Jake and the Real McCoy climbed a ladder to the LSOs’ platform as the first of the planes on deck rode a catapult into the night sky. Both men watched the plane’s lights as it climbed straight ahead of the ship. There — they were getting fuzzy…And then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.
“Six or seven hundred feet, a couple of miles viz. That’s it,” McCoy roared into Jake’s ear.
The petty officer who assisted the LSOs was already on the platform getting out the radio handsets, plugging in cords, checking the PLAT monitor, donning his sound-powered headset and checking in with the enlisted talkers in Pri-Fly and Air Ops.
The platform was not large, maybe six feet by six feet, a wooden grid that jutted from the port side of the flight deck. To protect the signal officers from wind and jet blast, a piece of black canvas stretched on a steel frame was rigged on the forward edge of the platform, like a wall. So the platform was an open stage facing aft, toward the glide slope.
Under the edges of the platform, aft and on the seaward side, hung a safety net to catch anyone who inadvertently fell off the platform. Or jumped. Because if a pilot lost it on the glide slope in close and veered toward the platform, going into the net was the only way for the LSOs to save their lives.
Jake Grafton glanced down into the blackness. And saw nothing. “Relax, shipmate,” McCoy told him. “The net’s there. Honest Injun.”
The platform was just aft of the first wire, about four hundred feet away from the ship’s center of gravity, so it was moving. Up and down, up and down.
As McCoy checked the lights on the Fresnel lens, which was several hundred feet forward of the platform, Jake watched. McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, the cut lights, adjusted the intensity of the lens. The lights seemed to behave appropriately and soon he was satisfied.
The Fresnel lens was, in Jake’s mind, one of the engineering triumphs that made carrier aviation in the jet age possible. In the earliest days, aboard the old Langley, pilots made approaches to the deck without help. One windy day one of the senior officers grabbed a couple signal flags and rushed to the fantail to signal to a young aviator who was having trouble with his approach. This innovation was so successful that an officer was soon stationed there to assist all the aviators with signal flags, or paddles. This officer helped the pilot with glide slope and lineup, and since the carriers all had straight decks, gave the vital engine “cut” signal that required the aviator to pull his throttle to idle and flare.
When angled decks and jets with higher landing speeds came along, it became obvious that a new system was required. As usual, the British were the innovators. They rigged a mirror on one side of the deck and directed a high-intensity light at it. The light was reflected up the glide slope. By rigging a set of reference lights midway up on each side of the mirror, a datum was established. A pilot making his approach would see the light reflected on the mirror — the ball — rise above the datum lights when he was above glide slope, or high, and descend below it when he was low. The landing signal officer was retained to assist the pilot with radio calls, and to give mandatory wave-offs if an approach became unsafe.
The Fresnel lens was the mirror idea carried one step further. The light source was now contained within five boxes, stacked one on top of the other. The datum lights were beside the middle, or third, box. Due to the way the lens on each light was designed, a horizontally wide but vertically narrow beam of light was directed up the glide slope by each box. Crossing the fantail, the beam from the middle box, the “centered ball,” was a mere eighteen inches in height.
This was the challenge: a pilot must fly his jet airplane through turbulent air into an eighteen-inch-thick window in the sky. At night, with the deck moving as the ship rode a seaway, hitting this window became extraordinarily difficult, without argument the most difficult challenge in aviation. That anyone other than highly skilled, experienced test pilots could do it on a regular basis was a tribute to the training the Navy gave its aviators, and was the reason those who didn’t measure up were ruthlessly weeded out.
You could do it or you couldn’t — there was no in between. And yet, no one could do it consistently every time. The task was too difficult, the skills involved too perishable. So night after night, in fair weather and foul, they practiced, like they were doing on this miserable night in the Sea of Japan, eighty miles west of Honshu.
As Jake Grafton stood on the platform staring into the darkness as the wind swirled rain over him, he was glad that tonight was not his night. It felt so good to be here, not up there sweating bullets as the plane bounced around, trying to keep the needles steady, watching the fuel, knowing that you were going to have to fly that instrument approach to the ball, then thread the needle to get safely back aboard. To return to the world of the living, to friends, to food, to letters from loved ones, to a bunk to sleep in, to a world with a past and a future. There in that cockpit when you were flying the ball there was only the present, only the airplane, only the stick in your right hand and the throttles in your left and the rudder beneath your feet. There was only the now, this moment for which you had lived your whole life, this instant during which you called upon everything within you to do this thing.
Oh, yes. He was glad.
Other LSOs were climbing to the platform now, so Jake moved as far back as he could to stay out of the way. All these specialists were here to observe, to see another dozen landings, to polish their skills, to learn. This was normal. The platform was packed with LSOs on every recovery.
The last airplane to be launched was upon the catapult at full power when the lights of the first plane on the glide slope appeared out of the gloomy darkness astern. In seconds the catapult fired and the deck became unnaturally silent.
The Real was already three feet out onto the deck holding the radio headset against his ear with his left hand while he held the Fresnel lens control handle in his right over his head, a signal to his colleagues that he was aware the deck was foul. Jake leaned sideways and looked forward around the edge of the canvas screen. The waist catapult crewmen were working furiously to put the protector plate over Cat Three’s shuttle and clear the launching gear from the flight deck. Until they were out of the landing area, the deck would remain foul.
“Come on, people,” the air boss roared over the flight deck loudspeaker. He seemed to believe that his troops worked best when properly stimulated. In any event, he didn’t hesitate to stimulate them. “We’ve got a Phantom in the groove. Let’s clear the deck.”
The last flight deck tractor zipped across the foul line near the island, yet three cat crewmen were still struggling with the protector plate.
Jake lifted one side of his mouse ears away from his head. He heard McCoy roger the ball call.
The air boss on the loudspeaker again: “He’s called the ball. Let’s get this deck clear now, people!”
There, the cat crewmen were running for the catwalk. Jake looked aft. The Phantom was within a half mile, about two hundred feet high, coming fast. On his nose-gear door was a stop-light arrangement of little lights, red, yellow and green, that was operated by the angle-of-attack instrument in the cockpit. Red for slow, yellow for on speed, and green for fast. The yellow light was lit, but even as Jake saw it, the red light flickered.