"Plane in the water, port side. Man the starboard lifeboats."
The 1MC announcement shattered the silence of the night. I bolted upright in my rack and looked at my watch. Just after 2 a.m., our first night in the Adriatic Sea. I threw on my flight suit and rushed to the combat information center. Most of the air wing staff was already there.
"What happened?" I asked.
"E-2 went down after a wave-off."
One event that changed the lives of many, some for just a week or two, some for the entire six-month deployment, and an unfortunate few for the rest of their lives.
We had completed a rough eleven-day Atlantic crossing wherein even our mighty aircraft carrier was tossed about like a child's bathtub toy. At one point, waves crashed over the flight deck, 60 feet above the water's surface. When we finally arrived in the more peaceful waters of the Mediterranean, a visiting admiral told us that our first port visit would be cancelled so that we could take up immediate station in the Adriatic. (Cancelled port visits would become the norm for this deployment.) Our mission: To fly combat air patrol over Bosnia in support of NATO's Operation Deny Flight.
Earlier in the day two aircraft carriers sailing alongside each other inspired images of the U.S. Navy's massive power projection capability. We spent the day turning over the watch with JFK. By dusk she had turned west toward home, while our crew and air wing cycled into flight ops. As the air wing flight surgeon, I expressed my concerns about our pilots conducting night operations in marginal weather after the long transit and a full day of turnover. We had no choice, I was told. Our Air Force counterparts would not fly that night because their crews had not yet familiarized themselves with the 11,000 foot runway at their base in Italy.
But it's okay for our guys to make night landings on the bobbing deck of a carrier. Go Navy.
So our planes launched into the goo of a low overcast wherein they flew mostly on instruments. The only visual reference they would sight would be the carrier itself when they returned to Mother at the end of their flights. One pilot described the experience as flying around in a bowl of milk, then suddenly flying out of the impenetrable whiteness into a sea of black -- without a visible horizon between the dark sea and the night sky.
In that environment, the lights of the distant carrier as the only visual reference made the perfect setup for visual disorientation. One experienced F-14 pilot had to wave-off his approach because he became so disoriented he felt like he was doing barrel rolls around the ship.
The E-2 Hawkeye descended through the overcast after 4 hours of flying racetrack patterns in the muck conducting radar surveillance and traffic control -- two pilots in front and three naval flight officers in the back. The pilots made a normal approach behind an A-6 that trapped on the carrier ahead of them. But something delayed the A-6 getting out of the landing zone, making it unsafe for the E-2 to land.
Just as the Hawkeye came over the ramp, the landing signal officer (LSO) made the call. "Wave-off, foul deck."
As they had practiced so many times, the pilots immediately added full power, arresting the descent and bringing the aircraft into a climb away from the deck. Per standard procedure, they flew straight ahead to gain altitude before they would circle around for another approach. But then -- with no warning or communication from the aircrew -- a quarter of a mile ahead of the ship and 250 feet above the water, the E-2 nosed over and flew directly into the sea.
The recovery effort persisted through the night and most of the next day, but netted only chunks of aircraft -- the largest being a portion of the radome. The water in that area is very deep. The five men on board never surfaced.
For the next two weeks, as a member of the mishap investigation board, my only assigned duty would be to try to figure out what happened.
