Wow, Pomp. What a story.
Tim, this one's for you:
When I first joined the Navy, I couldn’t wait to go to sea. After a while, however, I began to think of my aircraft carrier as nothing but a loud, dirty, nasty place that I couldn’t wait to leave. Sometimes, though, something would happen that would make me love that big ship. This is a story about one of those days.
I was a senior copilot in my helicopter squadron, flying with a senior helicopter aircraft commander (or HAC), an experienced crew chief, and a rescue swimmer who’d been with us for most of our “workups,” or training cycle. It was the beginning of our third month in the Persian Gulf, we felt comfortable with ourselves and the environment, and we were already counting the days until our next port call. The flight was a simple plane guard / surface search mission, with some passenger ferrying thrown in later on. Plane guard meant that we were supposed to fly near our carrier as the ready rescue aircraft while it launched and recovered fixed-wing birds. Surface search was flying around the vicinity of the carrier, keeping tabs on the local shipping. Passenger ferrying was, well, passenger ferrying. We briefed at 0400, launched at 0600,and were scheduled to recover at 1000.
As we preflighted our Sikorsky H-60 that morning, we saw large thunderheads and lightning flashes roughly ten miles away. It was unusual for the Gulf, but we’d been getting thunderstorms for a few days and had been having no trouble avoiding them. So far.
Nothing much happened in the first hour of flight. The fixed wingers launched OK while we in the helo warmed up, drank coffee, and slowly worked closer and closer to the Iranian side of the Gulf as we kept our carrier between ourselves and the weather. During a break between launch cycles, we radioed the ship for tasking and accepted directions away from her to go photograph an Iranian oil tanker. We had an uneventful flight out to the tanker, though the cloud ceiling had dropped to about 500 feet. After we finished photographing the ship, the carrier called us with another contact. That’s when things started to get interesting.
We turned toward the contact and saw a dark gray wall in front of us. We called up the ship, told them we wouldn’t be able to get to the contact due to weather, and added that we were coming back. It was coming up on time for our passenger runs, anyway. Problem was, that gray wall had extended and was now standing between us and our carrier. “No problem,” we thought. “We’ll just transit south until we get around it.”
That wall just kept going and going. Our crew chief said that he saw a clearer route to the north, so we decided to give that a try and turned around. It was a great plan, right up until we saw all the lightning strikes raining down on the area we’d planned to traverse.
Now we were getting a little uncomfortable. There was nothing between us and the carrier but black, grey, and thunderbolts all the way down to the water. The other option was sunny Iran, which was really no option at all. We decided that the best route, since we had to go through this mess, was to pick the lightest spot in the grey and go for it.
As I flew closer and closer to the light grey wall, I got more and more tense until, just prior to penetration, that little elf on my shoulder jumped up and shouted, “Rethink this!” I said, “I really don’t want to do this. Let’s turn around and rethink our options.”
The crew chief chimed in, “I concur, sir.”
Our HAC thought for a second. “OK, let’s turn around.”
So we bought ourselves a few minutes and reevaluated the situation. We were on the wrong side of a nasty line of thunderstorms; our only divert was a place that, if not hostile, certainly wasn’t friendly; there was so much thick white lightning raining down around that line that we pilots didn’t even flinch when the guys in back called, “Holy smokes! That was close!” any more. Oh, and while we reevaluated, more clouds formed around us. We didn’t have many options to weigh, and we hadn’t talked to anyone for some time.
Wait a minute! We hadn’t talked to anyone for some time! We’d had trouble with one of our two radios earlier in the flight and had only been talking to the Surface Control Module, the guys who track big surface ships and tell us where to go to have a look at them. But those guys didn’t have weather radar! Someone suggested that we try to call Departure, which is a dedicated air traffic control frequency with weather radar, and see if they could help us navigate the storm.
“Departure, 611 (our call sign), 11.2 miles out on your [compass bearing] 110, request radar vectors through this weather.”
“611, Departure. I’ve been trying to contact you, sir. You’re right in the middle of it. I’ll try to get you through. Come to [heading] 240. It should clear up about six miles from your current position.”
“Roger, 611, new course 240.”
Naturally, that course steered us straight into the blackest part of the wall.
