt Antel of Super Hornet squadron VFA-211, the Fighting Checkmates.
To be successful at a task with so little margin for error, pilots face a lengthy and stressful series of qualifications, both day and night, at land and sea. Ultimately, it comes down to trust: trust in one's instruments, colleagues and own skills. It comes down to fighting your instincts and learning something so well that it becomes automatic.
"The people who are really, really good, who constantly do really well at their landings, are those people who, for that last 15 seconds, can just really, really concentrate on what they're doing," said Cmdr. Kimo Buckon, executive officer of Super Hornet squadron VFA-31, the Tomcatters, which recently deployed with the Theodore Roosevelt strike group.
"But we're all victims of it at one time or another. As soon as you say, 'This one's looking good,' that's usually about when things go really bad. So we try not to ever say that."
Up or down. Left or right. Slow or fast. These three decisions keep a plane in the air and, when the time comes, put it on the ground. At sea, while the variables increase, these basics remain the same.
A land runway is long - more than a mile - and aimed into the prevailing wind to bring a plane down smoothly anywhere along it. A carrier's landing area is much shorter - less than 150 feet from the first arresting wire to the last. Come in too high, and you miss all the wires and have to take off and come around again. Come in too low, and you'll plow into the carrier's stern.
To up the ante further, the runway is angled to the left of the ship's centerline. Because the carrier is always moving during flight operations, the runway is always pulling away from the pilot and to the right.
At night, with no horizon to orient them, pilots rely on a combination of human and mechanical aides: the landing signal officer, another squadron pilot who talks them in from the deck; and the optical landing system, with its "meatball" or "ball" of light that lets them know they're descending at the proper angle.
This know-how is perishable - hard-earned and quickly lost. So as each carrier prepares to deploy, its air wing heads back to school, which is where outlying landing fields come in.
Mission control: a small white shack by the runway's edge at Fentress. The sun had set, reddening the western sky as an almost full moon began its upward creep in the east.
Inside, one landing signal officer, or LSO, waited for his squadron's turn, while another held the log book. A third was on the radio, eyes skyward.
Outside in the humid dusk, an F/A-18 C lined up over the runway, leveled its wings, and descended toward the small section of Tarmac lit to mimic the carrier's landing box.
"Roger ball," came a voice on the radio as the pilot zeroed in on the optical landing system.
"Roger ball auto," replied Lt. Matt Minzes, the LSO of Hornet squadron VFA-15, the Valions.
Wheels kissed the runway at about 170 mph, the pilot hit the throttle, and the plane hopped back into the dusk, circling around for another pass.
A landing is broken down into parts, like a golf or tennis swing. There is the "start," when the wings have leveled out on the final turn and the pilot sets the glide slope. This is followed by being "in middle," "in close" and "at the ramp."
Some planes land as if sitting back on their heels. Others hit short and hard, leaning into the runway, nose down. The ideal landing is rear wheels first with the nose tilted up slightly. A three-wheel landing can cost a day's maintenance.
The goal is to set the plane down on the runway between where the second and third arresting wires will be on the ship. The LSO grades each of these "bounces" or "touch-and-gos" in the log.
"Too much power, nose down on fly-through, up at close," Minzes dictated on one bounce. "Too much altitude in, then come down at close, high at the ramp," he said of the next.
Each pilot will do eight to 10 bounces before heading back to Oceana. These bounce periods help develop pilots' visual scans as they land - looking at the ball, the runway lights, the ball, the lights - and acclimate them to landing with no other visual cues.
The practice sessions help make landings second nature. Yet the sheer number of bounces required - a new pilot will do 120 before being allowed to land on a carrier for the first time - means many trips to the outlying landing field.
Compounding the problem, several air wings can be preparing to leave as other, newer pilots undergo their training. When these work-ups and exercises coincide with the shorter summer nights, noise levels and neighbors' annoyance increase.
This disruption is what many opponents have ho med in on, citing the effect of the noise on their rural way of life.
Rear Adm. David Anderson hears all this. A former fighter pilot himself, he now oversees the OLF issue as vice commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command.
Part of his job entails responding to these concerns, and for him, it all comes back to the intertwined issues of training capacity and safety.
"When I stared doing this 30 years ago, we basically lost an airplane and killed an air crew pretty much every deployment," he said, and the numbers were even worse during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Navy learned hard lessons and, in the following decades, overhauled its training program. As simulators became more realistic, they were integrated into the process.
"In past 10 to 15 years, we've gotten a better understanding about how much of that training can be done with simulation," Anderson said. "We really believe we have found a sweet spot of how much simulation we can do, then how much has got to be real in the airplane."
