One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (58 page)

Jets also had to get off the carrier, and this required a third British invention, the steam catapult. The Navy had been using catapults since the early days of naval aviation. Initially run by compressed air, ungainly looking catapults were installed on cruisers and battleships to launch their scout floatplanes. The Navy subsequently developed hydraulic catapults prior to World War II, but the fast carriers operated almost exclusively using free deck rolls because the Hellcats, Dauntlesses, and Avengers didn't need them. However, the hydraulic catapults were a necessity on the smaller light and escort carriers. It soon became clear that jets could not use free roll takeoffs due to their higher minimum flying speeds, and so the hydraulic catapults were used initially. However, as the jets got heavier and required yet greater launch speeds, the need for better catapults became manifest. The Royal Navy came to the rescue again with the steam-powered catapult. The steam catapult used steam from the ship's propulsion plant, could be built with a much longer power stroke, and was considerably lighter than a comparable hydraulic unit. These three innovations, the
angled deck, the optical landing system, and the steam catapult set the stage for the effective operation of supersonic swept-wing jets at sea.

GETTING OUT

In propeller aircraft, if the engine quit or the plane caught fire, the pilot and any crew could “bail out,” that is, open the canopy, door, or hatch and just jump, pulling the rip cord on the parachute once clear of the plane. Moreover, one could reasonably think about ditching a prop; pancaking down on the water at 80 knots or so was eminently survivable. All of this changed with jets. At 300 or 400 knots, trying to bail out in a traditional manner was impossible. At jet landing speeds, ditching a swept-wing fighter was almost certain suicide. The answer was the ejection seat. Initially powered by a small explosive charge, seats were later equipped with a rocket engine under the seat pan and had provisions for restraining the pilot's arms and legs in the brutal blast of air that was encountered when ejecting from airplane at high speed. The ejection seat was supposed to be the pilot's savior, and indeed it was—sort of. The first successful ejection from a Navy aircraft was in 1949 when the pilot of a Banshee was forced to eject over South Carolina at 597 knots.

As with the jets themselves, ejection seats went through a development process, with early seats being less sophisticated and capable than later ones. An ejection seat can be characterized by its capability in two modes: low speed and close to the ground and high speed and high altitude. Once introduced, the ejection seat generated an interesting dilemma for the pilot and crew—when do they pull the handle? The author of this chapter had an introduction to swept-wing jets that was marred by two accidents illustrating the problem. In advanced flight training using the TA-4J Skyhawk, an instructor and fellow student were killed when they ejected too late after their engine failed on takeoff. The instructor was apparently trying to get the aircraft turned around to execute an emergency landing. It was later learned in the accident investigation that he had been fudging his logbook with instrument time so that he would not lose his instrument rating. We surmised that fear of this coming to light if he ejected caused him to delay pulling the handle. The second incident was an A-7 pilot (another fellow student on his first A-7 flight—solo) that ejected late after his engine quit after a touch-and-go landing. He survived, but was so injured he never flew again. Although a qualified aviator, he had not yet developed the reactions and instincts to handle an engine failure at such a critical juncture on his first Corsair flight.

These gruesome anecdotes illustrate a phenomenon with ejection seats. Despite the progressively increased capability of the ejection seats in each new type of aircraft, the survival rate of ejections did not rise the way you would expect. Many aviators believed this was because (a) there were sometimes external mental or emotional
factors that caused pilots to delay their ejection, (b) pilots would ascribe too much capability to the seat and thereby delay pulling the handle, and (c) things happened too damned fast.

Interestingly, in the first decade of the jet era, the number of crew fatalities was significantly less than the number of lost aircraft. After that the two statistics gradually match up, with the number of fatalities becoming equal to or exceeding the number of aircraft lost. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the residual propeller aircraft in the fleet, including the F4U Corsair and the A-1 Skyraider. But it may also be due to the number of straight-wing jets that could be ditched with reasonable hope of crew survival. The arrival of crewed aircraft also meant that a fatal accident produced multiple deaths for the loss of a single aircraft.

KEEPING THEM FLYING

Just as flying was considered an art born of individual experience in the piston-engine years of naval aviation, so was maintenance. The aircraft, except for the engines, were relatively simple and maintenance was mostly a matter of senior petty officers handing down their knowledge and wisdom to the new “airdales” (sailors in naval aviation ratings). Piston engines were complex machines, but by the 1940s were pretty reliable. The introduction of jets changed things. To start with, the early jet engines had a very limited service life. Whereas an air-cooled radial piston engine might run for several thousand hours before needing to be replaced, a jet engine would require replacement after only several hundred. As jets got faster, they required more complex hydraulic and electrical systems, including such exotic (for the time) accessories as yaw dampers, cockpit pressurization, and ejection seats. The old ways of maintenance came under extreme pressure. To quote a
Naval Aviation News
article from 1961: “Compared to the fighters of 1940, the fighters of today are five times as heavy, have six times as many inspection items, ten times as many switches, twenty times as many valves, sixty times as many electron tubes, require ten times as many items of support equipment, and cost about eighty times as much.”
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The Naval Aviation Maintenance Program (NAMP) was established in 1960 to standardize maintenance practices and improve aviation logistics. The idea was to standardize both terminology and procedures so that a maintenanceman would be instantly familiar with maintenance and repair procedures regardless of what ship, air station, or squadron he was assigned. Moreover such a system required extensive documentation, and naval aviation produced progressively more sophisticated methods over the years.

