Air Warriors: The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot - Softcover

Waller, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982128216 ISBN 13: 9781982128210

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2019

Synopsis

Veteran journalist and author of The Commandos Douglas Waller chronicles his rare and intimate experience with the training program for Navy pilots in this “engrossing saga that will likely become an unofficial recruiting tool for naval aviation” (Publishers Weekly).

Waller, who was granted permission to participate in the pilots’ grueling training regime, has written an absorbing behind-the-scenes account of the physical and psychological trials endured by the most specialized group of pilots in military history.

From his bird’s-eye view in the passenger’s seat, Waller follows pilot trainees through two years of intense preparation. He offers vivid illustrations from the fray: hair-raising aerial dogfights; stomach-swallowing dive-bombing runs; high-speed tactical maneuvers grazing the desert floor; and numerous nerve-twisting aircraft carrier takeoffs and landings. In addition to his own experiences and those of the group of trainees he joins, his research is based on interviews with hundreds of other students and their instructors. Hurtling through the air at death-defying speeds, these pilots-in-training struggle to maintain their composure while withstanding conditions that are designed to challenge them to the very limits of human endurance.

Waller’s deftly drawn portraits of the men and women he encounters in this singular culture of elite pilots are as satisfying as his adventure narrative. The pilots, whose grit, determination, and mental agility operate on an elevated threshold, come into sharp focus behind Waller’s keen lens: their aspirations, awe inspiring. Air Warriors combines an examination of the modern Navy, recovering from past sex scandals, with a portrayal of a privileged cadre of men and women whose ambition and commitment coexist within a tightly knit group. Waller is able to capture images of these pilots training, living, and fighting with an acuity and intelligence that are often absent from Hollywood and television treatments of this diverse and fascinating subculture.

Air Warriors takes us inside the cockpit and behind closed doors for the real story of the making of a Navy pilot.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He is the author of the bestsellers Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red, and The Commandos, as well as critically acclaimed works such as Disciples, the story of four CIA directors who fought for Donovan in World War II, and A Question of Loyalty, a biography of General Billy Mitchell. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Air Warriors CHAPTER ONE

The Chamber

MCKINNEY inhaled deeply the smell of nylon canvas and metal and plastic from the flight equipment room. For three weeks he had been sitting through dreary classes, about as far as it seemed to him that he could get from anything having to do with flying. Now he was finally being fitted for a helmet and oxygen mask. The helmet wasn’t too small or large like the ones he had been told to wear in the past. This time it fit perfectly. A sailor measured the distance from his nose to chin for the size of the oxygen mask that would clamp snugly to his face. For the first time in his training, Charles G. McKinney II, ensign United States Navy, felt like a pilot.

McKinney walked to the room next door. Its whitewashed, cinder block walls reached two stories high. In the middle sat the chamber, a white steel box the size of a railroad car with green-tinted glass windows around it and a control panel at one end with dials and switches that would activate giant pumps to suck out the air from its insides. Before walking in, McKinney twisted off the college class ring from his finger and laid it on a red wood tray. He didn’t want the ring’s stone popping out when technicians lowered the air pressure inside.

Once in a while, a flight student would freak out before entering the chamber, overcome by the thought of being sealed shut in a sterile coffin gasping for air. McKinney found it almost exciting. The movie The Right Stuff, where astronauts become guinea pigs in tests just like this, passed through his mind. Finally he was doing something, not just reading about what it was like to fly.

It could take more than two years of training to become a fully qualified Navy pilot. But before ever setting foot near a plane, a student had to endure six weeks of what was called Aviation Pre-Flight Indoctrination. Forget the enemy for the moment. Flying itself was an unnatural act for humans. At high altitudes the world in which a combat pilot worked was alien and unforgiving. Over an ocean—the principal domain for Navy pilots—it was even more hostile. Only the most physically and mentally fit survived in this deadly environment. Preflight indoctrination taught the student the basics of the aircraft, its engine, the winds that buffeted it from the outside, the complex rules of the road that governed aircraft flight. The six weeks also began to teach the student the dangers of flight, how he must react when things went wrong in the sky and over the water—or, as McKinney was soon to discover, when there was little oxygen around him.

The indoctrination began at Pensacola, Florida, the military and cultural home of Naval aviation. In 1862, a mosquito-infested, sandy flat overgrown with pine trees and magnolias and crawling with alligators had been set aside by Congress along Florida’s panhandle for the naval base. When a handful of oddball officers experimenting with contraptions called “flying machines” later convinced the Navy that it needed an Aeronautic Service, hidebound admirals in 1914 plunked the new branch at the dilapidated Pensacola yard—about as far away from Washington as they thought they could send the silly notion.

