A/C Navigation

[HeyJoe]

During Desert Storm we operated from the Red Sea with 2-3 carriers depending on timeframe (America eventually left Saratoga and Kennedy to join other carriers in Persian Gulf). Typically Kennedy and Saratoga would be on a NW-SE line now closer then ten miles apart and swap positions depending on which one was the duty carrier and usually the same time of day so you'd know which was your "homeplate". One day, they swapped early (guess where this is heading). So a fairly senior A-7 flight lead comes back from pounding Iraq and picks up both carriers and heads towards the Northwestern most carrier and enters the break expecting it to be the Kennedy. Aboard the Saratoga, the LA is open for business when the Air Boss looks out and sees A-7s on the downwind (Sara had no A-7s). Since "capturing another carrier’s aircraft is a great prize, the Boss quickly checked to see if his arresting gear gang still had settings for the A-7. They did. The LSOs responded to the request from the boss to bring ‘em aboard and our unsuspecting Corsair pilot trapped and upon exiting the LA, was surprised to see so many Hornets on the flight deck and initially thought they had diverted tot he Kennedy...but it quickly dawned on him that there were way too many Hornets to have diverted and not an A-7 in sight AND the big numbers painted on the island were not 67 as expected, but 60. His wingman was 45 seconds behind him, but realized something wasn't right about the flight deck and took his own wave off and headed to the Kennedy.

Back to our now thoroughly embarrassed soul. As his radios were channelized for the Kennedy, he wasn't even up tower for the Sara, but we carried freq cards for both ships. He dialed in Sara's tower and checked in with the boss and got a friendly (somewhat smirking, "Welcome Aboard"). He got home eventually and had to tell his tale more than once. The final chapter unfolded at Foc'sle Follies after Desert Storm concluded and we got a break from the action. The Sara CAG caught a helo ride over to Kennedy and made a special presentation of a one trap patch (a Sara centurion patch with zeroes removed leaving a one). Not sure if he ever had that one sewed on his flight jacket though.

 

[HeyJoe]

I've been almost 1000nm from Mom on long range strike missions and strike "practice" missions. The ship gives you a "PIM," or Position of Intended Movement before you take off and you use that as the starting point to start looking for the boat when you get back. Most of the time the Shoes driving the boat end up far away from the PIM after chasing the wind or running for water or air space so we'd have to use our radar while farther out and look for a few blips close together (one big blip for the boat, another close smaller blip for the destroyer or frigate plane guard).

As you might figure from the math, 1000 miles is more than 2 hrs out and 2 hours back, the ship can actually get pretty far in that amount of time, even at 20 kts. The E-2 Bubbas were always a great help giving us a steer back towards home. It was even more fun when the ship was in EMCON and they'd have all of their emitters off so they couldn't be found by the bad guys. Then we'd have to turn off our radars as we got closer than 50nm and find the boat visually, which was fun at night too. Makes me want to head back out on cruise again....:icon_mi_1

The ship does try its best to "hide" from friend and potential foe alike it seems. In height of Cold War we operated in the North Sea in the GIUK gap and the ship was in constant EMCON so we were deprived of TACAN or even radio comms with the ship. the E-2 was our only connection and always had a good handle on where the ship was...usually hiding under a rain squall it seemed. We flew "Sly Fox" missions to intercept Soviet Bear D surveillance aircraft (sent to target the carrier) 1,000 miles from the ship. We also were supposed to turn radars off at 50 miles, but I don't know anyone if didn't sneak a peak for a "warm and fuzzy", especially at night. Yeah, I really want to do that again espeically with a heaving deck with green water coming over the bow.

 

[PropStop]

I've almost landed at the wrong airport before. Anyone ever flown to Fairchild AFB in Spokane, WA? Well, for those of you who haven't, there are two airports there, one being Fairchild and the other being Spokane Intl. They are just a few miles apart and have almost identically aligned runways. At night they even look quite similar.

I think you can see where this is going... So i call up approach and say "XXXX established on the ILS 23,” which they give a quick, "Roger" to. Anyhow, so i see the runway and it's not quite matching up with my localizer, but it IS matching up nicely with the TACAN (which my CP had dialed in). I thought, geeze, my ILS is AFU, there's the field right there, i can see it!

