I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (13 page)

Of course I imagined that I’d be landing in one of those F-14s, but no. They loaded me onto a
propeller-driven cargo plane – they call it a Cod but it looks more like a toaster – and flew me out into the middle of the Atlantic to rendezvous with the mighty Nimitz Class carrier.

From the air it doesn’t look mighty at all. In that vast grey ocean under a featureless grey sky it looks like a playing card. I know runways. I spend my life tearing up and down them in fast cars. So I know how long they have to be, and the one on top of the
Eisenhower
wasn’t long enough. Not by a long way.

Here’s what I knew was going to happen. We’d land, fail to stop, fall off the front and then the huge ship would run over the plane, turning it over and over until it, me and everyone else on board was minced by one of the three nuclear-powered, five-bladed propellers, each of which is 21 feet in diameter.

The closest I’d come to dying until this point was in a thunderstorm over Cuba. The Russian plane, which had been made in the fifties and used by the Angolan Air Force until it arrived in Cuba, was barely capable of flight in good conditions. But in a tropical storm it was quite literally upside down. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, at least the kids can say that Dad went west in a Soviet
fighter in the Caribbean.’ It’d look good in the obituaries as well.

The impending landing on the
Eisenhower
was stirring up those memories. ‘Yup, Dad died when he was liquidised by an aircraft carrier.’ It had a ring.

As we descended the ship grew larger and larger in the plane’s window, but it was still nowhere near large enough when we touched down, hooked up the arrester wire and went from 120 to zero mph in 0.0000000008 of a second.

Interestingly, my spleen, heart, lungs and liver continued to do 120 until they slammed into my ribcage whereupon they bounced back into place. Happily, you don’t feel this because you’re busy feeling around under the seat in front for both your eyeballs.

Moments later I was unbuckled and led onto the flight deck, where the jets did their best to blast me over the side and into the oggin. They say that working on the flight deck of a carrier is the most dangerous job in the world. I don’t know about that but I can testify that it’s certainly the noisiest.

And one of the least well organised. You’d imagine in a modern carrier that all of the flight
operations would be computerised but, in fact, each of the planes is represented in air traffic control by a lump of wood which is pushed around a board by a man with no high-school qualifications. And this was the most high-tech thing I was to see for two days.

I was shown to my quarters, which were more like sixteenths. There was a bed that was one foot shorter than me and steel walls, a steel ceiling and a steel floor. There was no window, but then there is no window in any room on a carrier. You go on board and for months you have no idea whether it’s day or night.

Certainly, the flight operations give no clue. I got no sleep at all on the first night, partly because it turned out my bed was steel too and partly because I seemed to have been given a room right underneath the steam catapult, which went off every twenty minutes or so.

And in between each firing an American came over the ship’s PA system to announce at the top of his substantial, sergeant-major voice something important like: ‘The donut-vending machine on Deck B is now fully functional. We would like to thank the brave men and women of the USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower
who have worked
so tirelessly to repair this invaluable equipment.’

In fact it turned out my room was nowhere near the steam catapult. I know this because the following morning I went to look at it and it took nigh on half an hour to get there. Then it took a further 90 minutes to get to the arrester-wire control room.

This was amazing. I just thought the wire was a piece of elastic but it’s a steel cable that’s connected to a hydraulic jack. And before a plane can land, someone on the flight deck has to telephone the man in the arrester-wire room to tell him what sort it is.

A big heavy F-14 needs a different setting than a Cod, for instance. Seems sensible, except for two things. First of all, the arrester-wire room is the noisiest place on earth – you couldn’t even hear the million-watt PA system in there – leave alone what someone at the other end of a phone was saying. And secondly, the man who had to set the machine was easily the stupidest person I’d ever met.

Had I known when I was coming in to land in the Cod that my life was in the hands of a man who could neither hear nor string two words together, I’d have jumped.

I asked him a few questions. A few of his spots burst. And I set off on a brief two-hour walk to find the admiral. At one point I thought I recognised one of the corridors. It seemed to be a slightly less-dark shade of grey, but actually my perception was ebbing, along with my will to live.

