Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
July 16, 2000

Ship Assignments Shift, So Aviators Must Adjust

By Dave Mayfield, The Virginian-Pilot

ABOARD THE CARRIER ENTERPRISE - The morning after a long flying day that included two missed landings on this floating air base, Lt. Bill ``Spig'' Reed sat in his squadron's ready room looking tired and a bit glum.

His mates had strung up a big bolt: his trophy for ``boltering'' past the landing wires. ``Owned by . . . Spig,'' somebody scribbled on a board next to it. ``Twice Over! (The Top).''

The E-2C Hawkeye pilots of Airborne Early Warning Squadron 124 were back aboard a carrier for the first time in seven months -- ``shaking off the rust,'' as they say. And Reed wasn't the only one having trouble doing it.

Too high, too low, too far left, too far right, the fliers were a long way from the smooth descents to the flight deck they'd mastered at war the year before.

In the Kosovo campaign, the squadron's boxy turboprops with radar domes on top proved critical to controlling NATO's fighters and bombers. Later in last year's cruise, the aviators repeated the mission for strikes inside Iraq.

It all seems so long ago now.

Off the coast of Virginia earlier this year for their first carrier qualifications since the last deployment, they were just another squadron of out-of-practice aviators. Ahead lay a new set of work-ups and new challenges, not the least of which was the Enterprise, the ship they now called home.

To the Bear Aces of VAW-124, the Navy's oldest nuclear-powered carrier might as well have been launched yesterday. Most had never set foot on it before. Like their fellow squadrons in Air Wing 8, they'd spent the previous deployment and the work-ups leading up to it on another Norfolk-based carrier 25 years its junior, the Theodore Roosevelt. The wing will head overseas with the Enterprise next April.

This ``hop-scotching'' became standard about the time Cmdr. Stephen Guse, skipper of VAW-124, started his Navy career nearly two decades ago. Until then, carriers and air wings had long histories of being paired together.

But today, with only 10 active air wings for its 12 carriers, the Navy has no choice but to scoot each wing returning from overseas to a different ship a notch further along in the training cycle. For the aviators, it's a never-ending game of catch-up.

Many say it's no big deal. The Navy's air units still perform well when called into action overseas, they say.

But Guse and others say the constant switching steepens the challenge of getting ready for deployment.

A world apart: The Enterprise's flight deck is sized and angled differently than the Roosevelt's. The differences aren't dramatic, but enough to matter to pilots trying to feel their way on board. In pitch blackness and stormy seas, when the dangers are greatly multiplied, their grasp of this new deck's nuances will improve their chances of getting back safely.

Of more concern to Guse are the cultural differences between one ship and another. No carrier, like no wing, prioritizes and tackles problems exactly the same way. Though these differences are generally minor, they can prove critical on the flight deck, where men and women from the wing and the ship's crew work side by side to keep the planes coming and going. There, the slightest misunderstanding of who's supposed to do what, and how, can turn the jet-blast ballet into a mangle of fire and blood.

There's more rechoreographing of the roles when wings hop ships, Guse said. ``You don't have the common ground'' to fall back on, he said. ``We're reinventing the wheel every time.'' Some Navy leaders have quietly begun pushing for the reinstatement of at least one more air wing. It's viewed as a long shot. If it happens, retired Vice Adm. Richard C. Allen, former commander of the Atlantic Fleet's naval air force, said the Navy should try matching up carriers and wings once again.

``The kids today can't tell whether they're coming or going,'' said Allen, now president of the Alexandria-based Association of Naval Aviation. ``I'd like to see us get back to that teamwork, that continuing marriage . . . It'd be an advantage for everybody involved.''

New angles and burbles: Up on the Enterprise's flight deck, on a little platform that juts out near where the planes touch down, Lt. Tim Slentz stood ready. A Hawkeye approached, landing gear down. ``The hum of freedom,'' Slentz shouted with a grin.

He is VAW-124's landing signal officer, better known as an LSO. His job: to grade the landings of his squadron's fellow pilots. The first pass, by skipper Guse, was fair. He was a little low in the middle of the approach, but added too much power and ended up coming over the tail ramp a bit high. Still, his tailhook snagged the third of the carrier's four landing wires -- the one pilots shoot for.

LSOs have their own shorthand to record in great detail the features of every pass. Later, Slentz will enter the notations into a computer program. Sometimes, it helps him find a bad pattern in one of the pilots' approaches that he might otherwise have overlooked.

Slentz hasn't devoted much time to the pros and cons of moving from one aircraft carrier to another.

The main ingredient to success is the same, he said: a skillful flying of ``the ball.'' That's the aviators' term for the Fresnel lens lighting system alongside the flight deck that guides them in.

Still, Slentz said the Enterprise has idiosyncrasies that a pilot should have in his mind's ``back pocket.''