About 5 miles out i begin to realize that something just isn't right, the taxi ways aren't quite the same and just as i'm about to call myself out on it, approach beats me to it. As it turned out later, the TACAN was jacked up and the ILS was working 4.0.

There are those who have, and those who will - at least saying that helps me sleep at night

 

[Gatordev]

@Propstop:

Ah, the war stories of landing at an AF base, which has been and will be in the same place all the time... I bet the directions to the Q weren't the clearest either... I keed, I keed. I've done the same in Salt Lake City.

@TacAir guys:

I know you all operate EMCON as well, but don't you pretty much always have someone watching over you (E-2 or other)? When I first posted my question, I was referring to ZERO comms, not even HF.

@HeyJoe:

Not all that excited about having to come to a ship, let alone a carrier, w/ green water over the bow. <shudder>

And finally @Brett:

I re-did the math, and I don't think ESM would have even been an option.

 

[zab1001]

Do E-2s and/or C-2s carry inertials?

 

[HooverPilot]

Yup. The C-2 has a pretty decent CAINS system. Ring Laser gyros, GPS updates, all fancy and stuff. It is actually 1/2 of the system that we had in the S-3, but it works pretty well. E-2's have a more arcaic system but don't feel bad, they have some state of the art stuff just around the corner.

 

[MIDNJAC]

During Desert Storm we operated from the Red Sea with 2-3 carriers depending on timeframe (America eventually left Saratoga and Kennedy to join other carriers in Persian Gulf). Typically Kennedy and Saratoga would on a NW-SE line now closer then ten miles apart and swap positions depending on which one was the duty carrier and usually the same time of day so you'd know which was your "homeplate". One day, they swapped early (guess where this is heading). So a fairly senior A-7 flight lead comes back from pounding Iraq and picks up both carriers and heads towards the Northwestern most carrier and enters the break expecting it to be the Kennedy. Aboard the Saratoga, the LA is open for business when the Air Boss looks out and sees A-7s on the downwind (Sara had no A-7s). Since "capturing another carrier’s aircraft is a great prize, the Boss quickly checked to see if his arresting gear gang still had settings for the A-7. They did. The LSOs responded to the request from the boss to bring ‘em aboard and our unsuspecting Corsair pilot trapped and upon exiting the LA, was surprised to see so many Hornets on the flight deck and initially thought they had diverted tot he Kennedy...but it quickly dawned on him that there were way too many Hornets to have diverted and not an A-7 in sight AND the big numbers painted on the island were not 67 as expected, but 60. His wingman was 45 seconds behind him, but realized something wasn't right about the flight deck and took his own wave off and headed to the Kennedy.

Back to our now thoroughly embarrassed soul. As his radios were channelized for the Kennedy, he wasn't even up tower for the Sara, but we carried freq cards for both ships. He dialed in Sara's tower and checked in with the boss and got a friendly (somewhat smirking, "Welcome Aboard"). He got home eventually and had to tell his tale more than once. The final chapter unfolded at Foc'sle Follies after Desert Storm concluded and we got a break from the action. The Sara CAG caught a helo ride over to Kennedy and made a special presentation of a one trap patch (a Sara centurion patch with zeroes removed leaving a one). Not sure if he ever had that one sewed on his flight jacket though.

hahahaha......thats awesome I heard that it was kind of a standard practice for the "wrong" ship to paint the lost a/c pink or some other un-warrior-like color if the pilot/crew had to stay aboard for any length of time....any truth to this?? (although I assume probably not during combat ops)

 

[phrogdriver]

One thought--in that story, the boss made some effort to deceive the pilot into continuing with his mistake. I would hate to be any of the people involved if there ended up being a mishap on landing.

As far as painting an aircraft, I doubt it. However, "zap stickers," the ones that look like squadron patches were probably all over any bird on the wrong boat. Hell, when we were in the same AO with the other MEU and had to go to the other's ship for PMC or whatever the crewchief on our helo had to guard the aircraft like a junkyard dog while we were on the flightdeck.

On one occasion, though, while we were spinning on the west coast LHD, my crewchief dashed to the forward bone, slapped our squadron sticker on three of the other squadron's 46s in the forward bone and rushed back. We were cleared to breakdown and made a clean getaway.

