“Drop your hook,” Annie directed. By feel Trench found the hook handle and lowered it. “Good,” she said when she saw it extend into the slipstream.
In his cockpit, Trench found reason to chuckle. It was as if he were Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles at the piano, looking up and away as he flew his multi-million dollar warplane. He sensed the blue Caribbean below and saw they were surrounded by cottony clouds as his XO led them down and behind the ship. She sounded confident, and it looked as if they could get set up with plenty of “straight in” to get the system to lock-on and allow the ship to fly him down to the deck. He had a few Mode One approaches under his belt, but the air wing pilots seldom used it. He hoped 302 and the ship’s system were up and up.
“Fuel low. Fuel low.”
Instant fear and dread shot through his body as he absorbed the meaning of the message his plane had relayed to him. Trench had at most 20 minutes before his aircraft ran out of fuel.
“Sonofabitch!”
* * *
Now back in Air Ops, Wilson heard Annie’s alarmed voice deliver the dire news of 302’s low fuel state. Dammit, only twenty minutes! he thought. On the PLAT he assessed the deck, jammed with airplanes being towed forward by tractors with yellow shirt directors extorting the deck crew to move faster. He figured they had 15 minutes to get Trench aboard.
South of Coral Sea, Annie knew she would have to guide Trench into a “basket” behind the ship at the proper bearing, altitude, and airspeed to allow the ship to lock him and guide him down to the deck automatically as he selected the automatic carrier landing switches in order, precision flying for any pilot. Annie had to fly Trench’s airplane by voice, and Trench had to respond exactly. So far he was doing a good job following her directions, but once they were behind the ship, things were going to happen fast.
She led them through an opening in the scattered clouds that hovered 2,000 feet above the sea. When Trench had informed her he had a low fuel light, she hit the countdown timer of her clock. She figured they had 15 to 20 minutes left before his engines flamed out, and she settled on 17 minutes as a baseline. Annie was going to stay with him until he was aboard, acting as his eyes and hands in their one shot to get this right. First, she had to level him off at 1,200 feet…. Then both the aircraft auto-throttle and Automatic Flight Control Systems had to work. “How you doing, Trench?” she asked him on Comm 2.
“OK. Seems like we’re getting close to the water.”