could see the faces of some of the crew.
They were excited to be getting their own
personal airshow.
As the ship passed behind us I initiated
an aggressive right-hand climbing
turn that would carry us back up to our
holding altitude. As I pulled the stick back
and nudged it slightly right, I set a little
more than 6g for the climb. As soon as I
loaded the aircraft up with g there was
a troublesome ‘bang’ and the jet rolled
dramatically and uncontrollably to the
left. Instinctively, I countered the left roll
by moving the stick right, but despite my
best attempts to control the aircraft we
kept rolling harder left. In an instant it
felt like the nose snapped downward in
full left yaw and I was certain we were on
a vector headed downward toward the
water. My head banged hard on the right
side of the canopy and, all of a sudden,
time stood still.
In a timespan that lasted for little more
than a few hundredths of a second, the
comfortable air-conditioned cockpit of
our navy ghter became foreign and
hostile. I was confused about what hadhappened, and I was desperate to sort
out our situation. I stared at the engine
and ight instruments, but the gauges
held no usable information. In short, the
instrument panel was a blank slate staring
back at me, telling me nothing about our
dire predicament.
I attempted to regain control of our
tumbling aircraft by centering up the
stick and pulling the throttles back out
of afterburner. I noticed re o the right
side of the aircraft, somewhere aft. I
couldn’t discern the horizon. There was
no di erentiation between sea and sky.
Nothing made sense, and I was sure that
we were not going to make it out of the
situation alive...the wings and willed our fuel-heavy
Tomcat to accelerate as quickly as it could
— at sea level the speed of sound is more
than 600kt. The controller on board John
Paul Jones had asked us to do our yby
as fast and as low as we could go, and
our goal was to arrive at the ship at 500ft
doing just over Mach 1. At 30 miles out
we could see a small dot on the smooth
ocean surface that was our target for
the yby. We continued to accelerate
and descend, and somewhere around
10 miles from the ship we leveled o at
500ft, doing almost 600kt indicated.
As we got closer to the ship I brie y
glanced in the mirrors on the canopy bow
and saw that a large vapor cloud covered
the back half of our aircraft. At high
speeds, and especially on humid days, it
was not uncommon to see a shock wave
that attached itself to the aircraft. A couple
of miles from John Paul Jones we could see
several dozen sailors standing in various
places on the deck, waiting to watch us y
past. The destroyer had been at sea with
us for the entire deployment, its mission
being to provide a defensive capability
— speci cally against any aerial threats
— for the carrier battle group via its Aegis
radar and RIM-67 SM-2 surface-to-air
missiles. As we ew past the ship we
NEXT MONTH ‘With our fi ghter turned into
a convertible, there was nothing more
to do, so I let go of the controls, crossed
my arms, grabbed tightly on the webbing
on either side of my survival vest and
wondered if the wind blast was going to
hurt really bad...’
Don’t miss the second part of this
compelling story in our November issue.Above right:
VF-213’s
‘Blacklion 101’
(BuNo 162599)
accelerates along
the deck of USS
Abraham Lincoln
(CVN 72) in 1995.
This jet suffered
a fatal take-off
accident at Berry
Field, Nashville,
on January 29,- Author via
Sally Jennings
Below: BuNo
161146 joined
VF-213 from VF-111
during October - The jet is
shown at Miramar
in August 1993
following the
change of tail
markings.
Craig Kaston via
David F. Brown
http://www.combataircraft.net // October 2018 59