This airplane time must include a set number of field landings before a pilot can proceed to the ship. Then come day landings on deck, then night landings. Go too long between night landings, and you have to land during the day again first. Go too long between carrier landings, and you're back to the landing field.
Even Anderson, who has more than 650 carrier landings - more than 400 of which were at night - basically would have to start flight training over again, because it's been so long since he's worked off a ship.
Further complicating the issue is the Navy's fleet response plan, which requires more carriers to be ready to deploy more quickly. This means their air wings must be ready as well.
"One of the chokepoints of the fleet response plan proved to be the capacity to train pilots," Anderson said. So planes sometimes fly nearly all night at Fentress, while others head to fields in Florida and Nevada to qualify. That's expensive for the Navy and a hardship for the air crews.
Some OLF critics have suggested alternatives that would take the noise away from the neighbors, such as anchoring the decommissioned carrier John F. Kennedy offshore and landing on it. But a carrier needs to be fully staffed and operational and moving to be of any use, the Navy says. What's more, landing on the carrier is the goal; there are numerous tests to pass before a pilot is cleared to do so.
Cost and environmental concerns prohibit building an offshore island to practice on, Anderson said. As for why the field needs to be in a rural area, he said, the pilots need darkness.
"If there's more lights around you... you have those peripheral vision senses that you have coming from your external factors," said VFA-31's Buckon. "You can see the ground coming up and those sensations you can incorporate quickly. At night, all those sensations are gone. That's where it's only instruments. And that's what we're practicing. "
On a night in late June, the carrier Theodore Roosevelt's flight deck was a netherworld: eerie light, frantic people, a constant din, the hot breath of jet engines. Into this seeming anarchy came the planes, invisible until very close, appearing first as a small group of steady and blinking lights.
One appeared to hover like a dragonfly, its speed undeterminable as it grew larger and descended across the back of the deck, tailhook hanging behind it like a stinger.
As the wheels touched down, the hook skipped slightly before catching the third wire, which spooled out as the plane strained against it.
The pilot eased off the throttle and lifted his hook. The cable retracted across the deck with a serpentine drag. The deck crew waved the plane to the side, making way for the next one, less than a minute behind.
That plane came in high, landing too far forward and missing all the wires, its hook sending up a shower of sparks as it shot across the deck and back into the night, rising for another pass.
The LSOs watched and graded all this, watching from the deck just as they did from the shack at Fentress. Simply making it to the carrier in one piece isn't good enough. But as in boxing or fencing, the subtleties of a good landing can be lost on the uninitiated.
"It's a heavy experience aboard the boat - that's the best way I can describe it," said Lt. Rip Gordon, a VFA-31 pilot who also serves as an LSO. "It's heavy, and a lot of the young guys really don't have the experience to feel confident. You never really get comfortable with it, but being confident is important."
So Gordon takes his pilots to Fentress and puts them through their paces, critiquing their bounces over and over, acclimating them, getting them mentally prepared for the real thing.
"There's no simulation that can simulate flying the ball," he said. "It's all about feel and seat of your pants and audiovisual stuff. The subconscious things that make you able to do it are tough to replicate."
Particularly that last 17 seconds or so, once the pilots are off their instruments, scanning the deck and the ball and the deck and the ball.
"There's little room for error, so at that point in time you need to be pretty much all on brain-stem power," Lt. Michael Tremel said. "You don't have a lot of time to make decisions and, if so, they need to happen extremely quickly."
His boss agreed.
"The conditions are never the same at the field as they are at the carrier, but how you fly your airplane relative to those conditions is always the same," said Buckon, who has landed on carrier decks more than 400 times.
"The darker it gets, the different wind conditions, the deck's moving - there are lots of contributing factors that can make one night exceedingly more difficult than the next night, but overall, your mentality has to be the same on all of them. And that rush at the very end, at least for me, has never subsided."
September 21, 2008
By Matthew Jones, The Virginian-Pilot
ABOARD THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT--The mission ends in the dark, alone. The pilot is on his radio, listening to his own breathing and to his colleagues safe and sound on the aircraft carrier deck, somewhere in the blackness before him.
He checks his instruments, trusting them to keep him out of the ocean below. Then a faint light appears, wavering in the night.
As he closes in, the light brightens and others appear, all so impossibly small, all moving away from him.
He's talking to the landing signal officer on the deck now, adjusting his speed, altitude and position, rechecking his instruments.
The lights grow and take shape as the rectangular landing box materializes, still several miles ahead.
He squares up with the drop line of lights hanging off the carrier's stern, levels his wings. Now he's within a mile of the ship and he's off his instruments, talking to the landing signal officer, watching the optical landing system to the left of the runway, tweaking his position as the plane sinks toward the sea.
He hits the deck hard at 150 mph, then guns the engine in case he has to take off again. He doesn't know he's safe until he's thrown forward in his seat, his captured plane struggling to break free of the arresting wire.
