This is going to be a long one my friends. Get your drinks, go use the facilities and then buckle up.

Now several things in this story are going to require multi-paragragh explainations before we get to the main jist. The first being:

Why I Hated F-8 Crusaders

Now the F-8 was a fine bird in its day. But at the time I was in, it was at the end of its operational career. Relegated to photo recon work. My first cruise was it's last.

My main problem with the F-8 isn't obvious to people who don't work on flight decks. That was the aircraft's "stance" as it sat on the runway/flightdeck. The similarly designed A-7 had some of the same issues with me, but to a lesser extent as its engine wasn't as powerful. The problem with the stance was that the aircraft sat nose up/exhaust low compared to other aircraft who sit so their intakes and exhausts fairly horizontal to the deck.

This meant that the exhaust blowing on you from one would hit you at the knees and not the chest and shoulders like the exhaust from other aircraft. This is a substantial blast of wind, some 80 to 100+ miles an hour and several hundred degrees F. We flightdeck denizens called the F-8s "Weinie Roasters" from the fact that going commando on the flightdeck, while nessesary in the tropics to keep important anatomical features from rotting off, had unseen consequences not obvious to the casual observer. Like hot jet exhaust heating your zipper, or even worse, just blowing through your zipper like wind through a screen door. Almost all other aircraft's exhausts hit you higher up the body and left your privates out of it. You only have to get your who-haws scorched a dozen or so times before you REALLY start to dislike the thing that is doing it..

The OTHER bad thing about the low exhaust plume was the much greater likelyhood of your feet getting swept out from under you. That's always bad on a flightdeck as you now are basically ballistic and can end up in an intake and having all your insides sucked out your various openings, or going over the side, which is an eight story fall into the ocean. That's a "scare" I mentioned in the Airforce thread.

In a given day at sea you will have 5 to 7 launch and recovery cycles and if you worked Tomcats, which are always parked on the back of the flightdeck for weight reasons, you will get blown-on hard at least three or four times in any one launch cycle. Not nessesarly blown down, but sometimes you have to grab a hold of a tie-down chain or a pad eye. And if its real bad, like when a pilot messes up and misreads a cue and has to stop halfway through a turn you try to get into a wheelwell, which has its own perils. Hence my amazement at the Airforce's attitude to people getting blown down.

What's lost in the videos is the heat and the smell, plus the "at an ACDC concert" level of visceral vibration. A-6 Intruders are so goddam loud they are painful even with two levels of hearing protection, earplugs plus the mouse ears built into the helmit, which are good by themselves in most cases. Especially if one is "loitering" overhead using deflected thrust. They don't stop like vstol aircraft, just go real slow. If they pass close overhead ~500 to 1000 feet up doing that, the vibration is painful clear through to your shoulders and makes you want to scream bad words at them.

And as a teen I used to think diesel bus exhaust was evil and horrid smelling. What it wasn't was oven hot and blasting you in the face at high speed. AND you had to troubleshoot computer equipment while this crap was blowing on you. Troubleshoot it correctly, I might add. Computers that spend all day flying around doing high gee turns and then crash landing on deck at 120 knots every landing. If you couldn't perform they didn't want you on the flightdeck troubleshooting. You can't waffle it along.

Now dispite the chaos of a flightdeck in operations, most everybody has a job as it's not a place to loiter. Some suckier than others, by a huge margin. I had a cushy job relative to everybody else. One of the most daring jobs was "Final Checker". The Final Checker is the last man in the chain of people who makes sure all the pins are pulled and the flags removed. All the doors shut and panels secured. This is while the aircraft is crouched on the catapult, engines at full, blasting in the Jet Blast Deflector, or JBD for short. That's a broad section of flightdeck that raises behind the catapult to deflect the exhaust upwards. It's still real nasty being behind them. He's the guy you see running like hell with his thumb in the air moments before they launch. And even they felt sorry for:

And The Award For The Worst Job On The Flightdeck Goes To...

