One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (59 page)

However, as with naval aviation maintenance, the “ready room” culture was resistant to change. Thus the authors of another 1961
Naval Aviation News
article felt compelled to say “Some people view the idea of everyone in naval aviation doing everything ‘the one best way' with some misgivings. They fear that general use of standardized procedures, while it may reduce the accident rate, will result in a reduction of a pilot's ability to ‘think on his feet' and deal flexibly with emergencies and combat situations. Experience in other fields has proved that fear unfounded.”
¹⁵
A major element of the resistance to change was the fact that adaptation to the new technology had a value content; that is, it made irrelevant certain skill sets that were associated with being a respected, professional aviator in the propeller-driven era. It wasn't so much the difficulty in learning new skill sets as it was abandoning old ones that were associated with professional virtue. The naval aviation culture that grew up from 1911 to 1947 was intense, insular, and value-centric. Moreover, likely because of the acrimonious relationship that developed between the Navy and Air Force in the late 1940s, there was a reluctance to view anything the USAF did as appropriate for naval aviation, and it took a long time for the Navy to adopt or adapt Air Force best practices.

Despite the organizational and procedural progress that was made in the 1950s and 1960s, the social culture of naval aviation lagged. Apart from the drinking and partying that contributed to any number of one-car fatal accidents after happy hour at the officers club, there existed a testosterone-heavy atmosphere of pressure in the ready rooms that put pilots in a difficult position when they manned up their aircraft. It was almost normal to find on start-up that some piece of equipment on a multi-system jet was malfunctioning. The pilot or crew now had to decide whether the problem was of sufficient severity to warrant “downing” the airplane
and canceling the flight. However, such a decision was not straightforward. Many a CO, Air Wing Commander, or carrier skipper was hell-bent on making all scheduled sorties or setting new operational records. The pilot that downed too many aircraft, especially in night or bad weather conditions, would quickly get a reputation as a coward. Thus pilots were under considerable pressure to get their aircraft in the air. How many mishaps were caused by pilots launching with defective aircraft is not clear, but the number was significant. The arrival of the F-18 changed this aspect of the culture significantly. The airplane was extremely reliable, and its design meant that any defects encountered on start-up were more clearly either insignificant or were cause for not launching.

The Navy has always placed considerable responsibility and authority into the hands of the individual officer. An imperative of war at sea, this delegated style of command and control has both enhanced and afflicted naval aviation. Throughout the history of naval aviation, outstanding decision making by relatively junior officers has made the difference in battle, such as Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky's decision to take his strike group in the direction a Japanese destroyer was headed and thus find the Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. However, faced with the imposition of new technology that demanded new types of procedural discipline and centralized management, the culture was slow to adapt, and literally thousands of naval aviators lost their lives as a result.

FINDING THE RIGHT COMBINATION OF INGREDIENTS

The development of aviation technology between the time of the Wright brothers' first flight and 1947 was amazingly fast. In just forty-five years aviation had progressed from machines that were hardly more than powered kites to jets that pushed the speed of sound. This rapid development meant that individual models of combat aircraft became obsolete fairly quickly. This had been the case prior to and during World War II, and was to be the case over the early years of jet transition in the Navy. The initial echelon of straight-wing jets had an operational lifespan in the fleet of only a few years, although some of them had a longer second life in the reserves or through other specialized shore-based uses such as the training command. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, as whole squadrons transitioned from propeller airplanes to jets, pilots—who had developed a set of habit patterns molded to straight-wing propeller planes that flew slower and used gas slower and were lighter and simpler—were put into fast, gas-guzzling jets with the challenging operating characteristics we have previously described. It was a lethal combination. Rear Admiral Thomas Brown III, who was a mid-grade officer in those days, summed things up pretty well in his oral history to the Naval Historical Foundation:

Something that is important to understand about that era is that the Navy introduced a number of different jet aircraft into the fleet in the middle '50s. Among them were the FJ3, FJ4, the A-4 Skyhawk, the F4D Skyray, the F8U Crusader, and the F-11 Tiger. Also, we had a whole bunch of pilots that had transitioned from props to jets, from slower to faster airplanes, from straight wing to swept wing, and the accident rate was horrendously high. It was almost off the graph how many accidents we were having in large part because of poor training. In our squadron alone [flying A-4s] we killed three people in our first year in the Skyhawk.
¹⁶

Admiral Brown was talking about the state of affairs in 1956 and 1957, a period when the mishap rate was falling sharply due to the introduction of the angled deck and the optical landing aid. A number of institutional fixes were generated, such as the founding of the Naval Aviation Safety Center in 1953, the Naval Aviation Maintenance Program in 1959, and the Naval Aviation Training and Operational Procedures Standardization (NATOPS) program in 1961. These measures had a dramatic effect; the accident rate per 100,000 flying hours plummeted from about fifty-five in 1954 to less than ten in 1971. None of this includes combat losses in Vietnam; the numbers reflect the total naval aviation rate, which includes shore-based patrol planes that had a much better safety record; even through the 1990s carrier-embarked mishap rates were always higher. Given that a single carrier air wing can fly 10,000 hours in less than three months of deployed operations, even a rate of ten is ruinous. By comparison, today's rate hovers between one and two per 100,000 hours, commensurate with that of the Air Force—an indication of the maturity of the naval aviation professional culture.

