because of the ungainly appearance it gave their aircraft as they made their
approach, and they usually overrode the plane’s computers to keep the wings
back.
At this point, Coyote didn’t give a damn for appearances. He just wanted
to get down on the deck.
The shudder from astern increased in intensity, kicking and bucking as he
fought the controls. Coyote clung to the control stick, his breath rasping
inside the rubbery gag of his oxygen mask, sweat making his face slick and
pooling where mask and helmet dimpled his skin.
Two hundred thirty knots. He dropped the flaps, praying that they would
work. The bucking increased … then steadied as the Tomcat’s nose came up.
“Hang on, John-Boy,” he said. “Damn it, hang on!”
He pulled out of a twenty-two-degree angle of bank, dropping toward the
ocean now at six hundred feet per minute. Jefferson was a toy on the water,
ridiculously tiny, three quarters of a mile ahead.
The Tomcat’s Instrument Landing System was out, dead. Dead too was the
laser sight, a relatively new system that would have read laser light from the
carrier and helped him stay in the proper glide path and attitude.
He was going to have to pull this one off the old-fashioned way. At
least when he lowered the landing gear, that worked. He could feel the
reassuring whine-thump as the wheels locked into position, more reassuring
than the gear-down light on his console.
“Two-oh-one,” he heard over his headset. That was the voice of the LSO,
the Landing Signal Officer, who was watching Coyote’s approach from his
vantage point along the port side of the flight deck. “Call the ball.”
Coyote’s eyes sought the ball, the green bull’s-eye on the Fresnel
landing system tower that showed him, by seeming to drift above or below a
pair of horizontal dashes, whether he was above or below the desired glide
path. “Uh … Tomcat Two-oh-one, five-point-oh, ball.”
That told the LSO that he had the meatball in sight, confirmed that his
aircraft was a Tomcat so that the arrestor cables could be properly adjusted
for the hurtling weight of the aircraft, and that his fuel was reading five
thousand pounds. He’d not taken on a full load of fuel from the KA6D; if he
crashed into the Jefferson’s roundoff, the less JP5 aboard, the better.
Savagely, he shook the stark image–of his F14 hurtling into Jefferson’s
stern and exploding into a boiling fireball–from his mind.
If only his hands would stop shaking.
“Roger ball,” the LSO said, confirming his call. “Remember your hook.”
Shit! He’d forgotten to lower his arrestor gear, and the LSO had caught
that through binoculars. He snapped the control, praying for the hook to
swing down.
Thank you, God, it did.
Landing an aircraft on the tiny, pitching runway, the flight deck of a
carrier under way at sea, was never easy. During Vietnam, aviators had been
wired for heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, and the like and their
physiological responses recorded during a variety of typical flight
activities. Trapping aboard a carrier–especially at night–made men’s hearts
race and their sweat flow more than any other single operation, including
getting shot at by enemy triple-A or SAMs.
I am not going to crash, I am not going to bolter. I’m going to bring
this bitch down lightly as a feather, snag the three-wire, just like a walk in
the park …
Other times, visualizing a perfect trap had steadied him in this, the one
maneuver that Naval aviators never entirely looked forward to. This time it
didn’t help. His breathing was one adrenaline-tinged gasp after another, so
loud in his own ears that he almost didn’t hear the LSO’s next words.
“Steady, Two-oh-one. Deck going down. Power down.”
The LSO was telling him that the carrier’s stern was dropping, that he
needed to ease back on his power a bit to compensate. Gingerly, he brought
the throttle forward, feeling more than hearing the engine’s dwindling pitch.
The deck looked like it was rising, rushing up to meet him, accelerating
now as he swept in toward the roundoff. These were the critical few seconds
when a bad call by him or the LSO could screw everything. He took a last gulp