The men who attached the rear connections of the "bridle" to the F-8 prior to it being launched. A bridle in this case is a special harness designed to spread the stresses of launch across more of the airframe and provided more attachment points for the catapult besides just the nosewheel. The aircraft's backside is too long to clear the flightdeck otherwise. Analogous to when a model glider hobbiest uses two hands, front and back, to launch his aircraft over a cliff.

Allow me to discribe what this involves.

You are at the catapults. All hot and loud and noisy and bad smelling. The aircraft you are responsible for is taxiing up to launch, so you take a great big tow hook looking thing in each hand attached to an elaborate gizmo of straps and harnesses. Now, while trying to not get too close to the front intake at the nose, which will suck you in and kill you, you have to lay down on your back and let the aircraft taxi over you. You are flat on your back on a hot flightdeck with a big hook in each hand, arms outstretched and the bottom of the aircraft inchs away from your nose. You then elbow back far enough to attach said hooks in there proper spots.

This is a big thundering aircraft engine covering you while you are very vulnerable and oh so mortal. Often with a second aircraft beside you on the other catapult doing its own launch sequence. (There are four catapults on the flightdeck. Two in the front, called the "bow cats" and two in the middle, called the "waist cats")

There is potential here for mishap.

Allow me to relate how this could go badly.

The day started normally enough as such days go. I was discussing a troubleshooting issue with some of my petty officers, [Translation: two E-5s were telling my E-3 butt to get below to the hanger bay and rob two components, one weighing 30 pounds and the other 45 pounds from the hanger queen and run them back up to the flightdeck, NOW!]

When I heard the Funny Noise.

When you work the flightdeck you get sensitive to the normal vibration of things, loud as they are. Sort of like "meta-hearing". When there is discord in the thrum of the flightdeck, trouble soon follows. As did here. For clarity this will include information I didn't have at the time. Not so much an eyewitness account as it is a narration.

The bridle rigger's bad day actually started the night before. His fellow squadron mates had done repairs to the throttle mechanism of the aircraft the previous night and in thier haste to close up and go back to the shop they neglected to account for a simple allen wrench. This is such a basic failure as to be near unforgivable. Your tool box is inventoried four times minimum each job. When you accept the tool box to do the job, when you arrive at the aircraft, when you leave the aircraft and when you get back to the shop. Yet this still happens.

This time the pilot taxied up to the catapult shuttle but stopped about a foot and a half short. The bridle man, dutifully laying down under this beast, indicated he couldn't reach the hook ups. The pilot was signaled to taxi forward a smidgeon, which he did, and that's when things went south.

The errant allen wrench fell into the inner workings of the throttle and jammed it open. As the pilot tried to fiddle with it the throttle opened wider and wider until he was locked in at full afterburner. Since he was lined up properly, just short a bit, he made contact with the shuttle and the nose wheel locked in place. The aircraft also rocked hard forward and back, and "squatted" on the bridle man, breaking his collarbone and several ribs.

More importantly for the bridle man, the aircraft also pushed forward several more feet. He was now in the full downward blasting exhaust. Wiki says this is the exhaust of an engine that puts out 18,000 pounds of thrust or 80.1 kilonewtons, whatever the heck that means. Not something that you should put your face into from inchs away. Though you never stay there for very long.

I've seen other people do near the same thing with other aircraft and noone is ever happy afterwards. It's a lot like getting hit by a car when you walk right behind a jet engine you thought wasn't running. You do that two, maybe three times and you get tired of it real fast. You learn to look for wavey lines in the air. I stopped several newbies and J.O.'s from doing that. Even if you didn't like someone you don't want that to happen to them.

What I Saw

I was troubleshooting like I discribed earlier when I heard the Funny Noise. I was at an aircraft parked on the back of the flightdeck, I was facing port, which would put forward to my right. If you looked down on the scene from above I was at the second aircraft parked from the left.

