Military: What famous actors served in the military?.Military Aircraft: What are the most culturally significant airplanes?.So I got out after seven years active duty, spent a few more years flying in the reserves, and hung up my flight suit for good. What I wouldn’t have enjoyed was being separated from my wife and kids for that long. I ended my naval career before I reached that point for the very mundane reason that marriage and a child had put an end to my desire to go to sea for six months at a time. What I didn’t realize at the time, and didn’t realize until much later, is how much I still had to learn to be the best of the best. I enjoyed every minute of it, even those minutes when I realized I had just gotten out of a situation in which I might have been killed. I wrote in my Quora profile that I was a Navy carrier pilot “when I was young and foolish.” That wasn’t lightly said. And there’s the LSO, who is highly experienced at watching planes land on a carrier and watches each plane come aboard from the time it picks up the glide path until it lands. Usually the LSO already knows this, because he knows how the plane looks and behaves when it is on the correct speed or slow or fast. There’s another who is keeping track of your speed and reporting to the LSO if you are faster or slower than you should be. For instance, there’s a guy with binoculars whose only job is to make sure that your landing gear, flaps, and tailhook are all down as you said they were and that the plane is not visibly damaged. But there are a lot of people there to help. If the plane is coming back from combat (something I have never experienced) and may have battle damage or a hung bomb or rocket, that’s another tension-maker. If we haven’t been flying for awhile, or if the weather is bad, or there are heavy seas causing the deck to pitch, then it’s less than routine. Making a carrier landing is just the way a Navy pilot at sea finishes a flight. I’ve made this sound routine, because, when we are flying every day, it is. The wire is attached to an arresting gear engine, which pays out wire under tension to slow my plane from the flying speed at which I caught the wire to a full stop. As I roll the wings level, the rate of descent slows and I fly right up to the stern, crossing over the flight deck and flying down until my tailhook catches one of the arresting gear wires. I’m about 100 feet above the water and 50-100 yards behind the ship, still descending. At this point I may get some instructions from the LSO to fine tune that last stage, telling me if I’m a little high, a little low, a little fast, a little slow, or so on. When I see the optical ball that shows the glide path, I report that and continue turning and descending until I enter final approach directly behind the ship. I’m now scanning between the landing area of the ship, the optical glide path, and my speed and altitude instruments in the cockpit so that I can continue to fly around the pattern safely and intercept the glide path at the right speed and altitude. I’ll intercept the glide path somewhere between the 90- and 45-degree positions. Other optical devices give an indication to the pilot that the plane is on the glide path above it or below it. This is the glide path that I want to follow down to a safe touch down in the middle of the arresting gear. To aid the landing pilot, the ship has an optical device that projects a beam of light toward the planes approaching to land. I had time to look around, check my altitude, check the sight, and actually fly the plane into a better position before dropping the bomb, still at 3,300 feet, but no longer a panic point, simply the altitude to push the bomb button, and start a pull out. What I began to notice was that time seemed to slow down. I’m not sure where the gunsight was in relation to the target. The dive, which actually took about 15 seconds, seemed to take no time at all. I’d heard stories about pilots having target fixation and flying into the ground. The first time I did it, all I cared about was knowing when I got to 3,300 feet so I could pull out. Drop the bomb and start a pull out at 4-5 Gs. Back when I was learning to drop a bomb on a target (long before smart bombs) the routine was to roll into a 40-degree dive at 8,000 feet, place the center dot of the gunsight below the target, and let it walk up to the target so it is dead on just at the time to drop the bomb. Here’s a secret about flying: When you start to learn something new, such as formation flying, instrument flying, gunnery, or dive-bombing, it’s hard, scary, and it seems like things happen way too fast, before you are ready. Like any critical flying skill, it’s something that is practiced over and over until it becomes second nature.
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