Aircraft Carrier Landing from a Topgun Fighter Pilot

My first deployment in the F-14, coming in at night to land on the ship, I would turn off the HUD because the stuff just kind of got in the way and it wasn't really useful and the Hornet guys were just like, what? So by my second deployment, we got a new HUD in the Tomcat and it had all the things that you're used to, altitude, airspeed, you know, velocity vector, all these things. And then, you know, the ILS, all that stuff was in the HUD. And so instead of, you know, when I first was flying our ship-borne ILS or the Automatic Carrier Landing System that you kind of look down, you had to look down between your knees at this little display, fly the ILS down there and then at three quarters a mile at night, you would look up, see this little teeny, you know, postage stamp in the dark bobbing out there and try and land on it. And it was pretty sporty, especially even just, you know, when you think about your eyes trying to transition from look, focusing on something short and then looking out long, whereas the HUD's focused at infinity. So my second deployment, we had heads up display that was amazing, you know, and then, yeah, and everybody asked me, you know, when did you become a HUD cripple? I'm like, the second I rotated with a good HUD the first time, you know, so that's when I became a HUD cripple. Yeah. And it was, it was awesome. And in my first deployment, we didn't, we had night vision goggles, but it was kind of a new thing. And so there was a very robust program to get trained up on doing it. And as I mentioned before, I right out of the training squadron, I joined this squadron and went on deployment. So I didn't have time to get all that training. So, you know, we're doing Operation Southern Watch sorties over Iraq and, you know, we're doing this big air wing thing with 15, 16 airplanes. And I'm the only knucklehead, not on goggles, you know, flying in that. And now I look back on that now, I'm like, fortunately, I didn't know what I didn't know. So, but now I'm like, holy cow, I should have just been scared to death, which I was anyway, but I couldn't see anything to be scared, I guess, was the whole point. So kind of, kind of interesting, but yeah, Tomcat was a completely different machine from the time when I started to when I finished, we, you know, couldn't drop JDAM. The 14D finally got JDAM towards the end. So, you know, increase the weapon suite and then, and then the capability was pretty amazing. Landing on the boat with no HUD, I'm assuming for maybe AOA, so angle of attack, and you're flying that down, but I'm thinking, you know, F-16, no HUD, you still fly AOA for the F-16, but if you have no HUD, I still consider that an emergency, even though it's aimpoint airspeed, but the AOA tapes down between your legs. So the cross check there is a, it is not a very ergonomic cross check, which it kind of sounds like that in the B model of the Tomcat. Well, yeah, we didn't have a HUD, but for the AOA check, at least the Navy, because we'd been landing on ships forever. And unlike, you know, the Air Force where you flare to land, our, our landing is actually a controlled crash. I mean, we fly at 750 feet per minute into the flight deck. So basically you have to take the hook that's on the airplane and put it and try and target the three wire. So you're, you're flying AOA and airspeed and glide slope so that you can plant the hook right in between the two and the three wire and, and do that and, and trap. And so, I mean, I'm going to use my hands here. You probably see it. Fighter guys always talk with their hands, right? So if this is me flying in the cockpit and then this is the hook down here, the reason we fly AOA is because if you change the AOA, we call it getting slow. So if you change the AOA, you can see the hook points moving, right? So you're that, and then if you're fast, the hook points coming up. So even if you're on the correct glide slope, if you're not on the correct AOA and you're trying to put that hook point right in a specific pot spot on the flight deck to catch the wires, if you're fast, the hook's going to go over those wires and if you're slow, it's dropping down. So you may hit the back of the ship or you may catch an early wire. So that's why AOA is critical for us. So even the days before the HUD, you know, I talked to my dad about flying A6s to the boat. Basically, you would fly visually. So you're trying to, and our, the way we would say our scan is meatball, lineup, angle, attack. So what the meatball is, is that's the Fresnel landing system that's on the side of the ship. And even with all this instrumentation, it's still there. So you basically have a row of green lights, that's kind of the horizon. And then you have these yellow lights that are angled at different angles. And so as you're flying in, if you're on the correct glide slope, what we call the ball, the yellow light that you're seeing, it lines up with those green lights. That means that you're on the correct glide slope. So if you're