This vantage let me look straight up the flightdeck and between both JBD's and I could see the F-8 in full afterburner twisting its landing gear in the shuttle and turning sideways on the catapult so that its exhaust was now playing over the inboard catapult and one of my Tomcats, causing its port engine to flame out. This had my full attention as I am directly downwind and down range of anything going boom.

That's when I noticed the Incredible Flying Man.

I had actually seen him moments earlier, but then my mind interperted the image as a wisp of smoke. When the "wisp of smoke" slowed at the apex of his flight a saw it to be a man. I was aghast at how high he was, without a net and nothing but an unforgiving steel flightdeck to land on. He cleared the verticle stabilzers of the adjacent Tomcat by at least half again. But as he came down, he came down in the exhaust plume of the Crusader, now being baffled by the Tomcat so that his vertical descent was translated horizontally before he piledrived into the steel deck, thereby avoiding further injury.

He slid to a stop on his back and did the fastest scuttle crab walk I've ever seen. He came to rest feet to the forward, on his back and just lifted up and scuttled sideways off the flight deck. To the starboard. He didn't seem to notice the broken bones. The E-2 Hawkeye people were the first to get to him.

This was his last day on the flightdeck. He never wanted to come back up to the roof after that. The August Body of Peers had no problem with this.

Other aspects of this near tragedy I didn't learn til later that evening. One of my friends is a Final Checker who was getting into his locker when I noticed the "Close Encounters" tan AKA the nuclear suntan you get from getting singed on one side. He was standing on the starboard side of the aircraft that was next to the malfunctioning F-8. Out of reflex he grabbed the nose wheel door and the plume swept his feet up so he was flapping in the breeze. When he looked between his feet all he could see was the still running starboard engine.

If he let go he would be injested. But where he was at was just too hot, so he couldn't hold on. He told me that he started to cry when he realized he couldn't hold on anymore. Just as he let go the F-8 pilot cut the fuel to the engine and killed it that way. The Final Checker just dropped flat to the deck. This was also a "cartoon" ending to a near tragedy. Sometimes the Foolkiller is just looking the wrong way when opportunity comes.

There was trouble in the F-8 community that night. People got in trouble. Ranks were adjusted to better reflect the needs of the Navy.

The End.

The other stories will come later. My arms are sore from shoveling gravel Saturday.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Wow, that really could have been disasterous. Talk about throwing a wrench into the plan. Good thing the pilot killed the gas to the engines. Whatever happened to the final checker other than getting burned I suppose? If it's part of the second part then I'll wait for it there. Thanks for sharing, it looked lengthy at first sight but it read fast, was a good story.

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Wow!!!
When you said this is going to be long I thought "goodie more juice for me".
The odd errant wrench has ruined many careers in many airforces.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

It feels inappropriate of me to reward a story like that with so few words, but "wicked neat story, Don". I was right. That was worth waiting for.

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When does the movie come out?

Well since I'm up early (4:30 AM local) and have a cup of coffee in front of me I'll continue.

Endeavor, I'm kind of confused as to where you are confused. If you can restate your question, I'll be more than happy to answer it.

The next two tales involves what happens to people "not cut out" for front line squadron duty, but end up there anyway. Here's the first one at least.

This first guy was a plane captain in the A-7 Squadron. I can't remember their squadron number but they were the "Blue Diamonds" (VA-147 ?). He had a problem with not knowing all the rules before trying to apply the exceptions. Like sleeping on duty at the wrong times, so people had to go looking for him. Even after repeated attemps at enlightenment. He also had a hard time adjusting to the level of energy output needed for his assigned tasks. That's the nice way of saying he wasn't used to being worked like a dog. At a job you can't quit.

If you get all huffy and do a sit down strike the Marines will come and get you. That's much worse than the goblins coming to get you. Goblins don't hit you on the forehead with four and a half foot long quarterstaff when you blow them crap. They just sort of pinch you in your sleep and curdle your milk. That story and other Tales of The Marine Corps As Observed By Me will be after the next story. Back to this one.

