Sliding, turning left and still sliding forward…he felt the left wheel slam into the deck-edge combing, then the nose, now the tail spun toward the bow, the whole plane still sliding…
And he stopped.
Out the right he could see nothing, just blackness. The right wheel must be almost at the very edge of the flight deck.
He took a deep breath and exhaled explosively.
His left hand was holding the alternate ejection handle between his legs. He couldn’t remember reaching for it, but obviously he had. He gingerly released his grip.
The Plexiglas was gone on the right side of the canopy. Flap had ejected through it. Where his seat had been there was just an empty place.
Was Flap alive?
Jake closed the speed brakes and raised the flaps and slats, watched the indicator to make sure they were coming in properly, exterior lights off. Out of the corner of his eye he saw people, a mob, running toward him. He ignored them.
When he had the flaps and slats up, he unlocked the wings, then folded them. The wind was puffing through the top of the broken canopy…rain coming in. He could feel the drops on the few inches of exposed skin on his neck.
Was the plane moving? He didn’t think so. Yet if he opened the canopy he couldn’t eject. The seat was designed to go through the glass — if the canopy was open, the steel bow would be right above the seat and would kill him if he tried to eject. And if this plane slid off the deck he would have to eject or ride it into that black sea.
Now the reaction hit him. He began to shake.
A yellow-shirt was trying to get his attention. He kept giving Jake the cut sign, the slash across the throat.
But should he open the canopy?
Unable to decide, he chopped the right throttle and sat listening as that engine died.
Someone opened the canopy from outside. Now a sergeant was leaning in. “You can get out now, sir. Safe your seat.”
“Have they got it tied down?”
“Yes.”
He had to force himself to move. He safetied the top and bottom ejection handles on the seat and fumbled with the Koch fittings that held him to the seat. Reached down and fumbled in the darkness with the fittings that attached to his leg restraints. There. He was loose.
He started to get out, then remembered his oxygen mask and helmet leads. He disconnected all that, then tried to stand.
He was still shaking too badly. He grabbed a handhold and eased a leg out onto the ladder, all the while trying to ignore the blackness yawning on the right side, and ahead. Here he was, ten feet above the deck, right against the edge. He felt like he was going to vomit.
Hands reached up and steadied him as he descended the boarding ladder.
With his feet on deck, he looked at the right main wheel. Maybe a foot from the edge. The nose-wheel was jammed against the deck-edge combing and the nose-tow bar was twisted.
Jake asked the yellow-shirt, “Where’s my BN?”
The sailor pointed down the deck, toward the fantail. Jake looked. He saw a flash of white, the parachute, draped over the tail of an A-7. So Flap had landed on deck. Didn’t go into the ocean.
Now the relief hit him like a hammer. His legs wobbled. Two people grabbed him.
His mask was dangling from the side of his helmet, and he swept it out of the way just in time to avoid the hot raw vomit coming up his throat.
He started walking aft, toward the island and the parachute draped over that Corsair a hundred fifty yards aft. He shook off two sailors who tried to assist him. “I’m all right, all right, okay.”
An A-7 came out of the rain and trapped.
There was Flap, walking this way. Now he saw Grafton, spread his arms, kept walking.
The two men met and hugged fiercely.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Haldane watched the PLAT tape of the cat shot gone awry five or six times as he listened to Jake Grafton and Flap Le Beau recount their experience in the ready room.
They were euphoric — they had spit in the devil’s eye and escaped to tell the tale. In the ready room they went through every facet of their adventure for their listeners, who shared their infectious glee.
Isn’t life grand? Isn’t it great to still be walking and talking and laughing after a trip to the naked edge of life itself?
After a half hour or so, Haldane slipped away to find the maintenance experts. He listened carefully to their explanations, asked some questions, then went to the hangar deck for a personal examination of 523’s nose-tow bar.
Apparently the hold-back bolt had failed prematurely, a fraction of a second before the launch valves fully opened, perhaps just as they began to open. The KA-6D at full power had begun to move forward, creating a space — perhaps an inch or two— between the T-fitting of the nose-tow bar and the catapult shuttle. Then the shuttle shot forward as steam slammed into the back of the catapult pistons. At this impact of shuttle and nose-tow bar, the nose-tow bar probably cracked. It held together for perhaps thirty feet of travel down the catapult, then failed completely.
Now free of the twenty-seven-ton weight of the aircraft, the pistons accelerated through the twin catapult barrels like two guided missiles chained together. Superheated steam drove them through the chronograph brushes five feet short of the water brakes at 207 knots.
With a stupendous crash that was felt the length of the ship, the pistons’ spears entered the water brakes, squeezed out all the water and welded themselves into the brakes. Brakes, spears, and pistons were instantly transformed into one large lump of smoking, twisted, deformed steel. Cat Two was out of action for the rest of the cruise.
Colonel Haldane was less interested in what happened to the catapult than the sequence of events that took place inside 523 after the catapult fired. Careful analysis of the PLAT tape showed that the plane came to a halt just 6.1 seconds later. Total length of the catapult was 260 feet, and it ended twenty feet short of the bow. The plane had used all 280 feet to get stopped. The bombardier ejected 3.8 seconds into that ride.
That Jake Grafton had managed to get the plane halted before it went into the ocean was, Colonel Haldane decided, nothing less than a miracle.
Seated at his desk in his stateroom, he thought about Jake Grafton, about what it must have felt like trying to get that airplane stopped as it stampeded toward the bow and the black void beyond. Oh, he had heard Grafton recount the experience, but already, while it was still fresh and immediate, Grafton had automatically donned the de rigueur cloak of humility: “In spite of everything I did wrong, miraculously I survived. I was shot with luck. All you sinners take note that when the chips are down clean living and prayer pays off.”
Most pilots would have ejected. Haldane thought it through very carefully and came to the conclusion that he would have been one of them. He would have grabbed that alternate ejection handle between his legs and pulled hard.
Yet Grafton hadn’t done that, and he had saved the plane. Luck, Haldane well knew in spite of Grafton’s ready room bullshit, had played a very small part.
Should he have ejected? After all, the Navy Department could just order another A-6 from Grumman for $8 million, but it couldn’t buy another highly trained, experienced pilot. It took millions of dollars and years of training to produce one of those; if you wanted one combat experienced, you had to have a war, which was impractical to do on a regular basis since a high percentage of the liberal upper crust frowned upon wars for training purposes.
Yep, Grafton should have punched. Just like Le Beau.
Sitting here in the warmth, safety, and comfort of a well-lit stateroom nursing a cup of coffee, any sane person would reach that obvious conclusion. Hindsight is so wonderful.