One is the Enterprise's ``burble.'' Legend has it, Slentz said, that it's more dramatic on the Big ``E'' than other carriers.

The burble is a term aviators use for the wind stream that passes over the flight deck. After rushing over the fantail, it dips down to the water, then bounces up in a rooster tail.

For the approaching plane, the change from updraft to downdraft as it goes through the burble comes quickly.

How quickly depends on how much of the wind is natural and how much is created by the ship's own movement. The Enterprise's burble is closer to the back of the ship, leaving less time to react, and it's more turbulent, Slentz said. That is, in large part, due to the big ``island'' superstructure rising from its flight deck, he theorized. It's wider than those of later carriers.

The burble's effect wasn't hard to see as some of Slentz's junior squadron mates came in for their first carrier landings in months.

As the planes' big wings were buffeted by sharp updrafts and downdrafts, the Hawkeyes looked caught in a wild elevator ride.

In the gawky Hawkeye, it takes deft handling of stick and rudder to minimize the effects, Slentz said -- and to avoid the sniggering of jet pilots, whose smaller-winged planes dagger through the burble in far prettier fashion.

Another thing that makes landing on the Enterprise a little different, Slentz said, is its landing area.

For approaching pilots, it's angled about 1.5 degrees farther right than on later carriers, he said. That means a bit more correcting of lineup. Because their planes' wingspans are the longest of any carrier aircraft, Hawkeye pilots can't afford to get off the center line.

Back in his ``stupid stage,'' when he was a brand-new pilot, Slentz said, he didn't pay much attention to such idiosyncrasies. ``I was too young to know any different,'' he said. ``I was just trying to get aboard.''

Now he knows that details, nuances, little things matter in carrier aviation.

The learning curve:``I mean, it's Windex for crying out loud.''

Cmdr. Guse was hot.

On the flight deck as twilight dwindled, he stared into a windshield smeared thick with salt spray and jet exhaust. The skipper called for a quick cleaning by one of the squadron's airmen. That's when he got the news. No cleaning fluid. It was left at VAW-124's hangar at the Norfolk Naval Station by the squadron's maintenance crew. Someone decided it wasn't a good idea to bring a ``hazardous'' material onboard.

That capped it for Guse.

His Hawkeye's launch had already been delayed by some of the Enterprise's flight-deck personnel bumbling over a ``huffer,'' a machine that forces air into the engines to help get them started. When they couldn't get the machine operating properly, the plane had to be pushed back on the deck to free others for launch. Another delay.

In retrospect, his Hawkeye probably shouldn't have been parked up close to the catapults to begin with, Guse said. It was the last plane in from the previous round of flight operations. That didn't leave enough time to get it back in shape for the next round only a few hours later.

Guse was disappointed -- in his squadron's support staff and in the Enterprise's flight-deck personnel.

But he wasn't surprised.

Building a successful team ``just takes time,'' he said. ``We're not saying that the ship is all gooned up. And, hopefully, they're not saying we're all gooned up. It's just the fact that we've got to train each other all over again.''

It's why air wings spend months on board a carrier during deployment work-ups -- perfecting the partnership. More practice is needed when ship and wing haven't worked together recently, Guse said.

Becoming comfortable: The good news was that VAW-124's pilots were getting back in the groove. Some, like Guse and Slentz, will roll out to new assignments before the next deployment. The same goes for many of the squadron's naval flight officers, who sit, three in a row, at the back of the Hawkeyes, monitoring radars and controlling other planes.

A handful who made the last cruise will stay on, among them Bill Reed. It's critical that they step up to become the leaders and trainers of the next crop of aviators.

Reed, 27, faces one of the biggest challenges: to move from right seat to left seat in the Hawkeye cockpit. Essentially, that means going from copilot to pilot in charge of the aircraft and the safety of all aboard.

The young pilot has a way to go. Guse said Reed tends to ``saw wood'' with his stick, jerking up and back on the power in his landing approaches. And Reed admits being intimidated sometimes by the skills of senior pilots, Guse especially.

``The skipper's a master,'' he said. ``It's almost frustrating to fly with him, he's so good.'' On the second night of carrier ``quals,'' at 20 minutes after midnight, Reed's Hawkeye was the last plane still flying.

``602. Two and a half miles. On and on,'' an air-traffic controller's voice on the Enterprise crackled over the radio. The plane's glide slope and lineup were near perfect.

In the carrier's air operations center, Guse watched the approaching plane on a TV monitor. The Hawkeye roared over the tail ramp and snagged the ``3'' wire.

``Nice job,'' said the air wing's commander, Capt. John Godlewski.``That was a nice job,'' Guse said.

A little while later, a grinning, sweaty-faced Reed strolled into VAW-124's ready room in his flight suit, helmet in hand.

It wasn't a bad finish, he admitted. Think of it, he said. ``Ninety thousand tons of steel just waiting for little old me.''