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Gate Guard

By John

So if you couldn’t be overflown, and you couldn’t develop a plan for alert fighters because you couldn’t rely on having the sea space necessary to turn into the wind to launch ‘em, what you could do was launch a gate guard of CAP before entering territorial waters and then tank the hell out of ‘em until the ship entered the harbor.

That two ship was us.

At first we were kind of excited, my wingman and I, entrusted as we were with protecting a $5 billion national treasure and the 5,000-odd souls embarked upon her from the Soviet Menace. But while a twenty mile cap leg takes not quite three minutes to run in a fighter moving at 420 knots ground speed, it takes a great deal longer for an 80,000 aircraft carrier picking its ginger way past the shoal waters approaching the outer roads to the harbor. Time has a way of dragging on CAP, especially when the Red Horde chose that particular day to take a sabbatical from harassment.

The ship gave us an S-3 tanker to help us while away the hours and replenish the fuel tanks while he was at it. Those of you who have been lucky enough to fly the War Hoover have no doubt a fuller comprehension of its “performance” envelope, but it was an unwelcome surprise to your correspondent to discover - after a tactical, comm-out trail, rendezvous - that the damn thing flies at a mere 150 knots or so when they are holding at max endurance airspeed.

Now the Hornet flies that fast in the landing configuration with the flaps down full and the rollers in the breeze, so when we snuck up on ‘em unawares, we also ended up by racing right past ‘em, claws scrabbling disgracefully like a pair of great danes trying to stop for supper on waxed linoleum floor. Oh, we had the throttles on the idle stops, speedbrakes out, maneuvering flaps deployed and we were just that close to opening the canopies too since leading a two-ship formation of strike fighters into an under-run - in the plain view of an S-3 crew, the great, gabbling gossips that they were, just plain looks bad.

And - as long time readers know - it is better to die than look bad.

You really should read the whole thing. There's a lot more. There's always alot more. Fighter pilots, y'know?

PS- it feels kind of dirty to categorize this under "sea stories," when it really isn't an OPFOR sea story. But Lex's handle, "Tales of Sea Service," is just so darn obtuse. Oh well.

May 31, 2007 06:00 AM Sea Stories