Life on the bridge was much better. It has windows from which you can see the flotilla a carrier needs when it’s at sea. There’s the fuel tanker, for the planes stoopid (the
Eisenhower
has enough juice in its reactors to last a million miles). And then there’s the food ship, which, being American, was huge. The
Eisenhower
’s crew get through 18,000 meals a day, which means they need 5,000 gallons of milk a week and, in a typical cruise, 160,000 eggs.

That’s before you start to feed the crews on the smaller warships that tag along to protect the big daddy (and the food ship) from a waterborne assault, and the sub, to protect it from beneath. There were fourteen ships out there, all to take care of the carrier.

And yet, should the balloon go up, the
Eisenhower
would leave its escorts far behind. A good modern warship can thunder along at 28 or 29 knots. But a Nimitz Class carrier will hammer
along at 33. It is, according to the admiral, the racing car of the seas.

But it’s the size of these extraordinary ships that boggles the mind most of all. Of course, there are longer oil tankers plodding around the seaways, but in terms of sheer bulk the Nimitz Class carriers are right out in a class of their own. They weigh as near as makes no difference 100,000 tons. Their turbines produce 280,000 horsepower. And the nuclear power on board allows continuous operation for fifteen years. To power a normal carrier for that long would take 11 billion barrels of fuel oil.

And now we’re starting to get into the serious statistics that arouse the hairs on the back of your neck. The
Eisenhower
is as tall as a 24-storey building, she can carry up to 90 planes and she costs £300 million a year to run. Mind you, that’s small fry compared to the £3 BILLION she cost to build. And remember, America has twelve of these monsters.

The idea behind them is very simple. They turn up off the enemy coast and Johnny Foreigner is so cowed by their enormity he lays down his assault rifle and opens a shop. Quite how that’ll work when the latest big carrier takes to the seas, I don’t
know. You see, it’s called the USS
Ronald Reagan
.

Whatever, the
Eisenhower
was certainly scary. Not because of the nukes it can rain down on your hometown but because I’d gone to the loo and was lost. I asked for directions many times, but it turned out the man in the arrester-wire room had been given the Big Job because he was the brightest man on board. Most didn’t seem to have heard of the bridge or the admiral and they certainly didn’t know where he or it might be.

Then they sounded general quarters, which is a bit like the teacher turning round. Everyone with a proper job must rush to battle stations and everyone in an ancillary capacity has to stay wherever they are, behind locked-down bulkheads. I was in a steel room with a steel floor and a steel ceiling. It could have been my bedroom. But because I fell asleep in there, it seemed unlikely.

Eventually, when the two-hour general quarters was over, a search party found me and from that point on I was given a minder. I forget his name but I do recall that he looked like Barney Rubble, and he really was the daftest man on board.

‘Attention!’ screamed the intercom, and I immediately put my fingers in my ears, assuming another donut machine had been mended. But no.
It turned out an F-14 was on its final approach… and one of its engines was on fire.

‘Quick,’ I said to Barney. ‘We must get up to the Vulture’s Nest so that my crew can film the fighter pilot nursing his stricken plane onto the deck.’

Barney agreed but seemed more bothered about getting our room account settled. Amazingly, visitors to the carrier are charged $8 a night. ‘Here,’ I said, plunging a ten into his podgy hands. But it was no good. Barney needed to give me change but didn’t have any. ‘OK,’ I yelled. ‘Here’s a fifty. That’ll cover all of us.’ And turned to run.

Barney wasn’t sure. So he pulled out a pencil and started to do some sums. ‘Let’s see,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘eight dollars a room and there are six of them. That’s six times eight which is, er, um…’ Pretty soon he ran out of fingers so he assembled a selection of alternatives before working out, after a full ten minutes, that the answer was 48.

‘Well,’ he said with a smile. ‘We’re no further on. I still owe you two dollars and I still don’t have any change.’ He wouldn’t keep it and as a result we missed the spectacle of a mono-engined
F-14 thudding onto the carrier’s deck. Thanks, Barney. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said cheerily.

