220420 Sentinel, Stand Down

This story is about the only stand down we ever had off the coast of Vietnam.
Navy life 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 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 build up a corrosion when subjected to salt air at sea; so consequently there were times when the crud crew was instituted to sandblast 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 the crud crew frequently. In a squadron where 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. No one liked it, but we all had to do our duty for God and for our country.
During a stand down off the coast of Vietnam when we were not bombing, 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 20mm 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 onboard the ship. The pilots in these sports cars of the skies would dive from the skies and fire the 20mm cannons at North Vietnamese convoys of supplies, sometimes chasing little guys riding bicycles with huge bags of rice and ammunition strapped on the back of the bikes, scattering the convoys all over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The next part of the show was a Northrop Aviation A-5 reconnaissance aircraft

(then the fastest plane in the sky) it 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 few seconds 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 planes 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 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 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.
I left the Kitty Hawk in March of 1968 by way of a catapult launch in a propeller driven cargo plane, a slow flier, but from a standstill to the edge of the flight deck, it was just as fast as anything in the Navy. Imagine going from 0 to 160 miles per hour in about 2 seconds. That was a thrill I'll never forget. The shot pasted me in my seat and I could not move until we were in the air.