ranges. That made the ILS essential.
Once the cross hairs were centered Tombstone kept them precisely in
position. Luckily, the throttle on a Tomcat adjusted speed automatically,
allowing him to concentrate on course corrections and his angle of attack.
The F-14 covered ten miles–half the distance between the carrier and the
final fix that had been the jump-off point for the approach–in just over two
minutes, dropping two thousand feet per minute. Magruder kept his attention
focused on the VDI, resisting the temptation to look through the canopy and
try to spot the Jefferson.
When the range indicator on the display indicated ten miles he “dirtied
up” the Tomcat by hitting the switches that dropped landing gear, flaps, and
tail hook. He was flying level now, at twelve hundred feet, with airspeed
dropping. The ILS cross-pointers were centered near the top of the display,
but they crept toward the middle of the screen as the Tomcat continued its
approach.
Three miles out he started his descent again, still entirely dependent on
instruments. It took experience to handle this part of a night approach, a
precise knowledge of just how much to compensate for tiny course deviations.
The carrier wasn’t a stable, motionless platform, but a moving target plunging
through wind and wave at better than twenty knots. And wind was only one of
many factors that were making the Tomcat drift off the mark. Correcting for
drift was a constant thing, and the closer the fighter got to the carrier the
more Tombstone had to anticipate the behavior of the aircraft so his
corrections could be applied in time.
His two years away from constant carrier ops had left him rusty, but he
found all the old instincts coming back to him. Man and machine worked as the
perfect team.
“Two miles out,” Jefferson’s radio controller said. “Left one, slightly
below glide path.”
He corrected automatically, almost before the radio call.
As the range indicator showed one mile left, he looked up from the VDI
and saw the carrier immediately. It was like a tapering box outlined in white
lights, bisected by a centerline that projected out of the bottom edge of the
box. Orange lights at the end of the centerline marked the drop line hanging
down the stern of the ship, indicating the edge of the flight deck.
He picked out the tiny rectangular shape of the optical glide-path
indicator to the left of the white lights, the “meatball” that helped aviators
estimate their height and approach path as they made the final drop to the
deck. It was still indistinct at this range, and not very reliable until the
range was considerably shorter. But visual acquisition of the meatball meant
that Tombstone was ready to bring the Tomcat down.
“Mercury One-oh-nine,” he said over the radio. “Tomcat ball. Four point
eight.” The signal told Jefferson who he was, what kind of plane he was
flying, and signaled that he had visual sighting of the meatball with 4800
pounds of fuel remaining.
“Roger ball,” the Landing Signals Officer said. “Deck’s going up.
You’re looking good.”
The meatball was designed to give the approaching pilot a visual
indication of his position relative to the deck. If the center of the five
Fresnel lenses was illuminated, the approaching aircraft was right on its
glide path. It was high if one of the upper lenses was lit, too low if a lens
below the midpoint glowed. But at a mile out one notch of the meatball
represented thirty-two feet of altitude, so it wasn’t the most accurate way to
judge the approach. Tombstone kept his descent constant at five hundred feet
per minute and relied on the advice of the LSO, a veteran aviator with a much
better perspective on the approach than Magruder had himself, to keep him on
track.
“Remember, you’ll tend to fly low,” the LSO went on. The best LSOs were
the ones who dropped hints without giving detailed instructions. If Tombstone
screwed up the approach enough to become a real danger, the laid-back,
friendly tone would change. Right now the LSO was simply a calming voice who
worked with the pilot, not against him.
The square of white lights that defined the flight deck was like a hole