Eject! Eject! Eject! (eBook)

Prologue:
My Accident

In Greek mythology, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, escape from King Minotaur’s Isle of Crete, using wings made by Daedalus. Despite his father’s warnings, Icarus is killed when he flies too high and too close to the sun, melting the wax and burning the feathers attached to his wings. He falls into the sea and drowns.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Shark 22, I’m in the water, I’m OK.” January 15, 2008, started out routinely. My wife and I got the kids up, enjoyed breakfast together, and walked them to school. We returned home, put our littlest one in the car, and headed to our local gym. Once we finished our workouts, we grabbed a couple tuna sandwiches at our favorite lunch spot before returning home so I could get ready for work. That day’s mission was Red Air. Our job was to disrupt and destroy Blue Air’s game plan, preventing them from successfully reaching their target. I was a wingman, which meant I was in a support role for my flight lead. I only needed to assist with the weather, Notices to Airman (NOTAM), threats, and the emergency procedure of the day. Since I didn’t have to coordinate and develop the entire tactical game plans of both sorties, I could focus on improving my defensive tactics. We were flying twice that day as Red Air—a daytime mission, followed by a turnaround for a similar Red Air sortie at night. I had decided my personal desired learning objective (DLO) would be executing and evaluating a textbook defensive maneuver. This maneuver is aggressive in execution, with many risk factors to consider. My thought process was that because so much of our tactical flying was shifting to night operations—and I didn’t want my first time executing the maneuver to be in combat, at night, over the Taiwan Strait—I may as well practice during the day sortie and then polish the maneuver at night.

Our daytime sortie went well, but I made some mistakes executing the tactic by the book, which negated the effectiveness of the maneuver. I planned to clean up my mistakes that night, if my flight lead’s tactics allowed. The forecast for our night mission over the Gulf of Mexico included low clouds over the water, unlimited visibility, and a bright moon for Night Vision Goggles (NVGs). Initially, my flight lead’s tactics did not call for me to exercise my tactical intention; however, Blue Air was delayed coming off the air refueling tanker, while we burned down mission-critical fuel holding in our Combat Air Patrol (CAP). The Blue Air Mission Commander of the four-ship formation would “push” late to meet their Time over Target (TOT). This is where the holes in my “Swiss cheese”—as we pilots say—began lining up.

The Swiss cheese model for accident prevention (Figure 1) is something pilots are quite familiar with. The concept is to set up traps such as checklists, operational risk management (ORM) procedures, use of tactical decision aides, wingman input and consideration, proficiency, and reduction of mission complexity to prevent or offset cumulative errors (holes) from aligning all the way through the Swiss cheese to the other side, all representing a mishap or accident.

Figure 1. James Reason Swiss cheese model adaptation.

The holes in my Swiss cheese were beginning to align as we stepped up to our clean F-16s for our evening mission. Because Blue Air was behind their timeline, we would have to modify our original game plan in order to conserve fuel and still provide them adequate training. Originally, my flight lead’s Red Air game plan would not have allowed me to execute the tactic I intended to practice on my own. Now that Blue Air was late for their “Push” to the target, however, my flight lead, Shark 21, modified the plan to provide enough training to meet Blue Air’s objectives. This modification allowed me to reconsider executing my tactic as intended. We were established in our CAP, on time, in super-clean F-16s. We had no wingtip missiles or external wing fuel tank drag, and much lower fuel quantity than the Blue Air configured jets we were fighting. This is not how we usually trained as Red Air for this mission (the first hole in my Swiss cheese). Normally we were configured the same as Blue Air, according to the mission tactical phase of training being executed for the month. But due to training requirements and maintenance, the aircraft we took off in were cleanly configured F-16s. A clean F-16 is a highly maneuverable, low-drag, high-speed scream machine carrying less fuel than the Blue Air jets configured with external wing tanks we were fighting against. A cleanly configured jet was beneficial tactically for executing my objective. However, I hadn’t considered the increased performance threat (another hole) for my first attempt at this defensive maneuver, at night, in a clean F-16 rather than my more familiar tanked-up, draggy jet. I had not set a trap in consideration of my inexperience executing the maneuver at night. Choosing a less aggressive maneuver with respect to the dangerous environment I was flying would have been appropriate.