Another factor that may have contributed to the brutal accident rates of the 1950s and early 1960s was the number of different models of jets operated by the fleet. Up through 1957 new types of jets were being introduced almost every year. Combined with the lack of an effective training and standardization program, pilots would switch back and forth between models, the newer of which possessed evermore-complex systems and more challenging flight characteristics. Mishaps were a virtual inevitability. Again, Captain O'Roarke:

But for the kids newly arrived at VC-4 [the Navy's night specialty squadron on the East Coast] from the all-prop training command and a short, night/radar course in props at Key West, sporting only about four hundred hours of total flight time, the simultaneous introduction to night, weather and jets, all done in an informal, casual manner, presented a real exercise in personal survival. This demanding environment, as might well have been expected, exacted a very heavy toll in fatal accidents.
¹⁷

A-6 Intruder on the USS
Independence'
s catapult, March 1965
.

By the mid-1960s, Air Wing composition was starting to stabilize, with the introduction of the A-6, F-4, and A-7. Pilots could build up considerable experience in one type of airplane and by 1973 naval aviation had more than halved its accident rate.

Of course, some of the Navy's jets were easier to fly and more reliable than others. The F9F Panther, and its swept-wing cousin, the Cougar, were well regarded by pilots, even if they were a bit underpowered. Perhaps the most infamous of the early jets was the F7U Cutlass, a tailless fighter unaffectionately known as the “Ensign Eater.” Part of the combination was also due to the operational mission of the aircraft. Some of the jets were almost exclusively used as “day fighters,” which tended to limit their exposure to the more threatening flight regimes such as low-level bombing and night or bad weather carrier operations. Newer models brought both improvements—designers learned from the defects of current aircraft that were brought to light via fleet operations—but also new problems as the limits of technology were pushed. Aircraft like the F-8 Crusader and F-4 Phantom achieved much higher airspeeds than their predecessors, but at the cost of higher approach and landing speeds that reduced the margin for error in landing them aboard the carrier. Perhaps the ultimate aircraft in terms of speed and difficulty of bringing aboard was the RA-5C Vigilante. A large aircraft at around 70,000 pounds takeoff weight, it was beautiful, fast—and fragile. The combination of high approach speed, heavy weight, and no-margin structural design (to save weight) made every landing a potential accident—and many were.

However, chasing higher airspeeds was not the only technological limit that was being pushed. The introduction of the A-6 Intruder brought an all-weather, day and night attack capability to the fleet. Although the A-6 had a robust airframe and two reasonably reliable engines, it also had a complex radar navigation and attack system. Crewed by both a pilot and a Bombardier-Navigator (BN), the airplane had an incredible ability to sneak around at low level, in the mountains, at night to deliver weapons. However, there were limits to the system's reliability, and in the low level, night regime, margins for error disappeared. Many Intruders and their crews were lost in those conditions. In theory, the A-7 Corsair was supposed to operate in a similar way with a single pilot and a single engine. A rash of training accidents quickly demonstrated that this was not feasible. By comparison the night strike version of the single-seat F/A-18 proved to be perfectly capable of flying low-level night missions in the mountains, albeit in a clear air mass. The difference was massive improvement in cockpit automation and display, and the introduction of imaging infrared and light amplification technologies.

In this centennial year of naval aviation, the Navy's air arm has been jet powered for over half of its history. The transition was long and brutally expensive in terms of loss of life and aircraft. However it was, by any measure, a success. Throughout the Cold War and a series of hot wars including Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and others, naval aviation has been able to provide effective tactical air power from the sea. Its ability to do this despite a long and difficult process of learning how to operate jet aircraft at sea is a tribute to the brilliance of various aircraft designers, the ingenuity of countless airdales, the sailors who struggled to keep those complex and touchy machines flying, and the bravery and perhaps foolhardiness of the crews that would climb into jets, which were hard to fly and lacked reliability, and perform missions that took them to the edge of what man and machine could do.

NOTES

    
1
.
  
Tommy H. Thomason,
U.S. Naval Air Superiority: Development of Shipborne Jet Fighters 1943–1962
(North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2007), p. 123.

    
2
.
  
Naval Safety Center aviation safety database. Unless otherwise cited, all mishap statistics were obtained from this source.

    
3
.
  
Jeffery G. Barlow,
Revolt of the Admirals
(Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1994), pp. 233–89.

    
4
.
  
Thomason,
U.S. Naval Air Superiority
, p. 265.

    
5
.
  
Vice Admiral Gerald E. Miller, “Transition to the Jet Age,”
Into the Jet Age
, pp. 12–13.

    
6
.
  
Captain Gerald O'Roarke, USN (Ret.), “We Get Ours at Night,”
Into the Jet Age
, ed. Captain E. T. Wooldridge, USN (Ret.) (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), pp. 31–32.

    
7
.
  
Although it might seem more appropriate to use the term “generations,” it is avoided here to prevent confusion with the technical term “generations of fighters”—coined by the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun)—to describe various classes of fighters based on their performance characteristics.

    
8
.
  
A-3 Skywarrior Association,
http://www.a3skywarrior.com/memorial/full_accident_date.htm
(accessed 12 April 2009).