For the past several years, the Navy has sought space for a second outlying field, where pilots can practice their landings before heading to sea.
This quest has been beset by delays and controversy, as the Navy and its opponents spar over how such a facility would affect the economy, the environment and residents' quality of life around five proposed sites in rural Virginia and North Carolina.
The Navy argues that the field, which would augment Fentress Naval Auxiliary Landing Field in southeast Chesapeake, would be a win-win both for the residents, who could gain jobs and tax revenue if compatible businesses are attracted, and for the pilots, who would be able to train locally and more realistically.
Many opponents say they don't care what the economic benefits might be - they're not interested in changing their quiet country life.
One perspective that tends to get lost in all the debate is that of the men and women whose lives depend on rigorous preparation for the hardest job in naval aviation: landing a plane on a carrier at night.
"No matter how many times you do it, no matter how seasoned you are, it scares the hell out of you," said Lt. Matt Antel of Super Hornet squadron VFA-211, the Fighting Checkmates.
To be successful at a task with so little margin for error, pilots face a lengthy and stressful series of qualifications, both day and night, at land and sea. Ultimately, it comes down to trust: trust in one's instruments, colleagues and own skills. It comes down to fighting your instincts and learning something so well that it becomes automatic.
"The people who are really, really good, who constantly do really well at their landings, are those people who, for that last 15 seconds, can just really, really concentrate on what they're doing," said Cmdr. Kimo Buckon, executive officer of Super Hornet squadron VFA-31, the Tomcatters, which recently deployed with the Theodore Roosevelt strike group.
"But we're all victims of it at one time or another. As soon as you say, 'This one's looking good,' that's usually about when things go really bad. So we try not to ever say that."
Up or down. Left or right. Slow or fast. These three decisions keep a plane in the air and, when the time comes, put it on the ground. At sea, while the variables increase, these basics remain the same.
A land runway is long - more than a mile - and aimed into the prevailing wind to bring a plane down smoothly anywhere along it. A carrier's landing area is much shorter - less than 150 feet from the first arresting wire to the last. Come in too high, and you miss all the wires and have to take off and come around again. Come in too low, and you'll plow into the carrier's stern.
To up the ante further, the runway is angled to the left of the ship's centerline. Because the carrier is always moving during flight operations, the runway is always pulling away from the pilot and to the right.
At night, with no horizon to orient them, pilots rely on a combination of human and mechanical aides: the landing signal officer, another squadron pilot who talks them in from the deck; and the optical landing system, with its "meatball" or "ball" of light that lets them know they're descending at the proper angle.
This know-how is perishable - hard-earned and quickly lost. So as each carrier prepares to deploy, its air wing heads back to school, which is where outlying landing fields come in.
Mission control: a small white shack by the runway's edge at Fentress. The sun had set, reddening the western sky as an almost full moon began its upward creep in the east.
Inside, one landing signal officer, or LSO, waited for his squadron's turn, while another held the log book. A third was on the radio, eyes skyward.
Outside in the humid dusk, an F/A-18 C lined up over the runway, leveled its wings, and descended toward the small section of Tarmac lit to mimic the carrier's landing box.
"Roger ball," came a voice on the radio as the pilot zeroed in on the optical landing system.
"Roger ball auto," replied Lt. Matt Minzes, the LSO of Hornet squadron VFA-15, the Valions.
Wheels kissed the runway at about 170 mph, the pilot hit the throttle, and the plane hopped back into the dusk, circling around for another pass.
A landing is broken down into parts, like a golf or tennis swing. There is the "start," when the wings have leveled out on the final turn and the pilot sets the glide slope. This is followed by being "in middle," "in close" and "at the ramp."
Some planes land as if sitting back on their heels. Others hit short and hard, leaning into the runway, nose down. The ideal landing is rear wheels first with the nose tilted up slightly. A three-wheel landing can cost a day's maintenance.
The goal is to set the plane down on the runway between where the second and third arresting wires will be on the ship. The LSO grades each of these "bounces" or "touch-and-gos" in the log.
"Too much power, nose down on fly-through, up at close," Minzes dictated on one bounce. "Too much altitude in, then come down at close, high at the ramp," he said of the next.
Each pilot will do eight to 10 bounces before heading back to Oceana. These bounce periods help develop pilots' visual scans as they land - looking at the ball, the runway lights, the ball, the lights - and acclimate them to landing with no other visual cues.
The practice sessions help make landings second nature. Yet the sheer number of bounces required - a new pilot will do 120 before being allowed to land on a carrier for the first time - means many trips to the outlying landing field.