However, change has always come hard to the Navy and the imposition of standardized maintenance methods was no exception. To quote from the same
Naval Aviation News
article: “While it is hard to find anyone in our time who does not
appreciate the value of interchangeable parts in machines, it is not so generally recognized that the same principles apply in human organizations.”
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The effective transition from aviation maintenance as an individual art to a formalized human-machine system took years, and many jets were lost, even through the 1980s, to maintenance errors resulting from squadron maintenance chiefs “doing their own thing” and subverting the system in various ways. The informality of naval aviation maintenance was nowhere more evident than in the cases where naval aviators undertook to fix their own aircraft on a cross-country flight. If a starter, hydraulic pump, or similar part failed, it was not uncommon for the pilot to call back to the squadron and have a new part sent out in another jet toting a “blivet,” an external fuel tank modified with a door and shelves to carry cargo. The sight of a Navy pilot taking a wrench to his own airplane always shocked and dismayed Air Force personnel (if it took place at an Air Force base) who witnessed it, as the Air Force had a much more disciplined and structured system. This practice continued at least into the 1980s.

Naval aviation maintenance is a highly challenging business even under the best of circumstances. Squadrons must regularly move their operations from a shore base to an aircraft carrier and back again, sometimes splitting up into small detachments. Moreover, airdales must perform maintenance on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, at night and in some miserable weather conditions. As if that were not enough, they have to be ready to scurry out to the middle of a flight deck during launch operations to try and fix a jet that developed a problem after start-up. Although the dangers of whirling propellers and jet engines that could blow a man over the side or suck him into the intake were well appreciated, over the years a steady stream of aviation sailors were lost or injured to these hazards. As with aircrew, airdales who could not maintain their composure in the rapid-fire and dangerous environment they faced were weeded out by death or injury, or if they could not deal with the fear and strain, left the business. Those who remained were tough and savvy and they made naval aviation a success.

NAVAL AVIATION CULTURE AND THE TRANSITION TO JETS

In order to understand the catastrophic price the Navy paid in its march to operate swept-wing jets from aircraft carriers, we must look at the organizational culture onto which this new technology was grafted. After all, the majority of the mishaps that occurred were due to aircrew error of some sort, whether it was precipitated or exacerbated by the design problems previously identified—or gross error, negligence, or irresponsibility not connected with them.

Naval aviators always viewed themselves as daredevils. The difficulties of taking off from and landing on a ship were unequalled in the land aviation domain, and naval aviators therefore considered themselves both exceptionally skilled—and
expendable. The naval aviation accident rate (if not the sheer numbers) from its inception through World War II was hardly less than the awful rates experienced in the early jet era. Naval aviators have always regarded themselves as a different breed than their surface Navy brethren, but for all that, have shared in the Navy's culture of independence and self-reliance. The simplicity and relative inexpensiveness of early naval aircraft allowed this culture to thrive, in that flight instruction was personal and aviators had few detailed procedures or rules to follow in mastering their aircraft. Seat-of-the-pants flying and individuality in technique were the order of the day. But since the piston-engine aircraft all operated essentially in the same way and roughly at the same speeds, especially when landing, and since they rarely operated at night or in bad weather, pilots could transition between aircraft easily and informally. Mr. Richard “Chick” Eldridge, a member of the Naval Safety Center for several decades remembers his Navy flight training in 1943: “To my recollection, there was little emphasis on aviation safety. What safety information was imparted to the fledgling aviator came from the primary instructors. Lessons learned usually came in the form of ‘gems of instructor wisdom.' You were simply told to fly certain maneuvers in a specific way or wind up as a statistic.”
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The first thing to change was the technology. Culture change lagged by more than a decade, causing a virtual bloodbath. In addition to the specific challenges of flying jets mentioned previously must be added the greatly increased speeds. Things happen much faster in jets and a different mindset and discipline are called for to avoid disaster. Pilots who spent significant time flying at propeller aircraft speeds tended to have more difficulty adjusting to jet speeds than those who were introduced to them early. The author observed this during the Navy's transition from the piston-engine S-2 Tracker carrier anti-submarine aircraft to the jet-powered S-3 Viking. The more senior pilots seemed to have the most difficulty, and indeed a number of them either quit, had accidents, or failed to pass flight checks. This was a serious issue that attended the fleet introduction of the A-3 Skywarrior. Initially, the Navy brought in senior aviators from the land-based patrol community as well as some carrier pilots. A series of accidents and difficulties involving former patrol pilots prompted the Commander of the Sixth Fleet to write a letter to the CNO recommending only carrier-trained pilots be assigned to A-3 squadrons.
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In the early years of the jet transition, naval aviation remained wedded to its individualistic culture. Structured programs of training, detailed reference manuals, and disciplined evaluation of pilot performance did not exist in any coherent way across naval aviation. But jets, with their higher speeds, challenging handling characteristics, and ever-more complex systems required just that. The horrible accident rates eventually drove the Navy to do something. The Air Force had been suffering an increase in mishaps also and formed a Flight Safety Directorate with 525 personnel and undertook to impose discipline on the aviation corps by disciplining crew when
fault and culpability could be assigned. In contrast, the Navy's first effort was puny by comparison with only twenty-five personnel. However, war hero Captain James F. “Jimmy” Flatley wrote up a highly critical and influential report on naval aviation safety in 1953 that generated organizational and procedural changes that went far to change the culture.
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Along with these changes, a more structured program of flight training was introduced, eventually culminating with the establishment of replacement training squadrons that provided intensive and detailed instruction for newly winged aviators in the aircraft they would fly in the fleet. These squadrons would also become the centers of flight and maintenance evaluation of the fleet squadrons based with them. A variety of other measures also served to further professionalize and discipline the naval aviation culture, including formal training for squadron safety officers, improved accident investigation techniques, specially trained medical personnel called flight surgeons, the publication of a safety magazine to share stories of accidents and near misses, and top-down leadership that countered the laissez-faire cultural heritage.