Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
July 16, 2000

An Aircraft Carrier Can Be Dangerous For Workers

By Dave Mayfield, The Virginian-Pilot

ABOARD THE CARRIER ENTERPRISE -- The E-2C Hawkeye had blown a tire coming out of the landing area. It was the last plane in for the night. Airman Trevor Wayne Maki, 22, took chains in hand. His job: to secure the aircraft to the flight deck.

But something terrible happened that night in April while the Enterprise sailed off the Virginia-North Carolina coast. Maki was struck by one of the Hawkeye's spinning propellers. He was the Enterprise's first fatality since a flight-deck crash in 1998 in which four aviators perished.

Few ``work places'' are as dangerous as an aircraft carrier. And it's not just accidents on the flight deck. Carrier air wing commanders consider themselves lucky if they make it through a deployment or the work-ups preceding it without losing at least one aircraft at sea.

Lt. Cmdr. John Eggert, a pilot with Airborne Early Warning Squadron 124, has felt the pain of loss from such an accident. During a deployment in 1993 with the same squadron, five of his squadron mates died when their Hawkeye, assigned to the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, crashed in the Ionian Sea off eastern Italy.

VAW-124 is assigned to the Enterprise now, and Eggert is one of its senior pilots.

Eggert wasn't in the cockpit the night of Maki's death. But he was a few nights earlier, when a young sailor from a S-3 Viking squadron was blown down by the propeller wash of another plane. Eggert quickly cut his engines as the young man rolled to a rest under one of the Hawkeye's props.

There was little thought in his action. ``You just do it,'' he said. ``You spend enough time in an E-2 on the flight deck, and you're going to run into a problem like this.''