We Don’t Need No Stinking Flaps!”
It doesn’t take long flying the Tomcat to experience all sorts of system degrades, failures, or emergencies. Most of the airframes I started flying in 1990 were already 10+ years old, so these kinds of things were not unexpected in the Big Fighter.
There are a host of relatively benign degrades you can develop. Sometimes they’ll compound into something more serious, sometimes not. One had to always be ready for the worst, but the worst was relatively rare. And here, “worst” involves the three things you rely on most; engines, flight controls, and fuel. Most everything else was not necessarily going to get you hurt (except fire, bleed duct light, etc.), but they all took a certain skill set to deal with.
While flying in daylight hours, clear skies, and off the beach (Miramar or Oceana), things generally ran pretty well despite any moderate or even serious degrades. Then you get to the boat and the price of poker goes up pretty quickly. Landing on the ship with degrades big and small can be a real bear. But as long as the jet is still flying and you’re in control of it, it’s pretty much up to you to make it happen.
Then the lights go out. And it’s dark. And there’s no horizon. The price of poker goes up exponentially. Now that day/beach nuisance (say no attitude gryo) is a REALLY big deal. I bring all this up because I wanted to relate a boat/night landing that should have been fairly benign……until the flaps wouldn’t come down.
A day/beach no-flap landing is pretty simple. You just land faster, make sure you don’t land long, make sure you don’t smoke the tires when braking. There’s a little more to it than that, but you get the drift. On the boat? At night? Whole different kettle of fish.
Once you’ve got enough experience with the Tomcat at the boat, you develop an innate physical sense of what 15 Units AOA (on speed for landing, about 138 knots) “feels like.” The jet’s cocked back a bit, maybe 7-8° nose up, straight and level, the throttles are around 92-94%, you can hear the gear and flaps in the wind. It’s comfortable. You’re in the “on speed squat.” You can hit it almost with your eyes closed.
Then you suck a little power off to start the decent on the 3° glideslope to the boat and then it’s all muscle memory driven by visual cues, a little finesse, and bad-bing you catch a nice 3 wire and the LSO gives you a fair pass because….well, don’t get me started.
With the flaps up, ALL that changes. First, that 15 Units of AOA is now 155-160 knots rather than 135-140. Doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot. Second, the jet is a lot flatter in pitch, uncomfortably so. Then, the throttles are WAY back from where they normally, maybe back at 85-89%. And finally, with the flaps up you have no Direct Lift Control or DLC, which you can use to partial extend spoilers to kill lift/speed in close to avoid a bolter.
And with the speed required to be on speed, the boat now has to “make” extra wind (go faster) to get enough across the deck so your actual landing speed is within limits. And the faster the ship has to go makes that “artificial wind” that much more turbulent across the deck and into the wake, complicating matters more.
One of the obvious features of the Tomcat are those BIG wings and the tunnel that generate quite a bit of lift. When in the landing configuration with no flaps she tends to “float” after a power reduction (a bit like the T-2 Buckeye did with those straight wings). Say you’re going high on the glideslope so you pull a little power. Holding everything equal, nothing seems to happen…..and then all the sudden it does and the correction takes effect. You can influence the process with a little nose bunt, but that makes you flat/fast and susceptible to a bolter.
My buddy Norm and I were coming back aboard the Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf in 1999 with a no-flap jet on a dark, light wind night. At this point I’m an O-4 with maybe 1600 hours in the jet but that didn’t make you immune from f*cking it up. We’re on the inbound leg with gear down/speedbrakes out and on speed. The boat’s having to make nearly all the wind we needed. We hit the decent point at 3 miles and start down the glideslope. This gave me some time to fiddle with the throttles and try and get a feel for it, but it was well outside normal muscle memory.
As we hit the ball call, things look fairly good, on centerline, on glide slope, maybe a little fast. Turns out “a little fast” at the start isn’t “fairly good” as you need to hit that point on/on/on for all three. As I was coming down, the ball starts creeping up (I’m going high) so I pull a little power. Nothing happens. The ball is still creeping up because I showed up with a couple extra knots AND I was floating. I pull some more power as we’re high in the middle now (LSO’s know what’s coming).
Still high, I instinctively pull some more power.
SHIFT PERSPECTIVE TO PADDLES ON THE PLATFORM
He’s watching me come in, little high. A little higher. But he can also HEAR my engines. By the time I’d made that third power reduction I was what Paddles calls “a whisper jet.” My throttles are in the bucket (too far back) and if not resolved immediately the Tomcat is going drop like a turd off a tall moose and be so far “behind the power curve” I wouldn’t be able to recover. Boom, there’s your ramp strike.
Shift back to my perspective.
Paddles is a second ahead of me as I was just starting to realize where my left hand was (throttles) as he’s firmly commanding “POWER-POWER-WAVE OFF-WAVE OFF-WAVE OFF.” I got the power on the jet just in time to flatten out nicely in close and comfortably fly away and climb out.
We come around the night Case III pattern for another try and do much better this time. Sort of. I had a much better start, but slowly got a little overpowered in the middle. In a normal landing, one would simply eke off a smidge of power, hold what you got, and then hit DLC (to kill a little lift) crossing the ramp to settle slightly for a 2 or 3 wire. And that’s what my muscle memory had me do. Except…no DLC. I crossed the ramp, thumbed the wheel instinctively….and floated down the deck to touch down past the four wire. Power up and bolter-bolter-bolter. Dammit.
OK, last try. We came around (me much smarter now) and I assumed what I call the “simulator hunch” where you’re leaning forward hunched over to stare intently at the VDI and the ILS needles on it, making exceedingly small power and lineup corrections to literally pin those needles right in the middle, on and on the whole way down. At the ball call, lean back and peek outside to make sure there’s a boat there and things are looking good, then back to the hunch for a few more seconds.
At the in-the-middle point I started my transition scan (in-out-in-out-out-in-out-out-out) and continued nearly microscopic corrections, crossing the ramp on and on and greased a nice 3 wire. Full power in the wires, throttle back as the jet gets pulled back, sweep the wings aft and look for my director. Taxi out of the wires and park the jet as Norm says “About time, Corky. I’m hungry.”
Just another day in the life, I guess. And also the never-ending lesson that no amount of experience prevents the need to hyper focus in that environment. Let your guard down and you’ll hear Murphy’s foot steps right behind you.
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