I had a lot of excitement when serving on the USS Kitty Hawk. I was initially scared of being on an aircraft carrier. I was assigned to a carrier based early warning squadron based at North Island Ca. in the U.S.
It is an overwhelming experience going aboard an aircraft carrier for the first time. It is like going to a new city, with no street signs to direct you from one place to another. An aircraft carrier uses coded numbers to navigate from one place to another. Those numbers tell you what level you are on above the waterline. They go from 01 up to about 21. Above 04 (flight deck) is mainly for officers and crewmen steering the ship. Those numbers also tell where you are from front to back on the ship. There are several decks below the waterline; the first deck had sleeping quarters, below that was ammunition storage and below that was engineering spaces (engines, steering, propellers and such.)
My life centered on the 04 deck (the flight deck.) The deck was crowded with planes of several different squadrons. They were frequently shuffled around the flight deck, either for launching or for recovering aircraft after they fulfilled their missions. The E2a squadron I was in always had 3 planes on the flight deck and a 4th on the hanger deck below.
My job was to repair the radios, the tactical navigation systems, the tactical identification system and the altimeter system.(an altimeter tells the pilot how high he is flying above the ground.)
The plane had radios that covered every frequency from AM radio to VHF (very high frequency) to UHF (ultra high frequency.)
My first time out to sea began at the carrier pier in San Diego bay. Tug boats pushed the ship away from the pier into the bay. The ship’s engines took over and we left the bay, then traveled out 100 miles and began a racetrack pattern from San Diego to Los Angeles and back. The 2 weeks out there were used to train pilots how to takeoff and land aboard the ship. On the first day, one of our E2a planes was coming in to land. The pilot was a well seasoned officer. The co-pilot was to make his first landing at sea. The plane had a good approach, but when it touched down on the deck, the plane caught the arresting cable too far port (left) of the centerline. The plane went straight off the deck. The wheels caught in the 3 feet wide steel cable mesh. The nose was pointed down, the arresting cable was trying to pull back to its normal position. The result was the plane cracked open like an egg and fell 60 feet into the ocean. There were 5 crewmen aboard. The pilot managed to get back to the surface and the enlisted radar operator/repair tech made it to the surface, but the co-pilot and the other two radar officers went down to the bottom of the ocean.
The accident happened right in front of me. I was sitting in a plane by the island structure. Had the co-pilot landed to the right side of the arresting wire, I would have been killed and the squadron would have lost 2 planes instead of 1.
My first day ever at sea could have been my last. Instead, I was sitting in the pilot seat of the plane listening to The Wolfman Jack rock and roll station out of L.A. At that time in the sixties, working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier was in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in America. I did not know that at the time, but I was 21 years old and was, I thought, invincible.
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