Navy life on the flight deck was exciting sometimes and then again not always. I remember one of the not so exciting times was working on the crud crew. The crud crew was perhaps the least stimulating adventure strictly under control of the individual squadrons.
It seems that aluminum and saltwater aren’t good friends. I’m not a chemist, so I don’t know the reason why, but what I do know is the rivets on the skin of an aircraft (and there are thousands of them) build up a corrosion when subjected to salt air at sea; so consequently every time we headed for home port in San Diego, the crud crew was instituted to sand blast and polish away the corrosion from the planes. Now because we had the biggest planes on the ship, we had the biggest problem and because these crews were hard, dirty work, the task was assigned to lower ranking personnel in the outfit. I was one of those lower ranking personnel on my first cruise and was assigned to crud crew frequently. In a squadron most people had training and a rating, so the lousy jobs went further up the ranks than normal. The corrosion was tiny and difficult to see, so one of the airframe mechanics would sandblast the areas affected and the rest of us would fine sand where he had already been so he could come back later and repaint the aircraft skin. It was a lot like wax on, wax off in the karate kid movie. No one liked it, but we all had to do our duty for God and for our country.
During the one stand down the air group put on a show for the ship. It was in 1967, but I still remember it well. The show started with some A4 Skyhawks flying low firing their 20-mm cannons at a target sled pulled behind the Kitty Hawk. Movies are one thing, but to see the real thing just a few yards off the fantail is the real deal! The A4 Skyhawk was the smallest attack aircraft in the Navy arsenal and the only plane in the fleet that didn’t need wings that folded up aboard ship.
The A4 Skyhawk is pictured below.
The pilots in these sports cars of the skies would dive from the skies and fire the 20-mm cannons at North Vietnamese convoys of supplies, chasing little guys riding bicycles with huge bags of rice and ammunition strapped on the back of the bikes and scattering the convoys all over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Senator John McCain was in an A4 Skyhawk beside two A4’s engulfed in the fire that nearly sunk the USS Forrestal in July of 1967.
The next part of the show was a Northrop Aviation A-5 (My last employer Northrop Grumman) reconnaissance aircraft (then the fastest plane in the sky) that appeared on the horizon at flight deck level (just over 86 feet off of the water) at twice the speed of sound. The plane was a tiny black spec on the horizon, and then in a second or 2 it was even with the deck and was then over the other horizon and out of sight before the sonic boom hit us on deck. We could feel the boom against our chests. The plane was gone before we ever heard the sound. It was an awe-inspiring sight to see and hear.
I was told at that time that a Navy jet when running at sea level burned fuel as fast as a person could pour it out of a bucket. I don’t know if that was absolutely accurate, but I do know that plane was burning a lot of fuel when it went past us at 1600 miles per hour.
Those guys used a lot of fuel when they took off; they would light off the afterburner while still immobilized on the catapult, so the engines were running as fast as if they were running at 1600 miles per hour, but were standing still, locked to the catapult. That all changed of course when the cat operator pressed the launch button. The pilot would have to have the stick pulled back before launch, because he was unable to move until the plane was well off the deck. There were tankers in the air to top off their tanks as soon as they got to altitude so they had enough fuel to perform their mission and return.
There was more to the air show, but it paled in comparison and I don’t really remember what happened beyond that. The rest was like the closing credits on a great movie, no one ever sees them; the attraction was over.
Copyright Bill Weber 2006-2019 and beyond.
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