"Whoa!" - Brief Article

Time slowed down as I replayed events, verified that we had, in fact, hit our numbers, and we were, in fact, about to die.

Not the thing you want to hear from your pilot at the bottom of a low pull-out at the end of a 45-degree bombing run.

Let's start at the beginning. Some guy named Saddam Hussein hardly rated page five in the Union Tribune, and Wednesday was still the highlight of the week at the O Club. We Tomcat crews had just begun hurling blue death and ourselves at the ground. Our squadron was the first to go through the fledgling Strike Weapons School's brand-new "Bombcat" syllabus. For two days, we sat in a darkened room listening to lectures and looking at hand-drawn overheads, learning how to circle the wagons around some helpless soul in a foxhole. Weaponeering was still a black art to be tackled at some later date.

I was a first-tour RIO, teamed with a salty cruise-experienced pilot I'll call "Bobo." Bobo was known for two things: his calm, good-natured demeanor and his incessant drive to sneak in a workout at every opportunity. Little did I know that it was this second characteristic that would save our lives.

One summer morning, Bobo and I were scheduled to lead a section of Mk-76-toting Toms to NAS Fallon's Bravo 19 Range. We thoroughly briefed the mission, emphasizing the Z-diagram numbers and crew coordination. Our launch and transit went without a hitch, and soon we were in the range. Finding the nuke bull was easy, even for an air-to-ground newbie like me.

Flying low over the target on our spacer pass, I got a good look at the sand and tumbleweeds of the Nevada desert and the smoothly bulldozed surface of the target.

"Our hundred pounds of blue death aren't going to do much to tiffs sucker," I thought as we pulled up into the pattern for our first run.

Rolling in from 14,000 feet AGL, the bull looked very far away.

"Twenty, thirty degrees, four hundred and fifty knots, forty-five degrees, four eighty," I called, watching our dive angle and airspeed increase. The bull got steadily larger.

"Track, stand by," I recited as we hit each altitude, and Bobo maneuvered the jet to put the HUD's bomb-fall line over the target. I called, "Mark," and he pickled our first bomb as the rings of the target filled the windscreen. After a potato (the standard naval-aviation unit of time) and no discernable pull-up, I called "Pull," thinking that Bobo might be fixated on the target.

I felt the onset of G and began to relax. The pull ended abruptly, however, and we were still pointing at the ground and accelerating. Within a second, the outer rings of the bull seemed to spread from wingtip to wingtip. We were well out of the safe ejection envelope and not looking good.

Time slowed down as I replayed events, verified that we had, in fact, hit our numbers, and we were, in fact, about to die. As I managed to get out a more emphatic, "Pull!" I felt a slight negative-G bunt followed by a healthy 7-G pullout. As we climbed steeply back through 1,000 feet AGL, Bobo summed up his feelings, "Whoa."

"What happened?" I asked, somewhat less coolly, recalling the vivid image of one particularly large tumbleweed.

"I went to pull out, and the stick wouldn't come back," he replied in a surprised tone. "So I pulled really hard."

We agreed that we were done with negative-flight-path-angle exercises for the day and let Dash 2 know we would be holding overhead doing some troubleshooting while they finished their runs.

We briefly discussed diverting to NAS Fallon, but instead opted to return to NAS Miramar for a straight-in approach, thinking of the inconvenience associated with coordinating a rescue det on a Friday afternoon. About halfway home, Dash 2 began having some electrical problems, followed by a cooling air light--not a good thing in a Tomcat. We were abeam Point Mugu, and they neatly peeled away and landed ASAP, thinking they were the ones in danger. The rest of our RTB and straight-in recovery went uneventfully.

In our debrief, we discussed crew coordination and the process of deciding to eject. As much as I'd like to say I came out of it with some good lessons learned, the fact of the matter was that there simply hadn't been enough time to completely understand and adequately communicate what was happening. For a brief moment, we were both simply along for the ride. Our options had been simple: Go out in a huge fireball, or get ripped to shreds in a 500-knot ejection. A little luck and a lot of strength were the only things that kept us out of the Nevada soil that day.

The culprit turned out to be a small, aluminum dust cap from a hydraulic jenny. It must have fallen out of someone's pocket during maintenance or rework. After a time, it found its way under a console in the front cockpit where it rolled around between the control rods. During our initial roll-in, the high dive angle and 1-G acceleration allowed it to roll into a tight spot between the horizontal-stab control rod and a bulkhead.

Bobo's initial pull firmly lodged it there, and his subsequent pull flattened it like a penny left on a railroad track. We never did find out where it had come from, and for all we knew it could have been rattling around the plane for years before it came to its final resting place. It's hard to say if the massive impact and subsequent fire would have left any trace of such a seemingly insignificant piece of metal. It's more likely that the apparent case of CFIT would have been blamed primarily on a loss of aircrew SA, followed by a delayed ejection decision, rather than FOD in the cockpit.

Postscript: Nearly a decade and 2,000 hours later, I still look back on this event with uneasiness. Much has changed in naval aviation; training is better, ORM gives safety the respect it deserves, and as a whole, we aviators are smarter. None of these improvements, however, would have prevented this potential tragedy caused by someone's negligence. Human nature will always be the weak link in the safety chain.

LCdr. Smith now flies with VAQ-131.

COPYRIGHT 2000 U.S. Naval Safety Center
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group