Compounding the problem, several air wings can be preparing to leave as other, newer pilots undergo their training. When these work-ups and exercises coincide with the shorter summer nights, noise levels and neighbors' annoyance increase.
This disruption is what many opponents have ho med in on, citing the effect of the noise on their rural way of life.
Rear Adm. David Anderson hears all this. A former fighter pilot himself, he now oversees the OLF issue as vice commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command.
Part of his job entails responding to these concerns, and for him, it all comes back to the intertwined issues of training capacity and safety.
"When I stared doing this 30 years ago, we basically lost an airplane and killed an air crew pretty much every deployment," he said, and the numbers were even worse during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Navy learned hard lessons and, in the following decades, overhauled its training program. As simulators became more realistic, they were integrated into the process.
"In past 10 to 15 years, we've gotten a better understanding about how much of that training can be done with simulation," Anderson said. "We really believe we have found a sweet spot of how much simulation we can do, then how much has got to be real in the airplane."
This airplane time must include a set number of field landings before a pilot can proceed to the ship. Then come day landings on deck, then night landings. Go too long between night landings, and you have to land during the day again first. Go too long between carrier landings, and you're back to the landing field.
Even Anderson, who has more than 650 carrier landings - more than 400 of which were at night - basically would have to start flight training over again, because it's been so long since he's worked off a ship.
Further complicating the issue is the Navy's fleet response plan, which requires more carriers to be ready to deploy more quickly. This means their air wings must be ready as well.
"One of the chokepoints of the fleet response plan proved to be the capacity to train pilots," Anderson said. So planes sometimes fly nearly all night at Fentress, while others head to fields in Florida and Nevada to qualify. That's expensive for the Navy and a hardship for the air crews.
Some OLF critics have suggested alternatives that would take the noise away from the neighbors, such as anchoring the decommissioned carrier John F. Kennedy offshore and landing on it. But a carrier needs to be fully staffed and operational and moving to be of any use, the Navy says. What's more, landing on the carrier is the goal; there are numerous tests to pass before a pilot is cleared to do so.
Cost and environmental concerns prohibit building an offshore island to practice on, Anderson said. As for why the field needs to be in a rural area, he said, the pilots need darkness.
"If there's more lights around you... you have those peripheral vision senses that you have coming from your external factors," said VFA-31's Buckon. "You can see the ground coming up and those sensations you can incorporate quickly. At night, all those sensations are gone. That's where it's only instruments. And that's what we're practicing. "
On a night in late June, the carrier Theodore Roosevelt's flight deck was a netherworld: eerie light, frantic people, a constant din, the hot breath of jet engines. Into this seeming anarchy came the planes, invisible until very close, appearing first as a small group of steady and blinking lights.
One appeared to hover like a dragonfly, its speed undeterminable as it grew larger and descended across the back of the deck, tailhook hanging behind it like a stinger.
As the wheels touched down, the hook skipped slightly before catching the third wire, which spooled out as the plane strained against it.
The pilot eased off the throttle and lifted his hook. The cable retracted across the deck with a serpentine drag. The deck crew waved the plane to the side, making way for the next one, less than a minute behind.
That plane came in high, landing too far forward and missing all the wires, its hook sending up a shower of sparks as it shot across the deck and back into the night, rising for another pass.
The LSOs watched and graded all this, watching from the deck just as they did from the shack at Fentress. Simply making it to the carrier in one piece isn't good enough. But as in boxing or fencing, the subtleties of a good landing can be lost on the uninitiated.
"It's a heavy experience aboard the boat - that's the best way I can describe it," said Lt. Rip Gordon, a VFA-31 pilot who also serves as an LSO. "It's heavy, and a lot of the young guys really don't have the experience to feel confident. You never really get comfortable with it, but being confident is important."
So Gordon takes his pilots to Fentress and puts them through their paces, critiquing their bounces over and over, acclimating them, getting them mentally prepared for the real thing.
"There's no simulation that can simulate flying the ball," he said. "It's all about feel and seat of your pants and audiovisual stuff. The subconscious things that make you able to do it are tough to replicate."
Particularly that last 17 seconds or so, once the pilots are off their instruments, scanning the deck and the ball and the deck and the ball.
"There's little room for error, so at that point in time you need to be pretty much all on brain-stem power," Lt. Michael Tremel said. "You don't have a lot of time to make decisions and, if so, they need to happen extremely quickly."
His boss agreed.
"The conditions are never the same at the field as they are at the carrier, but how you fly your airplane relative to those conditions is always the same," said Buckon, who has landed on carrier decks more than 400 times.
"The darker it gets, the different wind conditions, the deck's moving - there are lots of contributing factors that can make one night exceedingly more difficult than the next night, but overall, your mentality has to be the same on all of them. And that rush at the very end, at least for me, has never subsided."