The misfit here was slacking the load and causing others to do his work for him and then his squadron mates missed his presence during a high energy output evolution. So they went looking for him. Hey, you never know, he might have gone overboard.

They found him in the hanger bay, sleeping in the intake of one of thier aircraft.

Now sleeping in an intake isn't as counter-intuitive as it seems at first glance. The intakes of A-7's and yes, Tomcats, are quite comfortable due to the ergonomic shapes formed by the inner part swelling wide and forming a swale. Raises your head and feet just right, especially when you are exhausted. You just didn't want to do it during the day, when all those annoying officers were up and awake. Now before any sort of engine turn there are all manner of inspections, looking for misplaced tools and stray debris that may damage an engine. They are quit unlikely to miss something the size of a person.

But the misfit didn't know that.

So the A-7 guys got together with hangarbay crew and did this:

Since the aircraft was already parked for a maintence turn in the hangerbay, the exhaust pointing out the hangarbay door, the A-7 guys quietly fastened the FOD screen which is a heavy duty safety cage that uses those heavy pins to hold it in place during low rpm engine runs. The screens were all painted red and had a heavy duty steel mesh over heavier bars. The square holes have an opening of 3/8ths of an inch.

Then they drove up the huffer.

This is the piece of yellow gear that blows hot air into the turbines of jet engines and starts them. Though there are multiple settings you can put it to, depending on what you want to do with the engine in question. In this case they had the exhaust from the huffer blowing cold and shunted so that the turbines were just spinning harmlessly with no actual burn initiated. But it sure as hell didn't look like that to the guy sleeping in the intake.

From his point of view he wakes up to the clanging of the huffer nozzle hooking up to the engine port. He looks up and sees the FOD screen already in place, and its already too loud to be heard screaming. It's completely smooth and white like seamless tile in the intake with nothing to hang onto and a set of naked turbine blades are beginning to spin awake like a bad sci-fi movie, only for real and the engine seems to be whining to live around you. In reality, this is a very bad way to die. Not that there is a wide selection of good ways to die. In your sleep and while making love, that's all I've got. As opposed to all the bad ways of dying.

It was said they wound up the engine good and scary like and that the misfit lost several fingernails clawing for his life at the FOD screen. That they could see all ten of his finger tips pressed through it as he firmly believed he was going to be drawn to a grisly death. That would probably violate some law in the civilian world, like assault or something.

Told you it was going to be kind of mean what they did.

__________________
"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

I understood everything, I was just wondering what happened to the guy who almost got sucked into the engine, was he okay. I haven't read part 2 yet so let me see if its in there.

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Haha...that was mean what they did to him, but a good prank. I bet he never fell asleep in there again. Big Don, I think you may have a good career in writing ahead of you. Keep them coming if you have anymore stories. Thanks again 4 sharing.

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VA-146.
Here's a piccy of an A-7E from the front so the intake can be seen.

They now fly F/A-18C's and are called VFA146.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

Great stories, BigDon!

Have you ever considered becoming a writer? With your experience and the way you paint things you really bring things home to people. Perhaps you might consider calling it, Tales of the Navy, or Carrier Ops, or something. Flight Deck.

Who knows?

I'd buy it.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

"Staying young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." - Heinlein

"Freedom begins when you tell Ms. Grundy to go fly a kite." - Heinlein

Oh man, that _was_ mean. Funny though, once one dries out their skivvies.

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
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for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
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Now here's what happened to somebody who complained too stridently against his duly peer assigned callsign. This ain't pretty either.

and it names names.

In the same month as the maiden flight of the Columbia we get assigned one Petty Officer (E-4) Shettles. Now sadly for him they dropped him on us at an at-sea period. Tensions and stresses are always higher at sea due to the work load and the long hours. It can be very intimidating to newbies and some withdraw for a bit until they get their feet under them. In Shettles case he would zone a bit and stare into the distance unless directly addressed or assigned a task.