But the idea of flying planes off ships slowly caught on. By the end of World War I, the Pensacola Naval Air Station was one of the largest in the world. By World War II, the station mass-produced 22,000 pilots a year. The Naval aviation mafia became as powerful as the fiefdoms that sailed the service’s ships and submarines. Today, the number of aviation students who are graduated is far smaller; only about 1,100 undergo the highly coveted training each year and the instruction is conducted at naval air stations scattered around the United States. But the indoctrination into flying—and a way of life like no other in the civilian world—still begins at the Pensacola Naval Air Station with its lush green lawns, drooping palm trees, the gentle Pensacola Bay off the coast, steamy hot summers, and training aircraft constantly buzzing overhead.

The Navy wanted McKinney about as much as he coveted the training slot. He was black. After decades of first racism, then racial indifference, the Navy was now desperate to recruit more African-Americans into its embarrassingly white aviation ranks. Up until World War II, African-Americans were barred from flight training; the service thought they could not see as well at night as whites. Even after the military was integrated, African-Americans steered clear of Naval aviation, which was considered an elitist preserve of white males.

If he made it through the training, McKinney would become not only one of the Navy’s few black pilots, but also one of its youngest. Born in Newport News, Virginia, he was something of a child prodigy. By the time her son reached three years old, Sylvia McKinney knew he was unusually bright. If he had been born in the ghetto the gift would likely have been ignored or wasted. But Charles was lucky. Sylvia was a reading teacher with a master’s degree. His father, Charles, was a Naval officer in the civil engineering corps.

Sylvia took it upon herself to educate her son and to do so at a faster pace than the public school system’s. Shortly after his third birthday, he was enrolled in preschool. Every afternoon McKinney came home to color-coded word cards his mother flashed before him. By kindergarten, he was reading. Sylvia had access to countless standardized tests from her school and began carefully measuring his intelligence. In kindergarten, he scored 165 on the IQ test. By age five, McKinney was in second grade. Beginning in seventh grade, he took the SAT tests every year thereafter. In his classes, he excelled in science and math, suffered through reading and writing. By age fifteen, he was a senior in high school.

Being a child prodigy could be fun. He felt proud in the classes where the students always turned to him for the right answers. Some teenage girls found it cute that he was so much younger.

But by high school, McKinney discovered that pain also came with being different. The constant moves every military family must make from one duty station to another could be difficult for children. McKinney dreaded each time he had to transfer to a new school—it always seemed to be in the middle of the academic year—and the teacher would make him stand in front of the class to introduce himself. On top of being the new kid—always with the wrong style of clothes—there was the added pressure of being younger and smarter than his classmates. He felt like a puppet in an amusement park. Some students called him Doogie Howser.

So McKinney withdrew into his own shell. He developed many acquaintances but no close friends. He liked it that way—always the outsider looking in, detached from the people around him. By his senior year, he tried to hide his age from people he met for the first time and pretended to be older. That was easy, he discovered. McKinney did look older and he acted more mature than his classmates.

Something else made him feel different. He had never experienced racism until the family moved to the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune when he was nine years old. The six years before, his father had been assigned to Guam, where being black or white meant little to an Asian culture and children of service families grew up oblivious to the prejudices that would later divide them when they returned to the United States. Lejeune was located near Jacksonville, North Carolina—redneck country, where a black kid, no matter how gifted he was, could still be called “nigger.” At first, McKinney found it perplexing, almost impossible to comprehend. Then the slurs began to hurt.

He attended a high school in the middle of a cornfield and faced racism from all sides. Blacks, who shunned him as much as whites, considered him too well bred to be one of their brothers. The constant moves had homogenized any accent in his speech. The educational advantages his parents had afforded him now made him an Uncle Tom in the eyes of black students. He talked and acted like a white boy.

“You’re not from the ’hood,” his black classmates would taunt. “You don’t know us.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” McKinney would answer back. What he didn’t say was that he also didn’t care. People automatically assumed he shared a common heritage and background with African-Americans because of the color of his skin. But he had never felt that bond. He came from a yuppie black family whose mother and father were well educated. The niche blacks expected him to occupy was alien to him. He never felt as comfortable with the African-Americans as he did with other cultures. It had rules of behavior, standards of conduct expected of him—hip, jive, slow walk, Ebonics—with which he had no experience and didn’t care to have. He shared no sense of history with his black brothers. If he ever took the time to investigate, he thought he’d probably discover three or four generations of race mixing among his ancestors.

McKinney enrolled in Georgia Tech University at age sixteen and majored in civil engineering. The school was his second choice. A congressional appointment for the Naval Academy would have been no problem if he had been older, but the academy didn’t accept sixteen-year-olds. He was even too young to qualify for a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship at Georgia Tech. But for as long as he could remember, McKinney had wanted to be an astronaut. He would go crazy if he had a job where he had to sit behind a desk all his life. He wanted to fly. And in the beginning, not just any plane. He had his future carefully plotted. He would fly F/A-18 Hornets, the Navy’s premier attack fighter for the future. Fast but not too fast. Easy to handle, seasoned pilots had told him, the best ticket for being accepted into the NASA program. Space shuttle pilots had to have experience in tactical jets.

