Ballistic, In A Cloud! - military air pilot finds himself flying in bad weather - Brief Article

Approach, Dec, 2000 by Tony Ludovici

The war hadn't begun yet. Our mission during a CV ops exercise off the coast of Puerto Rico was a night, peacetime escort on goggles. The weather wasn't cooperating. The Caribbean sky was littered with cumulus buildups and embedded thunderstorms.

Our section of F-14s took a vector, escorted our orange-air brethren away from Mother, and was ordered to drop our contact and return to CAP. From combat-spread formation, we started an in-place turn, and shortly thereafter, our flight lead disappeared. We had entered a cloud, in accordance with our SOP for NVGs, we immediately came off the goggles and began an easy climb in order to deconflict altitudes. Then the fun began.

Immediately after stowing our goggles, a blinding bright light flashed in front of my windscreen. Al almost the same time, I heard static in my headset and felt a shock on my lips from my oxygen mask. The nose of our aircraft had been struck by lightning. Temporarily blinded by the white light, I instinctively pulled back slightly on the slick and tried to regain my wits.

When my vision cleared several seconds later and I could discern my instruments, I discovered that we were now 80 degrees nose up, at 26,000 feel, with airspeed rapidly approaching zero--we had gone ballistic and were no longer flying. Oh, yeah, we were still in a thick thundercloud with periodic flashes of lightning surrounding us.

My RIO began calmly reciting the first slops of F-14 departure procedures over the ICS. Since we were zero airspeed, all I could do was release the controls, lock my harness, and reduce the throttles to idle. We were along for the ride at this point.

The aircraft rolled off to the left prior to slicing nose low to 90 degrees down. Once the airspeed began to build over 100 knots, I rolled to the nearest horizon and executed a 17-trait AOA pull, in accordance with recovery procedures. We leveled off by 19,000 feet, called out our altitude to our lead lot collision avoidance, and regained VMC shortly thereafter.

My RIO and I agreed we'd seen enough for the night and took an early steer tot marshal, this being the first night either of us could recall actually looking forward to the night trap.

Following our uneventful landing, maintenance found negligible damage to the aircraft. Over midrats, we agreed on two things. First, avoiding IMC would have precluded these events. Second, strict adherence to procedures, training unusual attitudes and OOCF, and effective crew coordination minimized the time it took for us to recover and helped prevent a mishap.

LCdr. Ludovici is VF-11's ASO.