high, the yellow light there will be canted up and you'll see the ball basically above the datums is what we call them. And then if you're low, it's below. And if you're really low, it's a red one. So that's the meatball. The next thing you have to fly is lineup. And so you're basically trying to line up on the center line of the carrier. What most people don't think about is they think, oh, you know, you just follow the wake in. Well, that's not correct because the flight deck is angled 10 degrees off the center line. And we did that after World War II with the jets and everything, because as you land the airplane, then they'll taxi you over to the front out of the landing area. In the old days of World War II, straight deck carrier, if you miss the wires, you plow into the airplanes on the front of the ship that have already landed in there in front of you. So it's angled off 10 degrees. So if you're looking at the carrier and this is, you know, my fingers are the carrier flowing and then your thumb, my thumb is kind of the flight deck, it's moving away. So you have a built in basically for the aviators out there, think of it as a built in cross wind already, right? So you've got to put in a little crab to guide it, get in there and land on the center line of the ship as it's moving away. And also don't forget that we're out in the middle of the ocean. So the ship's bobbing up and down. So you got that going on as well. And then there's limited flight deck on the aircraft carrier room. So the airplanes are, we call it the foul line, parked right on the edge of the, of the landing area. So if you don't land right on center line, especially at Tomcat, we had a 60 foot wingspan, your wingtips could easily hit some of those other airplanes that are going on there. So your, your scan is meatball lineup, and then it's angle of attack as we were talking about. And so kind of a unique thing that the Navy came up with is right on the side of the HUD. And it used to be just a glare shield because they didn't have HUDs, but even still on the, on the Super Hornet, you have it, we call them the indexers. And so you don't have to really look at it. There's basically three lights there. So the top one is a green Chevron that kind of points down. And if it's green, that means you're slow. So you kind of put, push your, push your nose down. In the middle is a yellow donut. And so if you see the yellow donut, that means you're on speed. And then if you see red, that means your Chevron means you're a little faster angle of attack is too low. So you're going to get, need to get your nose up a little bit as you do that. So your scan is meatball lineup, angle of attack, but you can really see that kind of angle of attack out of your periphery. So if you just see that little yellow glow kind of in your peripheral vision, you're scanning the other two things. And then if that color changes, you'll see it change as you're coming in. I guess the Air Force did steal that at least for the Viper and then the T6A, the joint one being able to use it. But the tape where it gets refined down there, you got to look between. In the Super Hornet too, you can pull it up on your, one of your displays, you can pull up the actual angle of attack, but obviously during flying, we're not, when we're flying to the ship, you're looking out the window, you know, doing those things. I was thinking too, I mean, the canted deck, to me, I would think that would create a visual illusion that you would constantly be fighting. Just like being on the tanker in the weather, thinking you're in a bank. Like to me, I mean, I would feel like I would have some battle. Yeah, so you're basically kind of just building in a, you know, it's not like the old wing down, top rudder slide in there. It's just kind of, you offset the heading basically is what you're trying to do. So you're just kind of crabbing in there as you're coming in. And then, you know, when you get to the Super Hornet with the HUD and you've got a very accurate velocity vector because the mission computers and all that stuff are really accurate, you know, and especially for the younger kids now flying all the video games and that kind of thing, you learn that we call it putting the velocity vector in the crotch. So basically in between where the ship is and the angle is, we call that the crotch where the angle is, where the bow goes out. So if you're kind of flying in visually, you know, one of the, you know, the tricks was if you put the velocity vector kind of right in that crotch, it kind of gave you that perfect little crab and you could just tweak it right at the end. But generally that's, that's kind of how we do it. And then now there's a system called Magic Carpet where the airplane couples up to the ship and it just, the computers fly it in, which is, which is pretty awesome. You still have to know how to do it manually, but you know, hey, it would have been really nice after some of those eight, 10 hour combat missions to not come back at night and have to fly to the boat.