 

[Goober]

Yup. The C-2 has a pretty decent CAINS system. Ring Laser gyros, GPS updates, all fancy and stuff. It is actually 1/2 of the system that we had in the S-3, but it works pretty well. E-2's have a more arcaic system but don't feel bad, they have some state of the art stuff just around the corner.

Not so archaic anymore. Only the remaining standard Group II's (fewer and fewer as time goes on) have a mechanical CAINS. All others (Group II Nav Upgrade, Hawkeye 2000, and MCU/ACIS aircraft) carry GPS-aided ring laser gyro systems.

 

[HeyJoe]

@HeyJoe:

Not all that excited about having to come to a ship, let alone a carrier, w/ green water over the bow. <shudder>

That wasn't all. You had to get airborne in same conditions. The gameplan was to launch you down the catapult track as bow buried itself on assumption and hope that it would be on the rise as you reached the end of the cat. Takes a lot of faith! Once airborne, you knew if you had to eject that the water was so cold that your fingers would be numb before you had a chance to get in your raft and even if you did, the helo would never be able to launch with 60 kts winds, much less even unfold its blades. We figured wearing wetsuits (or drysuits) were a token gesture. But in months of operating and flying 60 hr + months off Norway in 1982 and 85, we met the "bear" (literally) every day. Only casualty was an A-7 that was chained up near the bow that took one of those green waves that knocked it over on its side.

 

[The Chief]

During Desert Storm we operated from the Red Sea with 2-3 carriers depending on timeframe (America eventually left Saratoga and Kennedy to join other carriers in Persian Gulf). Typically Kennedy and Saratoga would on a NW-SE line now closer then ten miles apart and swap positions depending on which one was the duty carrier and usually the same time of day so you'd know which was your "homeplate". ....

Yep, Yankee Station 1967 all over again. I would always know what was going down when I would hear "MAIN COMM, WHAT THE H@LL IS WRONG WITH OUR RADIOS, AGAIN"?

 

[HeyJoe]

As far as painting an aircraft, I doubt it. However, "zap stickers," the ones that look like squadron patches were probably all over any bird on the wrong boat. Hell, when we were in the same AO with the other MEU and had to go to the other's ship for PMC or whatever the crewchief on our helo had to guard the aircraft like a junkyard dog while we were on the flightdeck.

On one occasion, though, while we were spinning on the west coast LHD, my crewchief dashed to the forward bone, slapped our squadron sticker on three of the other squadron's 46s in the forward bone and rushed back. We were cleared to breakdown and made a clean getaway.

In the "old days" even before my time, anything went including paint. I agree, zappers are more the norm in latter days. We also had an A-6 literally drop out of nowhere on us during Desert Storm when it had an inflight emergency en route from the states to the Persian Gulf to replace losses. The B/N knew there were carriers in the Red Sea and raised kennedy on the radio. We set flight quarters and successfully trapped the striken Intruder. The Boss told everyone it was off limits and not to mess with it as it was an emergency and therefore a "no foul" landing (logic being, make a mistake and you pay the price). Folks still write messages in the white painted wheel wheels using grease pencil and some are merely hello to somebody they know.

 

[phrogdriver]

Thinking of paint, we had a SSgt who had a stencil of a dick with wings on it. He zapped a couple of Navy 53s that were resupplying us in the field right on the sponson where the HM-15 (pretty sure that was the one) horsehead logo was. Looked pretty funny.

Of course, next supply run, our toolboxes all had "I love squids" stenciled on them. Oh well.

 

[Gatordev]

We found a nice big phallis painted on the transition section bay door that we found once back on the boat after being "hosted" by a squadron in Mayport. Well played. I was surprised there weren't more casualties.

@heyjoe:

As bad as all that sounds, I was reminded of those guys flying off the carrier in B-25s. No catapault to time the launch, no ejection seats, and fully loaded to the gills with fuel. Talk about balls. There's some footage of one of them taking off, and I swear the wave swallows the plane for a few seconds, then out it pops. I'm sure you've probably seen it.

 

[Schnugg]

So here's a question for others. How far have you gone w/out comms from Mom or anyone else.

600 nm at the outer edge of a long range CAP off the aluetian islands. Hunting for Bear.

Had to trust the ship would be where they said they would (PIM).