Final Flight

FINAL FLIGHT

by Stephen Coonts

THE PILOTS OF THE two F-14Do
Tomcats on the catapults shoved the throttles
of their engines to full military power at the
same time. Up on Vultures Row, high on the
carrier’s island superstructure, the off-duty
observers pushed their fingers even deeper into their ears
as the roar of four mighty engines at full power
became an unendurable, soul-numbing crescendo.

The bow catapult officer, seated facing aft at
his control console between the catapults, returned the
salute of the pilot of the fighter on Catapult
One, glanced at the signal light on the island coms-
yellow-and looked over his shoulder, down the
catapult toward the bow.

The bow safety observer had his left hand up, his
thumb in the air. The cat officer again scanned the
fighter. Still okay.

In the waist catapult control console, the cat
officer there looked across the nose of the fighter on
Catapult Three at the signal light on the
island superstructure. He, too, checked again
to ensure the deck was clear.

The light on the island turned from yellow to green.
Simultaneously both launching officers scanned
the length of their cats, looked again at the planes
at full power, and pushed the fire buttons on their
catapults.

Down below deck, the giant launching
valves opened and steam slammed into the back of the
catapult pistons.

Three seconds later the wheels of the two
fighters ran off the deck and the wings bit the air.

In the plane off the bow catapult, the pilot,
Captain Jake Grafton, slapped the gear
handle up with his left hand. He allowed the nose
to rise to eight degrees nose-up and held it there
as he trimmed and the machine accelerated. At 200
knots he raised the flap handle. With the flaps
up, he lowered the nose of the accelerating fighter and
leveled at five hundred feet below the slate
gray overcast.

Now he glanced back and left. His wingman, who
had launched from Cat Three, was several hundred
feet away in a loose formation. Jake eased the
throttles aft a percent or two to give the other
pilot a power advantage, then scanned his
instruments. EGT, RPM, fuel flow, oil
pressure, hydraulics, all okay. No warning
lights.

“You okay back there?” he asked the Radar
Intercept Officer, the RIO, in the seat behind him.

“Sure, CAG. No sweat.” The RIO was
Lieutenant Toad Tarkington. He and
Grafton had only flown together three times before
today, since Jake, the air wing commander, divided his
flying between the two F-14Do squadrons, the
two FirstA- 18 squadrons, and the squadron
flying the A-6E.

The Tomcat accelerated quickly, its wings
sweeping aft automatically as it accelerated through
.7 Mach. At 500 knots indicated, with his
wingman tucked in on the left wing, Jake
Grafton pulled the stick back and pointed the
fighter into the overcast.

Not a word had been said on the radio. The radar
altimeter and TACAN had not been turned on.
And the radars of both fighters were not transmitting.

Aboard the carrier from which the fighters had just
launched, the USS United States, America’s
newest Nimitz-class ship, total
electronic silence was also being observed, as it was
aboard the eight surface combatants arranged
loosely in the miles of ocean around the carrier.

No radars swept the skies. No radio
signals were being broadcast. Yet down in the
Combat Information Centers aboard every ship the
sailors sat and listened for electronic signals
from Soviet ships and planes.

Russian planes were aloft this afternoon over the
North Atlantic searching for the United States.
They had been searching for three days now and still hadn’t
found her out here in these millions of square miles
of ocean. The Americans were making the search as
difficult as possible. The United States had
been sailing east under a thick frontal system for
five days, hidden from the cameras of reconnaissance
satellites ever since she left Chesapeake
Bay. Laden with moisture, the extensive cloud
system covered a lot of ocean. The task group
dashed from squall to squall; the rain would help
mask the ships” radar signature from Soviet
satellites.

The exit into the North Atlantic had been
aided by two nuclear powered attack submarines.
They had sailed from Norfolk the day before the carrier
and located the Soviet snooper submarine that
routinely lurked at the mouth of the bay. The
American boats dashed back and forth at high
speed to screen the noise of the departing task group,
which slipped away to the southeast while the Russian
vainly tried to sort out the screw noises of the
warships from the cacophony made by the American
subs and the dozen or so merchantmen entering and
leaving the bay.

