02 June 2016
Editor’s Note: Every Fly Off is the same, and all are different. My fighter buddy Bronco sent me this one, from his time as an F/A-18 Hornet Skipper, which sums it up nicely: “Ah, Channel Fever. I remember it so well. I know you might discuss fly-off next, so here’s my story from VFA-137 coming home on CORAL SEA in ’88.
The night before the The Big Day we are hanging out in Ready One when we get a call to set the Alert 15 (skipped over Alert 30). What? I’m sure you guessed the reason. Two Bears had taken off from Cuba and would pass near Coral Maru on the way to the Land of Vodka and Ice. Two guys (XO & JO) were there in flight suits having conducted maintenance turns on jets. They geared up and headed to the roof. They were strapping in when the word came to launch the Alert 5. Mass confusion on the flight deck! Got ’em airborne in 7 minutes. They were headed out for 10 minutes when the Never Mind call came. Now what? Landing aboard was too hard, but they had the gas to get to Cecil Field. They landed at Cecil after midnight and ended up sleeping on the couches in the Commodore’s office. The next morning the families were arriving at the hangar for the big arrival. Our intrepid duo does not go down there, and no one notices the Kestrel jets on the transient Line. They saddled up to join us for our 12-plane fly by. So the families are out on the ramp when the two K birds do a section takeoff in front of them. Much head scratching ensued. But the 12-plane flyby at 300′ was glorious.
Bronco”
This sums things up pretty well. My pal Jake said the channel fever part was the same for him, too, and I responded that I had a bunch more from stuff from the operational side of the deployment, and he sagely commented that he just liked the liberty and the coming home parts. He didn’t need to do the cruise. He said he had already got the t-shirt for that.
– Vic
Homecoming
09 APR 1990:
This is it. If it doesn’t get done today, it ain’t gonna get done. I arise at 0730. Chop normally works at about 78RPM anyway, but this morning he is positively flying. He is out of the room and walking to the helo by 0815 .
I instruct him not to return his room key to the Ship, because the INSURV team comes aboard at noon and I don’t want to share my last twenty hours on the boat with anyone new. I strip his bed, though, just in case. Then up to Mission Planning to complete the job of throwing things into cruise boxes for the offload.
I am having a hard time staying focused on the task at hand. I find myself considering the strong possibility that I am going to be seated by my wife at poolside at our house in Orange Park tomorrow afternoon, watching the boys leap into the water and sipping a daiquiri …
Five cruise boxes are required to get the classified stuff all into one place. The space is starting to look like a warehouse. The INSURV team starts arriving at 0900 from Bermuda and their Admiral is aboard by 1130. The pandemonium level is extraordinary even by the standards of this cruise. We have two cycles of flight ops; inspectors are appearing in the space with clipboards and grim looks. VF-31 and VS-28 have been ejected from their ready rooms to accommodate the INSURV, so most of the officers are hanging around Planning with no where else to go. The squadron Intel guys are throwing things in boxes and the air is crackling with electricity.
There is a Staff Meeting at 1230 after a very crowded lunch in Wardroom Two. Pack-up is complete by the last brief and Mission Planning is empty by 1700.
I bag a quick combat nap and am back in the office by 1900 to start preparations for the Fly Off Brief at 2000. CAG leads it off with the admonition that he doesn’t want to see anyone do anything stupid due to Get-Home-Itis. “Don’t take an unsafe jet,” he says, and completes his motherhood speech quickly. Everyone I can see has an advanced case of that very disease.
Then Scooter is up and he briefs the Fly Off plan. There will be two launches. The Jacksonville-based squadrons will go at 1100, staggered to permit unit join ups and mass fly-byes for the families at NAS Cecil Field. The Oceana gaggles will launch in the afternoon, and the E-2 bubbas will provide flight following and hand-off to the FAA controllers as our jets enter their areas of responsibility.
This all is relatively complicated, as apparently the air traffic control system is not regularly configured to deal with gaggles of thirty-odd tactical jets racing in from the open ocean.
Lutt-man, Doc Flynn and myself are flying off with the Gamblers. Since they have no ready room at the moment, we conduct the mass brief after Scooter is done right there in Mission Planning. We will attempt an eight-plane fly-by at Cecil. In order to do so, we have to first collect all the airplanes in one place and orbit at arbitrary navigation points en route so as to ensure that there is sufficient separation between arriving flights. The squadron Skipper is nervous. His change-of-command will occur shortly after our return. He hasn’t had a major disaster yet, and all he can see in his imagination is a mid-air involving all his aircraft right overhead the home field.