We labeled him "Space" Shettles.

This was a perfectly valid callsign assignment and he not only complained about it, he went "through channels" starting with our chief, Chief Baker. A Chief is an E-7 for you Army and Airforce types.

Chief Baker very much advised him to not persue the complaint and tried to discribe how it would probably go down, but Petty Officer Shettles wouldn't listen to good advice. And Chief Baker had to move the complaint up to the division officer. After that we were officially not permited to call him "Space" Shettles anymore.

You're just waiting for what happens next, aren't you?

Enter the Moose

One of the big personalities in my shop was AQ1 Gary "Moose" Owens. Petty Officer Owens was an E-6 and a brilliant technician and flightdeck trouble shooter. He also was the very clone of Jack Nickelson, only 6 foot 7. From the same part of the world, so he talked like him too.

He very much suffered fools poorly and didn't mind expressing displeasure at stupid mistakes physically. Fer instance:

One time several of my shop mates and myself were coming down off the flightdeck (The "roof") all covered with equipment and having those racoon eyes made from wearing goggles in a sooty enviroment when, as we enter the first of two spaces that comprised our shop space, we heard another Funny Noise coming from the inner room. This Funny Noise was different than the last Funny Noise mentioned above.

This Funny Noise sounded like you would imagine a weiner dog in a cement mixer to sound like. As we had neither weiner dogs nor cement mixers in our shop our collective curiosities were peaked. (Gillian, is that the right one?)

As we came in the door, immediately to my right I see Petty Officer Owens (E-6) with the foot of Petty Officer "Jones" (E-4) who was going to AIMD, intermediate maintanence, because he was knowledgable, but not cut out for flightdeck duty or working on airplanes directly.

Owens was spinning Jones' foot in a rapid clockwise fashion while Jones' body was stuck in the foot well of one of those Navy sheet metal desks. In order to prevent the dislocation of his hip Jones was forced to spin at the end of his own leg like a wad of cotton candie on the end of those paper cones.

And what, you may ask, had Petty Officer Jones done to diserve such rude and unseemly treatment?

In the process of replacing a bad 155 pin connector Petty Officer Jones cut off the cannon plug of a vital weapons control system wiring harness before he marked the identity of all the wiring. Yup. Just snipped it off like you would a rosehip. Now all 155 wires had to be ohmed out and the tech pubs scoured to find every single reading each wire should give you. All 155 of them.

Command had plans for that airplane that didn't include it being hard down for days on end because of a stupid error from one of *your* guys. They get really upset and want it fixed NOW! Your shop works on it 24/7 until its fixed and it can still take days.

So Owens, I distinctly recall, put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs and smiled that big ol' smile that said someones getting hurt, and said, "Well, since he couldn't lift the toolbox all the way up to the wing last night, and it was (the light 25 pound one not the normal 35 pounder) we just have to call him "Sister".

The division officer's take on it was he already dealt with this issue once, he didn't have time for it anymore. (He warned him too)

He was Sister Shettles from then on. "Sis" for short. His time in service was a little more bitter than mine.

__________________
"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Collective curiosity, or individual curiosities. Pick one.

Good story. And yeah, I'd heard from several other sources that resisting one's call-sign ("space" wasn't that bad outside of the trite pun) never ends well. One's shipmates will go many miles out of their way to see to it.

__________________

New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

“piqued” is the one you where looking for. From the French word “pique” meaning “prick,” in the sense of “stimulate.”

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

Good point, Henrik. I'm kind of surprised I didn't spot that one.

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

Story#1 ratcheted the respect I have for my immediate supervisor at the office up a few notches (which says a bit, because I do respect the guy). He was an ordnance handler on a carrier till he had some unrelated health problems get him dumped on shore and out of servitude to Uncle Sugar.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.