In this excerpt from his new Naval Institute Press book Flying the Edge the author of Supercarrier, a veteran military correspondent, takes us up with U.S. Navy Test Pilot School instructors at Patuxent Naval Air Station, Maryland.
Jerry Gallagher, the instructor pilot, was in the front seat, and I was in the backseat of the T-2 Buckeye training jet whistling through white clouds and blue air on the way up to the patch of sky 23,000 feet above the Chesapeake Bay where we intended to spin the airplane—both right side up and upside down—and then do aerial somersaults. I was hoping my breakfast would stay put when I found myself hanging by my legs and watching the bay rush toward me as the upside-down airplane spun down through the clouds. All I knew about the somersaults was that the first one would be forward and the second one backward.
My purpose in going aloft with Gallagher this bright morning was to duplicate the spin training future test pilots receive. I wanted to do, see, and feel what they did so that I could describe their passage from regular pilot to test pilot. . . .
The T-2 is safe to spin if you know what you are doing—And Jerry Gallagher, 44, certainly knew what he was doing. He was as serious in his work as his comedian brother. Butch Gallagher, was funny in his. A former Navy jet pilot, Gerald L. Gallagher was now a civilian hired by the Navy to instruct future test pilots at Test Pilot School (TPS). Spinning was his specialty. "The reason we do spins," he told me before takeoff, "is that somebody has to go out and write the book about what happens when you fly these machines to the limits." Besides, he said of test pilots under instruction, "we want them to see as much aviation as they can." Knowing an airplane’s limits and what to do when they are exceeded is part of test piloting and could save an aviator’s life in aerial dogfighting, Gallagher said, "To a large extent, the outcome of a fight is [determined by] who can get closest to the limit." . . . after a series of spins, Jerry offered: "The next thing we’ll have a look at—what does that spin look like from upside down?"
"Why would a pilot get into an upside-down spin—aerial combat?" I asked.
"Some airplanes are real sensitive to inverted spinning: the A-4, for example," Jerry replied. "If you let the airplane’s tail slide, it generally goes into an inverted spin all on its own. So it’s nice to know how to get out of an inverted spin if you get in one. There’s really no tactical use for it." Flying upside down, but not spinning, might be useful in a dogfight, he said, if you were trying to keep track of an enemy fighter underneath you. . . ."
"Okay. I’m running my seat down. If you want to run yours down a little bit. Let me know when you’re ready."
"I got it down about three-quarters," I informed Jerry. I later would fervently wish I had levered my seat down lower so that my head did not end up pressing hard against the plastic roof of the upside-down plane.
"We’ll just do it from here.
"I’m going to raise the nose."
I felt the familiar run uphill we had done so many times before. We were still right side up.
"Now I’m going to slowly roll us over.
"Now we’re kind of upside down. You’ll feel yourself hanging in the strap a little bit," Jerry said casually.
A little bit! I felt like an upside-down carcass hanging from a meat hook. I was confused as I tried to figure out which foot pedal I would tramp and where I should put the stick to get the airplane off its back. The airplane was staggering again. Jerry was holding the nose high to make it stall upside down just as he had made it stall right side up. How could a test pilot possibly read the altimeter, alpha (angle-of-attack) meter, and airspeed indicator while hanging this way over the water by his legs? I asked myself.
"Okay. Everything looks good," Jerry said calmly.
Looks good? I saw an upside-down world full of dust. Turning the T-2 jet on its back had allowed its pockets to empty out. My map case stayed closed. But the dust from every crevice seemed to be drifting down over me. The upside-down plane stopped flying and started falling.
"There’s a stall inverted," Jerry informed me as though it did not make any difference whether we were right side up or upside down.
"I’m going to put in the control inputs. Notice that we’re rolling to the right, but the turn needle says we’re yawing to the left."
He could not prove it by me. From my upside-down, hanging position I could not focus my eyes on the instrument panel far less find the gauge he was talking about and read what it said. If Jerry had asked me to write down the altitude, I could not have fished out my pen. I might be able to say the number into a tape recorder. But everything in the cockpit seemed to have moved to a different place. I would have had to hunt for the altimeter. Happily, Gallagher did not call back, "Mark" during this strange-feeling upside-down spin.
"This is what it kind of looks like in an inverted spin," Jerry said. For the first time there was laughter in that professorial voice.
"Pretty wild, huh?". . . .
Imagine yourself flying low at night over enemy encampments in a fragile helicopter lit up so brightly that any rifleman for miles around could carefully aim at you and try to knock you out of the sky whenever you came close enough.
This is what Chief Warrant Officer 4 Reginald C. Murrell did night after night in Vietnam in 1971. "We were basically a target," he told me in the monotone of a pilot who had been through too much to get emotional about any one thing.
Reggie flew a UH-1H Huey with a cluster of seven landing lights from C-130 transport planes rigged at the chopper’s open, right door. The Huey’s machine gunner crouched behind the lights as they shone on the bush below. When enemy soldiers could no longer resist firing at the helicopter beckoning to them like a beacon, other helicopters with no lights pounced out of the dark sky and blasted them.
