It's not about glamour it’s about guts.
1 | Solo |
Form my childhood I was attracted to aeroplanes of all kinds, largely due to family. My Grandfather was US Navy Pilot shot down over Vietnam.
My father was an Aviator with USAF and has flown B-52 Stratofortress and presently a successful airlines company CEO and Chairman.
Now it was my turn.
They say Fighter Pilots are not born, they are built and this is place where they make them Naval Air Station Kingsville
The Advanced flight training starts with a 900 page manual of F/A 18 he first Fighter Jet I will qualify on. Here we have already done our Introductory flight screening (IFS)
and Primary flight training. It also includes Centrifuge tests which simulates the conditions of stress and gravity inside fighter aircraft. The tighter the turn, harder the gravity pushes on him, which in technically called pulling Gs. And fighter jets do it more brutally than any machine on earth At 2G a 200 pound man can easily feel twice his weight. Take it upto 5g and the flight suit feels like 1000 pounds of lead. Once you start pulling Gs its like bench pressing your chest, everything is pulling down and its very hard to breathe. Under G load blood drains from the head and pools in the legs leading to tunnel vision or verse G lock i.e G induced loss of consciousness. Survival depends on mastering the Anti G Straining Manoeuvre, the trick is - tense the leg and stomach muscle so as to prevent the blood from hitting south. And to breathe in short quick burst. Abs tight, but tight and lift yourself from the seat.
The G suite that I was introduced too basically had bladders in thigh muscle and abdomen which inflate under G forces at varying pressure to squish your lower extremities to keep the blood in your head. But for centrifuge test, the suit will not inflate, I need to prove that I can sustain high G forces completely on my own. I had to complete a series of tests culminating in 8Gs for 15 long seconds.
My turn I witnessed the heavy pressure and pull, it was difficult to breathe but I heard be “aggressive.. be aggressive” clearly and altered my pace likewise. When I finished it I was already a little white but I passed it. Good Stuff, the instructor commented. Two veteran pilots lost the test. One at 8 seconds and the most experience at 14 seconds. So being a pilot is no guarantee you will qualify. So Mike lost by just one second, its harsh but it would be fatal in F/A 18 rushing towards ground at hundreds of miles an hour. It took Mike 3 seconds to recover but that threes seconds is the time a fighter pilot does not have, especially if he supersonic. It could mean entering in enemy territory, getting shot by sam for failure to evade, or crashing. None of which is acceptable.
Mike will have another shot at this test.
I was in for my next challenge. The Seat from hell. The Fighter pilot’s ticket to survival. In a F/A 18 it is Martin-Baker Mk.14 NACES (Naval Aircrew Ejection Seat ). These seats are fitted in 200 fixed-wing and rotary types with the most recent being the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II programme.
A pilot is snared in belts and buckles, four straps for the leg another six for the torso, pin a pilot to the seat during violent manoeuvres. They also prevent him from being torn apart if he has to eject. The Ejection seat may be a pilot’s lifeline but it will be most violent and terrifying rescue imaginable. Pilot and seat literally explode out of airplane, when they are clear, another charge blows the seat belts and deploys the parachute. It all happens in just two seconds.
One of my greatest fears was having to parachute in open waters and its is critical to know exactly what to do in first few seconds after hitting the war. So as test I had get free from the harness after been thrown into Olympic pool before I get to pulled to the pool. Then get out from under the canopy before it pulls me under.
It was easy in the pool but imagine it in freezing Atlantic water. At this point everything I do is making life and death decisions automatic.
After learning to survive and passing this phase and before spending time in a real cockpit of F/A 18 I will have to spend hours in simulator. Instructors throwing emergency after emergency, while I struggle to keep up, but eventually these procedures will be seared into my brain.
While others went for Lunch one day I made a beeline for an open cockpit. I was going to save sitting in fighter aircraft for my first flight but there was too much to know. At the top of my list were critical emergencies that require a pilot to react instantly, the so called RED PAGES.
In a machine as complex as F/A 18, failures are inevitable.
Red Pages emergencies are inherently fatal. Things like Engine Fire that will cripple the jet; A fuel leak, Landing gear failure or a cockpit that suddenly fills with smoke, blinding the Pilot. Better to know where the switch is, if a lot has to think before acting in these situations, he will be hole in ground before he remembers the answer because if you are in supersonic fighter the question is not if the trouble will find you but when.
In a life of fighter pilot there are no secrets, even if there is, there is always a witness. Every time a fighter aircraft leaves the ground the mission is tapped.
The Heads up Display or HUD shows the pilot things like Speed, Altitude and G Forces. Everything a pilot sees is recorded and everything he says. Also my ride I discovered I had a companion, a computer one, and soon discovered that fighter pilots call it bitching Betty.
More common are the troubles that a pilot runs into when he pushes the jet too far. The same traits that make fighter jets agile and manoeuvrable also make them extremely twitchy
When they are driven to the limit. Once the plane looses control it will not be safe to control it until it reaches certain speed in situation where the plane does not reach that speed, all a pilot can do is take hands off the controls and wait, it’s ultimate faith and belief in a machine. The instructor talking about his experience when he recovered 2000 ft above ground and 3 seconds from oblivion. His HUD was a case study. This is the stuff we live for. Living life on the edge. Anyone can shoot bullets, but only few can call themfselves fighter pilots.