Almost instantaneously, we were flying blind. I couldn’t even see the water 175 feet below us. I decelerated to our most efficient airspeed, asked the aircraft commander to back me up on the gauges, and got my soul right with the Lord. The rain was so loud, it almost drowned out the sounds of the engines and rotors. The lightning was so heavy, I stopped worrying about whether we’d be struck, since there’d be nothing I could do about it other than fly the bird. And the intercom got very, very quiet.
The crew chief’s voice, cautious: “Sir, everything OK up there?”
“Yes. I’ve got all my synapses concentrated on the gauges.” I was using my ‘super cool’ voice, the voice I always use when I’m terrified.
“And I’m backing him up,” joined my buddy in the left seat, also in ‘super cool’ mode. “Everything’s OK.”
Departure came up again. “You’re about five miles from the clear area, sir. Come left [new heading] 220.”
“220, roger.”
Again, quiet: Kasparov quiet, the silence of concentration. The crew chief even gave up exclaiming at the proximity of the lightning hits. Every ten or fifteen seconds, someone would say, “Gauges green, doing good, or, “You’re doing fine.” Under most conditions, those kinds of comments are bromides. Today, however, they helped keep me calm and keep me flying.
The strangest part of the experience was how, when we were in the thick of it, we all became very calm, very professional. We had work to do.
And then the rain lessened, disappeared, and we were in a corridor amongst the clouds. We could see the sea again. It was gray, as was the ceiling about 300 feet above us and the walls of the thunderstorms all around.
“611, Departure. Have you in the clear, with storm cells at [bearings] 300 and 210. Recommend new course 255.”
“Departure, 611, roger,” my HAC radioed. “We see lightning down those bearings, coming to new course 255.”
And the amazingly accurate directions of the Departure controller continued until, at 3.5 nautical miles out, we saw our carrier, flat gray against the gray sea. I never thought I’d be so happy to see that boat. On the other hand, I wasn’t so happy to see all the lightning crashing down into the sea near her stern.
Once again, we got on the radio. “Departure, 611, have you in sight. Sir, what’s the status of our passenger run?”
“We’re checking into that, sir.”
Then our TACAN needle went away. The navigation lights on the ship went out. The radios got quiet. The HAC made the call. “Departure? Departure, 611?” Nothing. Not even static.
There was no way we were going to lose visual contact with mom at this point. We stayed within two miles, flying close orbits, watching the lightning, which by now we’d almost come to take for granted, come crashing down. After a minute or so, we heard the voice of the ship’s captain over the net.
“611, this is the bridge on emergency transmitter. We’ve had a lightning strike and power failure here. Navigation beacons, lights, and radios are down. Stand by. I’ll stay up with you until Departure comes back on line.”
So we did just that, standing by and orbiting the aircraft carrier, trying to stay clear of the worst of the lightning, waiting for the ship to fix itself. That’s when the crew chief raised the question, “Sir, what exactly happens if we get struck by lightning?”
The HAC responded, “Well, we should get a total AC power failure, for one thing. That would knock out the radios, the automatic flight control system, and the lights.”
I chimed in, “Hey, why don’t you grab the big in-flight manual and have a look? Lightning should be in the ‘heavy weather’ section.”
So he did have a look and, as we hawked the ship and avoided the blackest clouds, read to us everything the manual had to say about lightning strikes and total AC power failures. We came up with our plan in case we got hit, which was, basically, “If we don’t lose both our engines, we fly it back. If we do lose them, we get very wet very quickly.”
And that’s when Departure came back up. “611, we’re with you. We had a lightning strike here. We’re still trying to work that passenger issue for you.”
For the first time since things had started to get sticky, I laughed. Our HAC came back up, “Departure, 611, the passenger run is canceled. I’m not leaving visual range of the ship.”
“611, roger, will coordinate. Stand by.”
And it wasn’t long after that that we heard the magic words: “611, cleared to land.”
And we came back to the ship, feeling pretty good about ourselves, our bird, and our teamwork. After we’d shut down and I climbed out of the cockpit, one of the maintainers asked me if we were scared. I looked at him, smiled, got down on my hands and knees, and kissed the deck of that big, beautiful ship.