"Never took a hit," Reggie said in the same monotone. But he could not help smiling as he said it. More of a smirk. His hunter/killer missions were only part of the flying he did in Vietnam. "I flew almost 1,300 hours in ten months. I was flying every day, seven days a week." How, I wondered as he told about his combat flying, could TPS be anything but boring to this 41-year-old who already had done everything a pilot can do in a helicopter, often at great risk?
When I met Reggie in 1991, he was teaching future test pilots how to evaluate a helicopter’s performance. I discovered that passing on what he had learned since receiving his helicopter wings in 1970 stimulated his intellectual juices the way combat flying had stimulated his physical senses during the war. And Reggie Murrell, like the other instructors, wanted a thinking pilot in the cockpit, not a daredevil. He and the other veteran pilots had been to enough funerals of those who had pushed it.
"You don’t want to look for that kind of guy," Reggie told me. "Nowadays, what we’re looking for is somebody who can get the job done without an extra risk. We teach the buildup approach. You nibble at the unknown slowly so you don’t get into trouble with something you can’t handle."
This particular June day we were going to nibble at the danger of dropping from the sky in an OH-58 observation helicopter whose engine was not turning its rotor blades. Reggie was going to show me how a skillful pilot can land a helicopter from most places in the sky after the engine quits if he or she knows what to do and does it fast enough. "If a guy loses an engine and doesn’t do something in a few seconds, he’s going to die," the combat veteran said matter-of-factly.
As test pilots always do, especially instructor test pilots, Reggie detailed exactly what he was going to do with the OH-58 helicopter once we got in the air. He was going to drop out of the sky from various altitudes and at various speeds without engaging the engine to turn the overhead rotor blades. Although the engine would be kept at idle for safety’s sake, it would be of no help in slowing our free-fall. How hard we landed, Reggie explained, would depend on how successful he was in exploiting the lift created when the passing wind turned the rotor blades, as with a windmill. This windmilling is autorotation, short for automatic rotation. . . .
Even if the pilot in free-fall works the collective and stick correctly, he or she can still crash if the no-engine descent starts from certain positions in the sky called "dead-man zones" or "avoid areas." Each helicopter has a different dead-man zone that the pilot tries to fly out of as quickly as possible. Test pilots and engineers working for the helicopter builder chart the dead-man zones before delivering the helicopter to the military. The graph of these zones is called the High-Velocity Diagram. Military test pilots take the newly delivered helicopter aloft to determine if the dead-man zones are correctly charted. This requires simulating engine failures from different points in the sky to verify the High-Velocity Diagram. Reggie and other helicopter instructors teach future test pilots how to do this verification. We climbed into the OH-58 so he could show me how to do it too.
"There’s our 500 feet and 60 knots," Reggie told me as we reached one of the jump-off positions for gathering data for the High-Velocity Diagram. He was sitting in the right seat of the OH-58 helicopter, and I was in the left. Command pilots sit in the right seat in helicopters and in the left seat in fixed-wing aircraft.
"Throttle chop on three. . . . Thousand one. Thousand two. Thousand three."
He twisted the motorcycle-style throttle atop the collective to reduce the engine to idle. The engine was no longer rotating the rotor blades overhead. The helicopter was losing the lift provided by those whirling wings. Reggie hesitated before he took any corrective action, simulating how a surprised pilot would react.
Wee-whoop! Wee-whoop! The stall warning was shouting at us. It was warning that the overhead wings were not turning fast enough to keep lifting the helicopter. The aircraft would stall out, just as the T-2 had when Jerry Gallagher flew it uphill before going into those spins. We had to get those overhead blades to windmill faster.
If you put your hand out the window of a moving car, you feel less resistance if you hold it horizontal against the oncoming wind rather than vertical. Reggie pushed the collective lever down so that the blades would be more horizontal to the wind passing through them. This decreased their resistance to the wind and allowed them to windmill faster. He wanted to get the blades whipping around faster and faster as we fell to recover the lost rotor speed. He used the stick to make us fall to the ground in a slant rather than straight down. The degree of slant would help determine how fast we would fall. He knew he could suddenly pull up on the collective just before we hit the ground to make all the blades bite into the wind at once. This would provide the lift needed to pull us back from a hard landing. But if he used the collective as a skyhook too soon, while we were too far above the ground, the blades would stop windmilling too soon. We might stop falling while we were still too high. The blades, twisted to face into the wind at a sharp angle, would quickly stop spinning with no engine to keep them turning. We then would fall the rest of the way to the ground like a rock, perhaps killing ourselves and certainly damaging the helicopter. Autorotating to earth requires skillful fiddling with the collective on the left and the stick in the center to end up with a soft, happy landing.
We had been falling for three full seconds from 500 feet. The flattened blades were spinning faster and faster. Reggie was watching the needle of the rotor-speed gauge on the instrument panel indicate revolutions per minute. It was moving out of the red danger zone toward the green. The stall siren stopped. "Turns are life," Reggie said.