He is on the verge of directing individual straight-in approaches when cooler heads prevail. This is going to be a riot!
The plan is to load our gear at 0600 tomorrow. Individual crews brief at 0845. Walk to the aircraft NLT 1000. Launch about 1100; with a airborne time zone change, that puts us overhead Cecil at about 1245. We will recover as two-planes after the fly by, and then join up in two groups on the ground and taxi in as four? planes. Then we shut down the engines in unison and wait for the Customs guys to clear us. Simple as pie. What could go wrong?
After the brief, the crowd thinned out fast. I felt strangely disoriented. I was all packed and ready to go. There was really nothing further I had to do except get some sleep, and naturally that was impossible. I had a hot dog at mid-rats and it floated in my stomach along with some old CVIC coffee and the last of the cherry liquor chocolates that Doc Flynn was (successfully) trying to get rid of. There were a few attempts at some camaraderie, but everyone seemed lost in their own thoughts.
I hung out in planning until 0100 or so, smoking cigarettes and flipping between the two channels on the TV. Finally the last movie was over and there was nothing else left to do but go to bed. And wait for tomorrow, which had already begun…
10 APR :
It was not going to work. I laid in my bunk and tossed until 0200. I smoked a cigarette and tossed some more. I could not will myself to sleep. The remainder of the night was three more cigarettes and the sudden realization that it was 0430 and I was wide awake. I got out of the rack and pulled on my flight suit and boots and decided to hump my large duffel bag up to the flight deck and load it on the airplane.
The bag was heavy and awkward and the knee knockers kept threatening to take large gouges out of my shins. It was still dark as the inside of a cow on the flight deck, so I walked aft down the 03 passageway until I was under the island. That way I could come out under the floodlight s and didn’t have to worry about pitching myself overboard in the blackness of the catwalk up forward.
My crew’s S-3 was spotted on the waist. I found it after wandering from airplane to airplane peering at the side numbers in the gloom. I shoved my bag in through the crew access hatch and then went down to the Wardroom for breakfast. I had to kill a few hours prior to the brief, so I found myself back in CVIC drinking coffee and sitting on my desk.
Cruise boxes were stacked in rows in front of the fold down tables and made convenient benches for the other few insomniacs. I must have smoked another half pack of cigarettes waiting for the time to run the tape of Scooter’s briefing once more to refresh everyone ‘s memory.
Then the eight Gambler crews gathered individually on a stack of cruise boxes to run through the unit briefing SOP. The rapid-fire race through the briefing was impressive. The bottom line was that safety was paramount, but that short of complete failure this bird was going to Florida. We got through the thing in record time and I went forward to the rigger’s shop to draw some flight gear. Lizzie Berdan had flown off the ship at Rota and he was a good match for me in size. That was a comfort after squeezing into other people’s torso harnesses which were cut for short people. Fully attired, it was time to walk to the roof and get the show on the road.
It was a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky and temperature was delightful. It was Spring again and America was only 350NM away on the nose. I put my helmet bag and briefcase on the deck in front of the aircraft and watched with some apprehension as
f light deck guys swarmed over Catapult Three. They kept cycling the shuttle back and forth with some kind of tension measure in between. They did not seem to be happy campers, and the thought occurred to me that leaving the ship early might not be the best way to go, if one were to find oneself on the slow end of a cold cat shot.
It is better to die than to look bad, though, so I stood and chatted with Doc Flynn and waited for the word to man the airplane. We slid through the scheduled man-up time and were approaching the original launch time when the V3 Leading Chief shook his head, shrugged and started to get into his full flight deck uniform. We jumped in the airplane and got strapped in.
I sat in the TACCO seat on the right in back with the crew door under my feet. One of the squadron AW ‘s was next to me and Bill Carey was up front on the right. Rocky Rockwell was driving, an LSO and a great stick. So there were no qualms about the crew. All that had to work was the jet, the catapult, the rendezvous and flying in a formation nobody had practiced in a long time. What could go wrong?