And then it was time to go home. We were loaded back into the toaster and, to my enormous surprise, wheeled right to the front of the ship, giving us no runway at all to use for the take-off. We’d simply be attached to the steam catapult, which would fling us off the end, after which we’d fall into the sea and be minced by the props.

We were told not to worry by the grinning Barney, who said the steam catapult could fire a VW Beetle seventeen miles. So it’d have no problem with our little Cod, especially as the ship points into wind for every take-off. Every little detail of the launch procedure was discussed in fact… except one.

So, the 100,000-ton ship turned into the wind. Our pilot wound up his little engines to full power. The deck hands made all sorts of silly
Top Gun
hand signals and, with a savagery that’s hard to explain in print, we were off.

Immediately there was a resounding crack and I knew something had broken. Sure enough, the plane dipped as it cleared the end of the runway and I braced myself for the impact that never came.

It turned out that the steel ingot that is used to attach the nose wheel to the catapult is designed to break, with a crack, as the plane lifts off. It sounds catastrophic but Barney, bless him, had forgotten to mention it.

My two days on that carrier were, without any question or shadow of doubt, the noisiest, most uncomfortable, most depressing I’ve ever endured. I was startled by the average IQ of those I met and genuinely amazed at the conditions in which they live. There was no drink on board, sex was not allowed and the smoking quarters were barbaric.

And yet the ship itself was a wondrous piece of engineering. Sure, it was designed to attack without pity and rain fire without remorse. But there’s no doubt that beneath its nuclear heart it has a soul.

By any logical standard the Alfa Romeo 166 is not a very good car. Compared to, say, a 5-series BMW, it is not especially fast, spacious, economical or well equipped, and it doesn’t handle terribly well either.

It is pulled along by its front wheels, and while this space-saving option works well on small hatchbacks it’s rarely satisfactory in a large saloon. The problem is that the front wheels have enough to do dealing with the steering. To entrust them with the power from a 3.2-litre V6 engine as well is a recipe for disaster.

If you apply too much throttle in a corner in a rear-wheel-drive car, it is, of course, the rear wheels that lose traction. The back end consequently swings round and you know exactly what you do about that because you were told by your driving instructor. You steer into the skid, and all is well.

Get it wrong and the news is still good because
the back will swing all the way round and you’ll go backwards into a tree. This is fine. It means your death is as instant as it is unexpected.

In a front-wheel-drive car it is the front wheels that lose traction, which means you can do whatever you like with the steering wheel – it won’t make a jot of difference. You’ll hit the tree and, to make matters worse, you’ll see it coming…

But there are problems with front-wheel drive long before you get to a corner. I’m talking about torque steer. When you put your foot down, hard, the steering wheel squirms this way and that, as the power applies all kinds of unpleasant and unnatural forces to wheels that, by their very nature, aren’t bolted in place.

Alfa uses front-wheel drive because it’s cheap. And there’s a ‘win free save’ feel to the cockpit as well. In a BMW these days you get a little pinprick of light from the rear-view mirror that bathes all the controls in a puddle of red light. You also get cup holders and volume controls for the stereo on the steering wheel. None of this expensive-to-design stuff is available on a 166.

As a result, anyone with £30,000 to spend on a large executive saloon car is going to be swayed by the Beemer, and as a result of that, Alfa
Romeo’s sales in Britain are what an economist would call ‘pitiful’.

To make matters worse, no one wants them second-hand either, which means the poor sod who did buy one new, for £30,000, will lose £17,000 in a year. So he ends up with a car that’s not as fast, not as well equipped and not as nice to drive as a BMW. And what’s more, it’ll cost him £50 a day before he’s put any fuel in the tank or coughed up for some insurance. Frankly, then, anyone who buys a 166 is a full-on window-licking mentalist.

And yet, if I were in the market for a businessman’s car, I’d have one like a shot.

Don’t worry. This has nothing to do with Alfas of old being driven by men on black-and-white round racetracks that don’t exist any more. Buying a car because the firm that makes it used to be amazing 50 years ago would be like employing a team of Italian builders because the Romans were so organised. It’s people who make a car what it is, and the people who made Alfas so strong in Grand Prix racing in the fifties are all either dead or sitting in wingback chairs, drooling.