Part of the problem for the Soviets was that the
American task group was not now where it should be, on
the main sea lane from the Chesapeake to the Strait of
Gibraltar. It was almost two hundred fifty
miles south of it. So the Russians were still searching
the huge, empty ocean, looking for a silent needle
that moved erratically and relentlessly.

At present, the nearest Soviet ship was a
trawler outfitted with an array of sensitive
antennae two hundred miles to the northeast. The
trawler’s crew would tattle to long-range naval
bombers if they heard anything. The search and evasion
were games, of course, for the Soviets and the
Americans. Each side was training its combat
crews. Each side was letting the other see its
capability. Each side sought to intimidate the
other in order to prevent the final war that the citizens
of neither country wanted.

In the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat,
Jake Grafton listened to the Electronic
Counter-Measures equipment, the ECM. This gear
could detect the transmissions of Soviet radars
while the fighter was still so far away from the emitting
radar that the signal would not return in a
usable form-in other words, while the F-14 was still out
of detection range. This afternoon Jake listened in
vain. No radars yet. He watched the altimeter
record their progress upward, and occasionally
checked his wingman visually.

The two planes emerged from the clouds at
20,000 feet into clear air.

To the west the sun was still twenty degrees above the
horizon, but it was blurred and indistinct above a
thin cirrus layer at about 40,000 feet. The
light here was soft, diffused, and the visibility
excellent.

Jake leveled the flight at thirty thousand
feet at .8 Mach, 300 knots indicated.
“Okay, CAG,” Toad said over the intercom, the
ICS. “I’m receiving the E-2’s data link.
Our targets are about a hundred and eighty miles
away, bearing zero two zero.

Jake came right to that heading and adjusted the brightness and gain on the Horizontal Situation Display on
the instrument panel in front of his knees. On this
scope he could see a copy of the picture the
RIO had on the Tactical Information Display in
the rear cockpit. Sure enough: there was the threat
display.

Even though the American fighters and ships were not
emitting, they could see the Russians. The United
States was keeping an E-2 Hawkeye radar
plane airborne around the clock. This twin engine
turboprop had waited until it was over a
hundred miles from the ship before it turned on its
radar, and then it data-linked everything it saw back
to the ships and to any fighters aloft. The Hawkeye
was an eye in the sky. It had located two
Tupolev Tu- 142 Bear bombers approaching
from the north, still scanning the sea with their radars,
searching. And aboard the United States, Jake,
as the air wing commander, had decided to intercept the
Bears.

Now the ECM warning light on the right window
frame directly in front of Jake began
to flash. “We’re receiving radar signals from
Ivan,” Toad said. The main ECM panel was in
his cockpit, since in combat the pilot would be too
busy to check it.

“I don’t want these guys to know we’re coming
until we’re on their tails,” Jake told his
RIO. “What’s their heading?”

“They’re going two eight zero at about four
hundred knots, sir. You may want to come
right another twenty degrees-then when we pass behind
their port beam, we’ll turn left and accelerate
and come in on their stern quarter.”

“Gotcha,” Jake said, and turned right. He
pumped his fist at his wingman and received a nod in
reply. The other pilot dipped his nose and
crossed under Jake, surfacing on the right wing. From
this position he could ease further out and turn in behind
the second bomber while Jake took the one on the
left. Jake scanned the instrument panel once
again. It was still new to him. He had flown the A-6
Intruder attack plane throughout most of his career and
had been checked out in the F-14 only after he had
received orders to command this air wing. He still had less
than sixty hours in the airplane, yet he
enjoyed flying it immensely. It was high-performance
luxury compared to the A-6, which was subsonic and
designed in the late fifties as an all weather
bomber.

The D version of this supersonic fighter
interceptor was affectionately known as the
“Super-Tomcat” and was equipped with more powerful, more
fuel-efficient engines than those which powered the
F-14A, engines less prone to compressor
stalls and capable of being jam-accelerated in
high angle of comattack, high G-load
dogfights. Fast, agile, and stuffed with the latest in
air-to-air electronic wizardry, the
F-14Do was also going to sea for the first time aboard
the United States.