"Rotor’s in the green.
"We got our rotor speed back. So from here on out it’s just a normal autorotation descent. Piece of cake. . . . About our 100 feet we’ll start our progressive deceleration"—going down fast at first and then slowing up in stages.
Our free-fall felt comfortable to me. We were falling to earth on a slant like that pinwheeling maple seed. Reggie’s next move was to gradually increase the pitch on the windmilling rotor blades to provide more lift, slowing our descent progressively. I felt a bump and heard a scrape as the skids under the OH-58 hit the runway and skidded forward a few feet. Reggie had autorotated us to a soft landing on wind power alone. . . .
Leslie E. Scott, a retired Army warrant officer fourth class who also saw heavy combat while flying a Cobra helicopter in Vietnam, was the senior flight instructor of the Rotary-Wing Branch within TPS when I flew with Reggie in 1991. He defined the ideal test pilot: "He’s a positive kind of person with an affinity for details. He has good hand and eye coordination and almost an intuitive understanding of things mechanical. A test pilot needs to be relatively comfortable going from aircraft to aircraft. You have to have the ability to fly precisely and still analyze what’s going on around you because on some tests you may have to hold the controls absolutely fixed and divorce yourself from the motion of the aircraft but still analyze the motion without getting excited because the pitch and attitude have gotten real big. ... A lot of guys are not happy doing that. . . ."
We were gliding along in the high-tech F/A-18 when the instructor sitting behind me explained with his question why I was having so much trouble believing I was flying at 400 knots in the Navy’s most modern warplane.
"See how quiet it is?" marveled Marine Captain Alan G. McKillip from the backseat.
The F/A-18 flew so quietly that it was more like sitting in the fish-globe front seat of a peaceful glider than a combination fighter and bomber designed to kill. The F/A-18’s engines are hung so far behind the pilot that little of their noise penetrates the cockpit.
The smoothness of the flight controls enhanced the sense of quiet. The computers do almost all the work of keeping the plane steady. 1 felt no bumps or vibration as I held the stick in the neutral position. This plane—nicknamed the Electric Jet because of all its modern electronics—was flying itself.
But the really dramatic difference between the new generation F/A-18 and its predecessors is the information it presents to the pilot, much of it on the windscreen. Imagine the readings you see on the instruments of your car’s dashboard—miles per hour, temperature, oil pressure, and everything else—suddenly showing up as numbers in between the two layers of glass of your windshield. The F/A-18 displays information that way, all kinds of information. Numbers, arrows, warnings, dials, and bars all appear magically in the plastic of the windscreen. This feature is called a heads-up display, or HUD, and it lets you read about your own flight as you fly along.
McKillip dove the F/A-18 on an island in the Chesapeake. The plane’s HUD showed me arrows, numbers, and squiggles, more than I could keep track of during the dive. The plane seemed to be saying to me, "Pay attention, Stupid. I’m telling you what’s going on."
We then went into mock aerial combat against Marine Lieutenant Colonel Robert A. Price, who was piloting a T-2 training jet. Randy Hepp, a civilian photographer for Pax River who specializes in photographing aircraft performance and once had to bail out of an F/A-18 over the base after a bomb hit his plane’s wings, was documenting the F/A-18’s performance. Once again the F/A-18’s radar and HUD came alive with numbers and arrows. I found the amount of information dizzying.
Although the data the F/A-18 was generating overwhelmed me, I had no trouble maneuvering the airplane itself. It was similar to the sudden ease of parking a car with power steering after wrestling for years with mechanical steering. The F/A-18 was sweetly responsive. Its
computers compensated for my clumsiness with the controls. I concluded early on in the flight that for the pilot, the F/A-18’s biggest challenge is not in flying the plane but absorbing all the information it presents.
Back on the ground, flight instructor McKillip and adversary pilot Price agreed as we reconstructed the flight that seemed to take only minutes rather than its actual hour.
"There is so much neat stuff in the airplane that you forget to fly it," said McKillip, a former A-6 pilot. "You start looking at all the systems and everything else. The aircraft trims by itself. There is no noise. Sometimes you ask yourself as you fly along, "Why is this aircraft suddenly feeling rough when I’m only doing 250 knots?’ Then you find you’re actually doing 500 knots. The airplane flies beautiful. The big thing is aviate, navigate, and communicate. But you’ve always got to fly the airplane first."
"The hardest part in flying the F-18," said Price, "is assimilating all the information that is being presented to you by the aircraft. Once you assimilate that, you’re there. The aircraft is user friendly and easy to fly. It will do so much for you. You just have to manage that system."
. . . test pilots, no matter how smart computers become, still will have to go to class to learn the why of aircraft behavior, to understand the theoretical as well as do the hands-on actual I had just experienced in the sky over Pax River. Going to class every day is, and always will be, part of learning how to be a test pilot.
Mr. Wilson is a defense correspondent for The Washington Post.