Looking down at the USS Lexington in the water, I couldn’t believe I was going to have to land my jet on that tiny dot. When you land an airplane at an airport, the runway is generally at least 7,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. More important, though, it holds still. The runway on an aircraft carrier is less than 1,000 feet in length and much narrower—and it also pitches, yaws, rolls, and heaves along with the ocean’s swells. The ship is also moving forward in the water, and because the landing area is angled with respect to the ship’s bow, it is constantly moving away from and to the right of the jet trying to land on it.
The sight of the ship was intimidating. As I flew overhead and turned downwind, I didn’t pull back on the stick hard enough, which drove me wide. This made it much more difficult to get lined up properly behind the ship. As I approached for my first landing, the deck actually seemed big compared to my T-2, which was deceiving, because my landings still weren’t very precise. I tried to look at the optical landing system at the left side of the flight deck, a visual aid that lets pilots know how accurate their approach is. I hit the deck and added full power, heading back off into the air. My first attempt hadn’t gone badly, and now I was slightly more confident. I was to do six touch-and-goes—landing and taking off again immediately—before extending the plane’s tailhook to grab the arresting cable on the flight deck. I’d have to make four actual landings in order to qualify, and I hoped to make them all that day. As soon as I made my first arrested landing, I would officially be a carrier aviator, or “tailhooker,” part of a unique fraternity.
I got through all my touch-and-goes with no problem. But when I put the hook down while approaching the ship, the danger of the situation became more real to me and I felt my adrenaline rising—not a good thing. I approached, touched down, and went to full power as we had been trained to do, in case the hook missed the wires—I’d need to be ready to leap back up into the sky to prevent my airplane from sliding off the front end of the aircraft carrier into the water. The feeling when the hook caught the wires and confirmed that I had done everything right would have been fantastic—if I hadn’t forgotten to lock my harness properly. As my airplane was caught on the arresting cable, I was thrown forward and smashed into the instrument panel. The effect of getting into what felt like a car crash at the same time I had made my first heart-stopping carrier landing combined to slow down my reflexes. I was now supposed to reduce the power once I came to a stop, but I was having trouble doing it quickly. One of the aircraft handlers ran out in front of the jet, wildly giving me the “power back” signal.
I did a second arrested landing, then another one. One more and I would have the required four. But then it started getting dark, and we were sent back to the airfield. I expected to go out the next day and do the last required landing for my qualification, but when I saw I wasn’t scheduled to fly, I had to assume I had disqualified. I was upset for a few hours, thinking that I had failed. But it wasn’t long until I learned that I had done well enough on the three landings I completed that I was qualified without the fourth. I was a tailhooker.
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SOON, I started flying the A-4 Skyhawk, an attack jet from the Vietnam era that let us learn more of the capabilities we would need for flying in combat: dropping bombs, flying at low altitude in order to evade detection, and air combat maneuvering. Just as in the T-34 and T-2, the pace of the training was aggressive. We were expected to learn quickly and move on to the next challenge. At around this point in the training, the pilots who had previous flight experience started to lose their advantage as the rest of us caught up. To learn how to drop bombs, we flew from Beeville to the Naval Air Facility El Centro in Southern California, two hours from San Diego, which is set up with targets for pilots to practice on. I wasn’t especially gifted at dropping bombs, and nothing I tried to improve my accuracy seemed to work. I got used to taking ribbing from my classmates about it, but I wasn’t the worst; occasionally someone else would drop a practice bomb so far off target it would get close to the spotter sitting in a shack at the edge of the bombing range.
The targets had been given strange names, probably so we could differentiate them from one another on the radio. Some of them I still remember: Shade Tree, Loom Lobby, Inkey Barley, Kitty Baggage. The targets were set up with different run-in lines to let us practice different approaches over different terrain. Each target consisted of concentric rings with a clearly marked center point that we would try to hit with our Mark 76 practice bombs. The A-4 bombsight was a fixed reticle, a light projected onto the windscreen, and using it required that I not only hold that dot on the target but also visually compensate for wind. I released the bomb by pushing a small button on the stick, and I had to account for the time it took the bomb to fall from my altitude. The temptation was to fly lower, decreasing the variables of the fall, but I couldn’t drop so low I would be in danger of crashing.
I took much more naturally to air combat maneuvering, otherwise known as dogfighting. We started off with the basics, flying behind the instructor’s aircraft in a position to be able to fire the gun, then trying to stay there as the instructor’s airplane started moving around unpredictably. This was humbling at first, as the instructor was somehow able to go from being in the defensive position (in front of me) to an offensive position (behind me). I quickly got the hang of it, though, and as the engagements got more complicated, I gained in confidence. Thinking in three dimensions, as you must when dogfighting, came naturally to me. I soon learned the validity of the naval aviator motto: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” I learned that if I showed up at the point where our engagement started with more air speed than I was supposed to have, I had a slight advantage.
This was one of my favorite phases of training, not only because I did well at it, but because it was fun. I experienced a freedom and creativity in air-to-air “combat” that I hadn’t found anywhere else. I loved getting into long rollers, maneuvering the aircraft up and down amidst the large billowing cumulus clouds of the early Texas summertime, trying to “kill” my opponent. The last flight in this phase of my training I gave one of the instructors an epic beat-down—at least that’s how it felt to me.
After I successfully carrier qualified in the A-4, I got my aircraft assignment. I was to fly the greatest Navy fighter plane ever, the F-14 Tomcat.
I had been in Beeville for about a year when I got my wings. My parents came for the occasion (my brother was unable to attend because of his own Navy duties). We lined up in our white dress uniforms for the ceremonial pinning on of our wings. My mother pinned my wings on me, a glowing, proud expression on her face. I remembered the day she had graduated from the police academy, when I got to see her lined up with her classmates in uniform, and the impression that sight had made on me. Now things had come full circle.