The view from the cockpit took some getting used
to, Jake mused. One large rounded piece of
plexiglas covering both the front and rear
cockpits, and broken only by a lone canopy bow
between the cockpits, constituted the canopy. The seats
were mounted high so the pilot and RIO would have the
maximum field of view when the aircraft was
maneuvering against an enemy. Jake was sitting high
and forward on a large projectile shaped like an
arrow head. One felt naked, but the view in all
directions was spectacular. It was almost as if you were
riding through the sky in a chair without the benefit of an
aircraft.

As he learned to fly this airplane, Jake found
it difficult to keep his right thumb off the trim
button on the stick. With a computer automatically
adjusting the horizontal stabilizers to compensate for
flap changes, speed brakes, wing sweep, and
speed changes, an F-14 pilot didn’t
spend much time trimming. The other trait of the
aircraft he found difficult to master was the
sluggish pitch response and slow power response
when the aircraft was in the landing configuration. To ease
the pilot workload, Grumman had installed a
thumb-operated switch on the stick that allowed the
pilot to raise and lower wing spoilers to control
descent on the glide slope instead of adjusting the
throttles.

It was the swing wings that made this plane such a
sweetheart. The Air Data Computer
automatically moved the wings forward or aft for
maximum maneuvering efficiency. As the
aircraft accelerated through .75 Mach, the wings
left their medium-speed position, twenty-two
degrees of sweep, and progressed aft, until
at 1.2 Mach they were fully swept, at
sixty-eight degrees, and the machine had become a
delta-winged projectile. To optimize
maneuverability, a computer automatically
adjusted the flaps and slats when the machine was
maneuvering in the subsonic and transonic speed
ranges. All this aerodynamic aid allowed the
pilot to squeeze more performance from the airplane than
Jake had ever dreamed possible.

Jake waggled the stick slightly. The
stick had a self-centering bungee installed in the
artificial feel system and resisted displacement from
center. This control heaviness had bothered him when he
first flew the aircraft, but he rarely noticed it
anymore.

He scanned the sky. It was great to be flying
again, off the ship and out here in the great blue empty
sky. Under his oxygen mask Jake Grafton
grinned broadly.

Sixty miles from the bombers Toad turned on
the television camera system, the TCS, in the
nose of the Tomcat. This camera had a powerful
telephoto lens which would enable the crew to see the
bombers while they were still too far away for the human
eye to acquire them. Toad slewed the camera,
searching. The camera automatically pointed at the
target being tracked by the Tomcat’s radar, but
since the radar was silent, the camera was aimed in the
direction that the computer calculated was
appropriate. So now Toad had to fine-tune the
camera.

“I got em. Or one of them, anyway. I
think they’re a couple thousand feet above us.”

Jake checked the picture on the Horizontal
Situation Display (Hsd) in his
cockpit. The crew did not see raw video, but
a picture optimized by computer. Now the picture
was merely a small dot, recognizably a big
aircraft, but just a dot nevertheless.

He looked around. To his right and rear, his
wingman’s plane hung motionless, suspended in
space. The clouds above were too indistinct to give
an impression of motion. Far below, the top of the
gray and lumpy stratus layer slowly rolled
along from front to rear. It was almost as if the
planes were stationary and the earth was moving beneath them. It was
an illusion, of course. These machines were really
hurling through the sky toward an uncertain rendezvous.

“We’re just about to cross their beam, CAG.
Turn ninety degrees left.”

Jake did so. This course would lead the bombers
by forty degrees, necessary since they were moving. He
eased the throttles forward, then pushed them
into afterburner. The wingman was right with him. He
advanced the throttles another smidgen.

The fighter sliced through the sonic barrier with only
the barest jolt.

Mach 1.3 … 1.4 … 1.5, 605
knots indicated, true airspeed 820 knots.