“Hi,” a tall sandy-haired, square-jawed man said, walking over from across the room and extending his hand, “I’m Cade. We’re going to be headed to the left runway today. There’s a nasty crosswind, but that’s the runway with the most up-to-date set of landing lights.”
A white van ferried us out to the LSO shack, which looked like a little greenhouse, maybe where retired people would grow orchids if it weren’t out in the middle of a barren field and six feet away from a runway. There was a sliding glass door on the east and west ends, and the whole thing was no larger than a typical guest bathroom. The plywood floor was stained from water leaks and tobacco spit, and there was just enough room for three tall stools. A shelf mounted on the back wall held two radios, labeled “top radio” and “bottom radio,” a box of Post-its, and several faded tubes of sunscreen. Two tan telephone sets sat just beneath the shelf on top of a large metal cabinet that looked like a minifridge but had something to do with turning on the radios to the tower. Cade/Frumba flipped some switches and picked up a handset.
“Tower, Paddles. Radio check.”
“What does ‘Paddles’ mean?” I asked, and he explained that in the old days of carrier aviation, the planes were tail draggers built with the engines up front. In order to land, the nose of the plane had to be cocked up so that the tailhook could catch the wires. This position made it impossible to see the deck out the front of the plane over the massive engines. So a guy stood on the edge of the back of the boat with things that looked like Ping-Pong paddles and did a little dance so the pilot could crane his neck to look out his side window and see what he had to do to land. Each paddle represented a wing, and the first LSOs were like birds of paradise, dancing out their meaning as a physical representation of the plane itself. Left paddle low meant dip your left wing; both paddles flapping up meant add power and get higher; kicking either foot meant add rudder left or right. Frumba demonstrated the dance. It looked ridiculous for how serious and dangerous it must have been. But the name stuck, and now the LSO reports himself to the tower as Paddles.
“See these painted lines?” He motioned to a huge white box, roughly six hundred feet long and painted at a slight angle against the vertical stretch of runway. “That represents the carrier.”
It looked small to me. I tried to imagine it surrounded by miles and miles of ocean, how it must look like a postage stamp from the air during the day. I couldn’t imagine it at night.
“You don’t land on the boat straight on. The boat’s landing area is at an angle to account for the tower, so you can’t just line up with the boat and be done with it. You’ve got to fly at it at an angle. The tough part is that the place you’re aiming for is always moving away from you, but it’s also pitching, rolling, and heaving, and that’s one thing we can’t simulate out here. When they land on the boat, they’ll hear all kinds of calls to correct for that movement, so I go ahead and do those calls out here just because I want them to respond immediately to my voice.” He grinned. “It’s kind of like training a dog.”
From the top of a shelf, Frumba pulled out a stick about the length of a billy club, the handle of which was wrapped in electrical tape, with a thumb button on top and trigger button just below on the front of the stick.
“This is called the ‘pickle switch.’ It controls the light display. See?” Frumba showed me the different options, which, along with his voice on the radio, were meant to communicate to pilots what the dancing man of yore did with his Ping-Pong paddles. The thumb button activated the “cut lights,” two sets of green lights, which meant “add power; climb.” The trigger button lit up the red “wave-off lights,” which meant either, “you’re doing bad, go away,” or in the case of a blocked landing area, “wave-off, foul deck.”