The first test was pushing all of us Aviators to the limit. Last minute brushing up of details, sleep deprivation, stress. Unlike other exams in this exam the pass mark is 100%. For instructors demanding perfection is not unreasonable, it’s personal.
After having cleared the test and surfing three weeks, it was time for some celebrations No G suites today, instead, I was siting up for our official welcoming party.
Being a fighter pilot isn’t a job, It’s Life
Walking through Air Worthiness check of F/A 18, every Pilot must know by heart. There are 155 checks before one even climbs into cockpit. When you sign on to fly jets it means a life time of sacrifice. Suiting up for F/A 18, is like gearing up for super bowl, it makes everything else you have flown seem like training wheels. And it was about to happen the first flight in Fighter Aircraft, but first I had to prove I have memorised the external safety checks, all 155 of them. Covering Everything from mechanical to animal. Then there are another 194 cockpit checks. As I climbed up the cockpit ladder, I was feeling a soft breeze behind my neck, a feeling of something important about to happen, a feeling one cannot imagine.After 194 checks, I had to 76 more checks before I even started the engine. And starting the engines involves 45 more, I felt I could get old waiting around for this. An Experienced Fighter pilot can knock off the whole work in under 5 minutes. Student Naval Aviators like me usually take three quarters of an hour. I took 38 minutes on my first and It was situation where I could not afford to make a mistake. My instructor in back seat is watching like a hawk. And Upfront the Heads Up Display (HUD) tape is recording every move I make and everything I say.
“ All Set, 222 Taking Off my” first ever Fighter Callsign on a Fighter Aircraft. “Show me your Stuff man” The Air Controller replied to my information.” Pressing the throttle forward, this was the moment I have been waiting all my life. As the afterburners lit the tarmac up.
“Nozzles Good , 100 Knots and takeoff”
“Good Job” The instructor sitting behind me said as the wheels left the tarmac.
“All’s Up regain 220” Right away I was expected to master the basics. “I will try a roll” And I did.. Yeehaa..I could not control my excitement. “I’m gonna do one more.” My instructor just laughed.
Rolls, Climbs, Stall Even though I was getting the most thrilling experience of my life, instructors were looking for discipline and level headed guy which is required in combat and it was just business for us. But at this stage, flying is an easy part, for an inexperienced pilot bringing an F/A 18 back to earth is the most dangerous and difficult part of the flight.
For 44 years F/A 18 has proven its ability in combat theatres around the world. And it is dual engine plane, only experienced pilots gets to touch them and qualified ones get to fly them. It is whole lot different than F-16, but in hands a SNA ( Naval Aviator) on windy day it can also be treacherous. On the HUD on the left was the E bracket which tells the pilot, plane’s angle on landing, how high the nose is, E bracket helps insure a smooth landing.
I landed a little harder than my instructor would have liked but I got it done without drama, and completed it successfully. After very flight there is a debriefing.
This course is marathon and we athletes/ pilots have just begun our race.
There are never enough serviceable jets and never enough time. One of the exercise I did was practise engine restart, the drill is straightforward, shutdown one engine, accelerate to 350 knots and relight it, at that speed air is driving the compressor like a windmill, so when the engine is reignited the turbines are moving fast enough to blow the heated air out of exhaust.
If You fly too slow in this exercise, the hot air blast will be trapped and engine will overheat. Two cadets made a mistake, Mike was flying too slow so he had to do emergency landing with only one engine. The engine was unhinged and taken to sick bay for inspection, luckily for Mark, it did not suffer any damage.
For Tim his missioned was cancelled as he dropped his ball pen into cockpit. That 10 pence plastic could jeopardise the entire flight safety, so the plane was rotunded till the pen was found.
That means somebody else does not get to fly, due to Tim’s mistake. So around here we have rule, one pilot’s mistake is everyone’s lesson.
Time for Solo flight, for pilots, they count their flying hours, for me this was hour one, minute one for a solo flight.
“Alright Nose and Wheel Sten is up. I’m good to go”
“Cleared to Take Off” Came the reply. That was what we had all prepared for Solo Sortie
“EGT, Fuel Flow Nozzle, oil is good, Going to burner, Here we go Lift off” And I was wheels up in the climb “Gear flags up, 220”
“Eat your heart out..this is fucking awesome”..I commented up in air. It was my first solo flight, at 20000 Feet. If anything goes wrong help I long far away.The Mission went smoothly I did all the patterns I had to complete and pulled in a little extra and landed safely. Right before Thunderstorms filled the sky.
Flight Tradition Dictates that the a Pilot goes solo, he earns himself a callsign - a nickname that symbolises his identity. Squadron tradition demands a well stocked bar and well used gun barrel from nose of a jet. Getting a call sign is like Christening there it was “Hammer” and I had no say in it, and it was decided by mob rule by Instructors. Only in movies you get cool callusing like “Maverick” and “Iceman” here In this batch I was lucky.
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