McKinney thought his chances of becoming an astronaut were good—simply because he was willing to do anything to achieve the goal. The only roadblock in his way was a phrase that haunted every student pilot—“the needs of the Navy.” Practically all his classmates at Pensacola wanted to fly the glamour carrier jets, the F/A-18s or F-14s. But the Navy had more than a dozen different types of aircraft—jets, propeller-driven planes, helicopters—some of which never landed on an aircraft carrier. Students were assigned to them based on their performance and even more importantly on what the Navy needed at any given time to fill cockpits. What a student wanted to fly was a secondary consideration. McKinney prayed that the Navy wouldn’t suddenly need a lot of helicopter pilots when he finished flight school. He had heard of an astronaut who had begun his Naval career as a helicopter pilot, then had managed to transfer to jets in order to qualify for the shuttle program. But such moves were rare. Navy pilots were usually stuck for the rest of their flying careers with the planes they were assigned from flight school. Anything less than tactical jets would derail his dream of being an astronaut.

Men and women became officers in the Navy usually in one of three ways: through the Naval Academy, Naval ROTC in college, or Officer Candidate School. Since McKinney had been too young for the academy or ROTC, he entered OCS as soon as he graduated from Georgia Tech, which took four and a half years in order to complete its more demanding engineering degree. OCS, which for flight candidates was held at Pensacola, was designed to be a culture shock for youngsters whose only discipline in the past came from mom and dad. Males’ heads were shaved. Females kept their hair cropped short. OCS candidates wore baggy green fatigue pants, T-shirts, Nike running shoes, silver helmets that rattled on their heads, and a thousand-mile stare from little sleep and constant movement.

McKinney was the type of person who always blew things up in his own mind, always a worrier. By the time he reported Sunday morning for the first day of OCS, he was petrified of what was about to happen to him.

The first week—“Poopie Week” was its nickname—fulfilled his worst nightmare. It began with officers just graduated from OCS and awaiting assignment who were supposed to indoctrinate the rookies into the regimentation of military life. The young ensigns did so with a vengeance—payback for the hazing they had just endured. Never had McKinney been yelled at so much and for so long. When he wasn’t at attention, he was pushing up the ground or running or swimming. The hazing from the ensigns, it turned out, was just the warm-up for Thursday morning at five o’clock, when Marine Corps sergeants barged into his barracks banging garbage can lids to wake up the recruits.

By then, however, McKinney realized he wouldn’t die from the training. The Marine drill instructors were surly and intense, but fair. McKinney’s sergeant had a rich heritage. His father and grandfather had been DIs and he considered the job a calling.

McKinney had always thought of himself as a disciplined fellow. Now he marveled at how slovenly he had been as a civilian. Beds had to be made square. Uniforms had to be immaculate. Marches and salutes crisp. The DIs were maniacal about detail and precision. There was a reason. A pilot had to be a nitpicker. Sloppiness in the cockpit could kill him. McKinney began to enjoy the grueling training. By the time he graduated from OCS, he couldn’t wear civilian clothes without making sure there were no loose strings from his shirt. OCS had taught him true mental and physical discipline. It had taught him to think under pressure, to assimilate large amounts of information quickly, to keep his wits when surrounded by chaos.

· · ·

The air inside the chamber smelled stale. Its walls were painted white and from its ceiling hung bright fluorescent bulbs and oxygen tubes for instructors who would monitor the students. There was something very antiseptic to it—and quiet. Neither sound nor air could escape its hermetically sealed steel walls. McKinney felt no claustrophobia, as some students did when they walked into the chamber and the large door hatch sealed shut behind them. He liked small spaces. As a child he would always pick a corner of his bed to curl up as if in a cocoon.

Its full name was the hyperbaric chamber. Its purpose was to acquaint students with one of the most insidiously dangerous conditions a pilot faced at high altitudes: hypoxia, when not enough oxygen reached the tissues of the body. Hypoxia occurred for different reasons. When a pilot pulled Gs in a plane (gravitational pressure from sudden acceleration), the blood in his body sank to his bottom or legs instead of where it was needed in his brain, and he blacked out. A G suit the pilot wore on the lower half of his body inflated like a balloon, squeezing his hips and legs to force the blood back to his brain. Pilots also performed a “hook” maneuver, tightening their stomach muscles and quickly expelling air with a “hook” sound, like a weightlifter straining to pick up a heavy load. It also squeezed blood to their brains.

Another form of hypoxia occurred at high altitudes, where the atmospheric pressure was not great enough to keep the blood saturated with oxygen. A human could maintain a healthy blood-oxygen saturation level (of at least eighty-seven percent) up to about 10,000 feet. Any higher, and his cabin must be pressurized or he must have an oxygen mask strapped to his face. If not, le...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1982128216
• ISBN 13: 9781982128210
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448