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#TomcatTails Number 76 #TomcatTuesday “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” Flying military airplanes can range from exhilarating to harrowing and everywhere in between. Naval Aviation in particular adds additional degrees of scale to both sides of that spectrum: Day Case I launch on a beautiful day over the azure blue of the open ocean – Exhilarating Night Case III bad weather pitching deck single engine landing – You gotta be shittin’ me Sometimes a fairly innocuous system degrade can turn into a bigger deal than you expected. They can “cascade”, where one failure begets another until you’ve gone from “Hmmm, nuisance light” to assholes and elbows trying to keep the jet flying. Or, you can think you’ve got a seemingly benign degrade but get bitten in the butt by the downstream effects of that degrade you just didn’t think of or remember. We were in the VF-24 Renegades on the USS Nimitz steaming across the Western Pacific bound for the Persian Gulf in late 1995. This was my second cruise and I was pretty experienced as Pilots go. Good enough at the job to do it fairly well, but definitely still young enough to know getting cocky could throw open the door to Murphy when you least expect it. Flying around the Pacific was still a real thrill for me; the amazing blue of the open ocean that stretched to every horizon around you was just awe-inspiring. Like most Naval Aviators, we’d frequently say we couldn’t believe we got paid for this. We never said that at night, though. On one particularly beautiful day we banged off the catapult for what I recall was a fairly simple day hop. 1 versus 1 Air Intercept Controls to help train our new RIOs as well as the ship’s radar dudes. Not a super sexy hop, but then again we’re flying Tomcats off the Nimitz in the Western Pacific; that alone is an amazing day that many would pay a million bucks to experience just once. We were truly blessed. At some point in the hop I had an issue with the Environmental Control System or ECS. This is the giant compressor that pulls bleed air off the engines and runs a number of systems on the jet. As a result I had to select “Air Source Off” in the cockpit, shutting down that turbine. I can’t recall all of the affected systems but the first thing you notice is that it gets REALLY quiet in the cockpit which is normally pretty loud from the cooling air servicing all the components as well as your air conditioning. Normally you can’t talk back and forth with your RIO, but with the air source off you could actually have a conversation. That was a first for me. We were not necessarily in an emergency situation so we elected to come back to the boat at recovery time. But just to be safe, the boat had us execute a day Case III straight in approach after the rest of the previous launch recovered. Okey doke and easy peasy. Or so I thought. We got set up behind the boat at 5 miles and 1,200 feet, got the jet dirty (gear/flaps down, speed brakes out), trimmed to on speed and started trundling toward the ship on final bearing (landing heading). So far pretty simple. As is sometimes the case in the Pacific, some storm clouds had formed after we launched and now there was a large piece of the ocean with a giant rain cloud over it. And the Nimitz was just entering the rainy area as we started our approach. Now, the ship guys will swear that they can’t really just move the ship to avoid weather because blah, blah, blah. Us Aviators know better. The ship’s got a rudder and some screws; move the damned boat. But, as was often the case, Old Salt (the callsign for Nimitz) steamed right into the heavy rain showers. We hit the 2 mile point on the approach and the rain began hitting the windscreen in front of me. Not real bad at that point. But by the “push” (where you start your decent on the 3° glide slope) the rain got a lot harder and was beginning to affect visibility. No worries. Just select “Rain Removal” to “ON” and we’ll be good. Bleed air would shoot out these little vents under the windscreen and visibility would improve. Except we’d secured the Air Source so the rain removal feature, something we didn’t use very much, was……not available. Shit. I hadn’t mentally prepared for a difficult instrument approach but snapped into that mindset immediately. I transitioned to my primary attitude instrument (VDI) and began to fly the ILS needles or “bullseye”, something I always had engaged day or night. OK, that’s good. I can at least get it to a good start at three-quarter mile and maybe even work the bullseye to one half mile. At the ball call, I did a quick peek at the boat and it was rather…..disconcerting. I could definitely make out the ship but it was pretty blurry. Key features were recognizable (island, angle, flight deck) but the important things (like the Ball) were not easy to see. Just after the ball call I radioed “CLARA”, telling the LSOs I couldn’t see the ball. With a nice sugar call of “Lookin’ good, keep it coming”, I did just that; maintain attitude, teeny bit of power “for Mom and the kids”, and kept it coming. By this point the green horizontal datums of the landing aide were barely visible but the ball was not. @WadeMclusky and other Paddles will understand this next reference. With no accurate glide slope indicator but a “looks good” from Paddles, I elected to visually put the blurry picture of the boat about where it’s supposed to be in the windscreen, at about what looked like the right glide slope, and continue the pass. Not really “deck spotting” (staring at the flight deck….a big no-no) since I couldn’t actually see the deck. More of a “sight picture management” technique. Just as we get to the in-close position the ball becomes visible and whattya know it’s just cresting a little high. A tiny nudge of power for the burble (disturbed air behind the boat) and we crossed the ramp just right for a sold 3-wire pass, mostly on centerline. Mostly. The debrief on the pass went well and Paddles gave me an OK 3 for my troubles. He commented that the pass seemed pretty solid for not being able to see the boat very well and I told him I just got lucky, “blind squirrel finds a nut now and again”, and all that. He still clapped my shoulder and said “nice pass” as he and his crew departed for the next Ready Room. In thinking about this story as I was writing it, I’m sometimes amazed at all the things we did and had to deal with and just shrugged it off as “all in a day’s work.” And yes, I did a little extra systems study that night to refamiliarize myself with a few key things to remember!