Too Bad to Be True …

Approach, Oct, 2000 by Neil May

The memories from that night are the most vivid and frightening of my career. It was a cold, rainy night, dark as a sack of coal. The sea state was whatever number is bad on board USS John F. Kennedy. It was my first cruise. I was a fledgling LSO who had just relinquished the pickle when a Tomcat showed up, in the chute. He called the ball, and even though I was a novice, I could tell he was way high and lined up left. Calls were coming from the LSO. The aircraft passed the ramp coming down smoothly but with a tremendous left-to-right drift. Every LSO on the platform slowly turned in unison as the Tomcat passed. We watched it land long, past the wires, in the glare of the waveoff lights.

A KA-6 tanker was spotted on the crotch with a plane captain standing in the cockpit, wiping down the windscreen. The plane captain saw the Tomcat coming right for him and jumped to the flight deck as the tanker took the full impact of the Tomcat's right wing. Time stood still, then progressed in super slow motion. Immediately I felt intense heat from a massive fireball and watched the plane captain outrun the leading edge of the inferno inches behind him. (I later learned he had broken both heels from the fall.)

I saw the RIO's seat fire at the end of the angle as the burning plane left the flight deck. The seat rockets propelled him at a sixty degree angle-of-bank, blasting him over parked aircraft and into the blackness off the starboard side. The flaming Tomcat snap-rolled right off the angle and plummeted into the sea. I never saw the same brilliant flames from the pilot's ejection seat, so figured he was a goner. It was the first time I had ever seen someone apparently die.

At that moment, time seemed to take another turn, this time into fast motion. The OOD on the bridge immediately turned the ship to use the relative wind to direct the flames away from the flight deck and marked the plane's crash site by ordering strobe lights into the water. The plane-guard helo began looking for the aircrew and reported that its hoist wasn't working, so the OOD radioed a plane-guard ship into position 500 yards on a relative beating 180 from the strobes. The crash crew attacked the fireball, extinguishing the flames in less than 30 seconds--it was amazing to see them work so efficiently, dousing the huge flames. The 5MC loudly transmitted instructions to the flight deck personnel and the crash alarms were blaring. We got busy preparing to recover the remaining aircraft.

I looked down into the ocean, which should have been pitch black but instead was twinkling with strobe lights. I wondered if we had suffered mass casualties on the bow and if the strobe lights were from people who had been blown overboard from the explosions. I pulled out the spotlight stowed in the platform and scanned the huge swells. After a few cycles, I spotted a man waving at me--it was the RIO. I trained the spotlight on him, but he soon drifted out of range, waving at me as he faded to black. I radioed the helo and they began a hover over the general area.

The radios were alive with commands from the LSOs and tower while CATCC gave the "max conserve" call to the remaining airborne aircraft. Suddenly, the calls were interrupted by a faint voice over Guard, something like, "I'm cold, I'm cold ... I'm OK, but I'm cold!" It was the voice of the Tomcat pilot! I was elated that he had survived, but given the water temperature, we knew he wouldn't last long. The folks on the bridge kept him talking on the radio in hopes of preventing him from giving up or blacking out. We had no idea where he could be in the multitude of strobe lights. The helo hovered over each light to find survivors.

Once the fire was extinguished, the air boss ordered a quick, combat-FOD walkdown while the crash-and-salvage crew cleared the big pieces of debris. Soon we were landing Tomcats, Prowlers and Corsairs that were all low on gas. A remaining Tomcat had been sent to the tanker while the helo continued to look feverishly in the icy waters for the aircrew and others. After several minutes, the Boss reported the RIO had been plucked from the ocean by the plane-guard ship. He had drifted into its cargo nets.

Soon, the helo crew found the pilot. The sea was so rough the SAR swimmer dared not jump in after the pilot, lest he become a victim himself. Instead, he elected to stay attached to the winch cable and try to snatch the pilot. We later learned each time the swimmer was dipped into the sea trying to reach the pilot, he absorbed thousands of volts of static electricity. The amperage was low enough not to be fatal, but the jolts were strong enough to make him convulse and lose control of his bowels. Nevertheless, he pressed on to save the pilot. Finally, after several attempts and the helo well into its red-light fuel, the swimmer connected the pilot and began their ascent. Halfway up, the cable snapped, sending swimmer and pilot into the frigid waters below. The helo pilot, all the while lacking auto-hover trim, skillfully kept the helo overhead while his crew quickly made an emergency splice on the cable. It would be their last chance. The helo pilot radioed that he had less than 10 minutes of fuel remaining, and the frigid waters continued their deadly assault on the pilot.