Tag: blue angels

I read this morning that the Navy retired its last C-2 Greyhound. It took me straight back to a deck fifty miles off San Diego, thirty-two years ago, and a young woman I never knew and watched anyway.

The deck comes up fast at sea. That’s the first thing nobody tells you about a carrier — that an airfield can ambush you, can rear up out of the ocean looking smaller than a parking lot, gray and pitching, while the C-2 you’re strapped into backward drops its gear and aims for four wires stretched across forty thousand tons of steel. You hit the third wire if you’re good. You hit anything if you’re lucky. Either way your body keeps moving roughly sixty miles an hour after the airplane has stopped, and the harness across your chest reminds you of that fact with some violence, and somewhere behind you a sailor a quarter your age in a yellow shirt is already waving the next plane in, because the ocean does not wait for you to catch your breath.

This was July of 1994, the USS Constellation rolling gently under a sky that hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be. There were four of us. We’d flown out of North Field that morning the way you’d catch a bus, except the bus had a tailhook, and we spent the day being shown around eighty acres of moving city — the flight deck, the hangar bay, the nuclear reactor spaces, the wardroom where men twenty years younger than us ate dinner with the particular speed of people who might be back at work in an hour.

One of the men with us had commanded that ship once, in 1966, when most of his year was spent on Yankee Station, running air strikes into a war the country back home had already begun arguing about. We were guests. We were, by the time the sun went down, members of something called the Tailhook Club, which is the kind of honor that means everything to you and nothing to anyone you’ll explain it to later.

That night we went up to the flight deck for the carrier qualifications, and somebody put us right next to the meatball — the lens of amber light a pilot chases down the glide path in the dark, the only thing standing between a good landing and a very bad one.

Four instructor teams worked the deck around us, grading each approach, calling out deviations nobody but a trained eye could see. Every airplane that came aboard came in close enough to feel — gear down, hook down, throttle slammed to full the instant the wheels touched, because if you miss the wire at night on a moving ship, you don’t get to think about it, you just fly.

One of the pilots qualifying that night was a Lieutenant named Kara Hultgreen, twenty-nine years old, finishing third in a class of seven — solid, unspectacular by the numbers, which is exactly the kind of detail that becomes unbearable in hindsight. She would go on to become the first woman to serve as a carrier-based fighter pilot in the United States Navy. Fifteen months later, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1995, attempting to land an F-14 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, she would die, the first female fighter pilot in American military history to be killed flying. We didn’t know her. We knew her the way you know anyone on a flight deck at night — as a set of running lights and a sound, judged the same as everyone else by the men standing next to us with clipboards.

The next morning we were up before the sun because the ship had a refueling to do, the carrier and an oiler closing on each other from miles out, two enormous vessels pointed straight at one another like they meant it, until at the last possible moment both turned in tandem and the oiler slid in alongside, parallel, close enough that the lines shot across between them looked almost casual. We watched it from the bridge with the executive officer. Afterward the captain — a man who’d led the Blue Angels before he’d ever commanded the Constellation, and who still had the jacket with the right patches to prove it — called up the two sailors who’d run the operation and thanked them in front of everyone, the way a good leader does when he wants the rest of the crew to notice who deserves it.

Then we stayed on the bridge to watch the air wing leave. Eight F-18s — six Navy, two Marine Corps. The Navy pilots flew it the way you’re supposed to: catapult stroke, climb out, gone. The Marines went last, and the moment their wheels cleared the deck they hauled the airplanes into a vertical climb, straight up, like the sky owed them something and they intended to collect. The executive officer laughed beside us. “There go your tax dollars for this year,” he said, and none of us argued.

Then it was our turn. Strapped into the C-2 again, facing backward, braced against a catapult stroke that takes you from zero to flying speed in about two seconds. And then you stop in mid-air or so it feels. Disneyland never built anything like it.

I think about the wire sometimes — the one you catch, the one that stops you. Hultgreen caught it that week, while I stood close enough to hear the engines roar past us in the dark, indistinguishable from the five other sets of lights that came down before her. You don’t know, standing there, which ones you’re watching for the last time. I didn’t, that night. The airplane that carried us home is gone now too, and somehow it’s the airplane’s retirement, not anything grander, that brought all of it back.

---

Just came across this YouTube video of the final arrested carrier landing of the C-2 Greyhound. End of an era – with good personal memories!