Air combat tactics conducted above the water and at night make for unforgivable maneuvering environments. These require proficiency, confidence, fully functional instrumentation, properly illuminated avionics, a discernible horizon, and cultural lighting—if you can get it. We are trained not to complacently turn night into day under the aid of our NVGs. I felt confident continuing my personal training objective, given the above factors. However, I was unintentionally creating a perfect storm for “spatial disorientation.”

My flight lead modified our game plan allowing me to exercise my tactic. When Blue Air “pushed” from their starting point, we had enough fuel to provide a less complicated ingress “picture” for them to tackle, conserving enough fuel for an enemy egress “picture” while servicing their targets. Our goal was to give Blue Air a problem to solve on and off target prior to reaching “Bingo” fuel and having to RTB (Return to Base).

Considering the excellent moon illumination for NVGs, our perceived discernible horizon, and my comfort level with the environmental conditions, I decided to execute the maneuver. I chose to turn toward the dark abyss over the Gulf of Mexico, littered with illuminated shrimping boats (stars), and a lower strip layer of cirrus clouds (false horizon visual illusion). It would have been wiser to turn toward the cultural lighting off the coast, to help trap any of the spatial disorientation effects of the aggressive maneuvering. I thought I had executed the maneuver well, until I began hearing the distinct familiar auditory hum of an F-16 canopy approaching 1.0 Mach. “Why am I going so fast?” The picture and attitude my brain was perceiving visually appeared to be a familiar 30-degree nose low attitude, wings banked level with the horizon. I believe (we’ll never really know) I transferred my horizon to the moonlit thin cirrus layer of clouds just above the ocean floor while aggressively turning and descending simultaneously. The ocean now became my sky, and the straight edge of the cirrus cloud layer became my horizon reference. I didn’t recognize it through my NVGs. “I shouldn’t be going so fast with the power at idle, right?” I thought. Instinctively, I began pulling back on the stick to slow down as my cross-check was currently inside the cockpit. I was rapidly descending into my safety block of airspace. When I looked back outside the horizon picture I had referenced just seconds before had disappeared into a pure-black, zero-contrast picture outside my canopy. “Strange,” I thought. “Did I enter clouds?” I cross-checked my altitude in the Heads-Up Display (HUD) as I was passing 18,000 feet. I needed to continue my descent into my assigned airspace block of 10,000 to 14,000 feet. I assumed I had enough time to figure out what was going on while descending. Since I had a few seconds before entering my airspace, I rotated my head to the right side of the canopy in search of my last known visual references and cultural lighting cues for the horizon. “Nothing...What’s going on here?” Again, I thought, “I’ll figure it out in my block.” The visual illusion, coupled with my vestibular sensations and probable vertigo while maneuvering, had tricked me into an unintended inverted roll. I didn’t see the cultural lighting picture I’d expected, because I was probably staring at the ocean below, now imperceptibly upside down. I didn’t notice that my aircraft attitude was inverted, since everything seemed normal visually except for my recent loss of the horizon. The auditory cues made me suspicious something was not quite right, but I needed to wait until safely in my assigned block of airspace to address the suspicion. The holes were lining up, as I continued descending despite the audible high-speed cue warning me of my current unusual attitude. I initiated level-off just passing 14,000 feet. “That didn’t feel right,” I thought. It felt like I accelerated, and that sound of high-speed humming resonating outside the canopy became louder as I noticed through the HUD my rate of altitude loss accelerating. “Ok, I’m disoriented—get on the round dial gauges: “Recognize, Confirm, Recover!” I was now descending toward the water at an approximate rate of 1,000 feet per second. I immediately snapped my cross-check to the center pedestal instruments (round dial gauges) to see myself passing 9,700 feet, altimeter winding down counterclockwise at an alarming rate, with my airspeed approaching 600 knots and only a dot on the top of my attitude indicator (ADI) visible....