Both engines started. That was good. Listening to Rocky and Bill on the res, I could tell that every item on the pre-flight checklist had special significance. On cruise, if something was broken you just downed the airplane. Today was a little different; hydraulic pressure was an article of some discussion for a while. Rocky was of the opinion that we were spewing it on deck and the brown shirts were running around frantically. I had to assume that everything was OK because finally they broke us down and we armed the ejection seats and lurched forward.
At which point we promptly got stuck on the cat track. There was more flailing around. They pushed us back and we tried it again and got across. We were second in line on Cat One. I peered out the porthole across from me as we taxied over the Jet Blast Deflector and saw to my amazement that the Shooter was wearing his Service Dress Blue jacket for the occasion. We went into tension, wings down and engines up. I heard Rocky say he had saluted the Shooter and the usual split eternity went by and then FID’s mighty cat blast kicked us in the ass and off we went…
“Good Shot! We’re outta here! We’re going flying!”
We rendezvoused as a two-plane east of the ship and killed about twenty minutes waiting for everyone to get launched and sequenced. We heard that all the Gamblers had made it airborne and then pushed to the West. There was nothing else for me to do, so I pulled a John D. MacDonald novel out of my briefcase, opened a Diet Coke and snuggled into my ejection seat to enjoy the ride.
The flight was broken into several rendezvous points, the last being just outside the Jacksonville Warning area. By that time our two-plane had swelled to all eight. Rocky was assigned the slot in the double diamond and I cold see three other airplanes looking enormous out my porthole. we got clearance to push inbound and the XO requested permission to fly right up the St. John’s river over downtown Jacksonville.
What a thrill! We cruised in low over Mayport and the carrier pier from whence we had sortied six months before slid by to the left. Big freighters and container ships plowed upstream toward the city. Minutes later the city skyline appeared below us. we roared majestically over the . Landing and the Gulf Life Tower slipped behind us. Next stop Cecil.
Jacksonville is about two-and-a-half minutes flight time away from the Field, but they vectored us all around waiting for other traffic to clear the pattern. I couldn’t see much except pine trees out the porthole until suddenly there was white concrete runway and the formation arced directly over the Gambler Hangar. We passed over the field and then we all almost died.
Well, not so dramatic . The formation was supposed to split into two four-planes , each breaking in opposite directions into the landing pattern for our two-plane section landings. Unfortunately, someone kind of forgot which direction they were supposed to go. No big deal, since no aluminum touched, but I understand those that could see had a colorful nano-second or two.
I didn’t see a thing, except a glimpse of something large and grey flash by the narrow view of the canopy I had from the back seat and was blissfully unaware that the Skipper’s worst nightmare had almost gone down. It could have been one of the most spectacular fly-ins ever, showering the waiting families with bits of aircraft and us.
Then into the landing pattern and we land and roll out. Bill switches to Ground Control and they direct us to the tower to join up as the second four-plane for the taxi in. We folded wings nearly in unison and drove down to the hangar apron and shut down the engines just about perfectly. The silence was deafening as the handle turned on the hatch below my feet and the plane captain stuck his head in and grabbed the landing gear pins from the box in front of the tunnel.
The Florida air smelled wonderful and we piled out onto the concrete as bags flew out the crew hatch.
I could see a crowd and small figures a hundred yards away by the hangar but we were not yet free. We had to wait for U.S. Customs to come out, collect our declarations and clear our bags. One last wait. After a vast span of time (though it probably was only five minutes or so) a prim young woman in a white Customs shirt came to the airplane . I looked down at the duffel bag filled with undeclared items and briefly contemplated how thoroughly she was going to look. She smiled and said: “Welcome back, Guys.” She grabbed our tickets and waved us toward the hangar.
Free at last, I slung my bags over my shoulder and walked back across the ramp. I had covered about half the distance when two small figures burst from the line and raced toward me. In seconds my arms were filled with Boys.
I knelt down on the concrete and squeezed them as hard as I could without breaking them. Then a lovely, sun-dress clad woman who was crying and laughing at the •:
same time was in my arms . We kissed and embraced strongly. I looked up to see my Father, who was holding a ·video camera at port arms. It looked like he had something in his eye.
I tried to think of something profound to say, and had to reach back to the conclusion of The Hobbit for something appropriate.
“Well” I said. “We’re home.”
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com