23 February 2007
SPADS
The winter is not done with us. The temperature soared almost all the way to the top of the fifties yesterday, and with the exception of a few stubborn patches, the ice is gone. What has come with the change, though, are winds at tropical storm strength.
They are hissing now outside, raking the trees and whistling along the window fittings. There is nothing liquid in the hurtling breeze; it is dry enough, but powerful. Stepping out on Big Pink's balcony I felt as though I had emerged on the catwalk of a big ship pressing at speed into the trade winds.
Twenty knots of wind added to a fifteen knot speed-of-advance meant a steady thirty-five in the face. That was the whole principle to the launching of heavy jets from steel decks. Prevailing wind speed added to the ship's SOA gave a relative speed over the wings that changed the possibilities. It improved the chance of achieving controlled flight in a 60,000 pound airplane from a standing start from "impossible" to merely "improbable."
When they dispatched the Nimitz and her all-nuclear escort force to join us in the Northern Arabian Sea, the powers that be wanted her there at best speed. The route was around the Cape of Good Hope, since the shorter Suez passage was deemed risky in 1979.
Nimtz was making best speed, her General Electric reactors with the rods nearly full out. Her cruisers were keeping up. The top speed of a nuclear aircraft carrier is classified, or was, but imagine all that steel moving at something around thirty miles an hour, turning the corner into the Indian Ocean to hit the prevailing forty-knot breeze on the nose.
That is seventy knots of wind down the deck. Anything can fly in wind like that, including you.
It is remarkable. During the chaos that attended the ignominious fall of the South Vietnamese capital, a dauntless ARVN officer piled his family into a little prop-driven observation plane, and flew to sea to avoid the Communists.
He found Midway out there, which was busy taking on helicopters of all sorts, allowing the passengers to get off, and then pushing them into the sea to free up deck multiple and more landing space. He signaled that he wanted to try to land aboard the carrier in the little airplane, and after some incredulous looks around primary flight control, they decided to let him try.
They put Midway's bow into the wind and cranked up the power plant. On his final approach, the relative closing speed between the little airplane and the deck was so low that he could have parallel parked on the deck between the arresting cables.
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That event had been four years in the past by the time I got to the fleet. By then, there was only one airplane with a propeller and a reciprocating engine that came to visit us on the boat. It was a classic model, a C-1 cargo plane that had been lumbering around Asia since the Vietnam War.
In the last days of its operational life, Traders were used to haul parts and mail and passengers from the ship to outlying fields in small places, leftovers from the great struggle that was sliding into the distance, the war before the war before.
It was always a curiosity when it came, but particularly when it departed. In daylight, the trusty Trader would taxi after to the vicinity of Midway's Number Two arresting wire and wheel majestically to face the bow. Standing on the brakes, the pilot would bring the engines to full military power, and with the approval of the cranky man in the Tower, release the pedal and begin the short exhilerating race to the nothingness beyond the bow.
Usuallly, almost always, the air rushing over the wings created the necessary lift and the airplane would leap to the sky. It was a novelty, since every other airplane in the inventory required the steam catapults to be hurtled off the bow. A deck launch involved no neck-snapping steam rocket. It was a gentlemanly way to leave the ship.
I only got to do it once, but it was interesting, watching the deck slowly go by. A little group of us were off to Misawa to provide some aviation service to a ship that was going someplace that the Russians might not like. It was a small and quiet Cold War mission, and a deck launch was just the thing to start it.
When the Trader first arrived in the inventory, the Douglas AD Skyraider was still fairly new, but the pilots of the muscular airplanes with AVGAS burning engines and propellers could see what was coming. Sleek blue jets filled up the deck space, and required catapults with a variety of violent propulsion systems to go flying.
Not so with Skyraider. Like the Trader, it was rugged, and dependable, the very flower of a technology that was being relegated to the dustbin of aviation history. Still the workhorse attack aircraft, the pilots could open the canopies in flight, sling a silk scarf over their shoulders, and feel that they were one with the First War ace Eddie Rickenbacker in his biplane Spad.
That is what they came to call the Skyraider, an affectionate term for a mighty and still useful dinosaur. SPADs.
Skyraiders were produced by the Douglas Corporation for twelve years, ceasing the run of 3,180 airframes in February of 1957, the year before the Trader went to sea.
During that period, seven basic models were modified into twenty-eight specialized configurations to conduct specialized missions in addition to its basic attack and close air support mission. It was a workhorse, and it did everything. Skyraiders performed photo-reconnaissance, radar surveillance, Electronic Warfare, Medevac and Search and Rescue functions, as well as being a splendid general trash hauler.
Skyraiders brought an impressive reputation from the war in Korea, but were regarded as a transitional aircraft, whose time was finite. Jets were coming, and rugged and dependable or not, the Spad would go the way of the other dinosaurs.
At the Douglas El Secundo plant the Navy accepted an AD-6 airframe in August of 1954, labeling it Navy Bureau No. 135332.
I was three at the time, and the Korean War had come to an inconclusive cease-fire, the North Korean and United Nations forces frozen just along the lines of the 38th Parallel where the whole mess began.
It is in the ambiguous end of one war that the curious story of BuNo. 135332 begins, and it trails through another. In this sad season of the latest ambiguous conflict, the tale is not yet over.
Tomorrow: The Wizard of Silver Hill
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com