GrundleStiltzkin
New Fish
Until you have landed on 4 acres of US sovereign soil in the middle of the Persian Gulf, you really haven't landed anywhere.
Flare to land, squat to pee. Fuck off Air Force.
Pitch controls airspeed; power controls altitude. Eye-to-hook... keep playing with that power... eyeball the meatball.
Cool shit, Swaye! I'd love to get an opportunity to try this in a sim some day. I should bug my Navy buddy who is based out of NAS Whidbey. He's on the C-40 though and doubtful he could get me into a Growler sim.
You see him working the throttle? It really is like that. You are getting calls from the LSO like "Power" and "Easy" which is helping give you an idea of the rate of movement you have around the glideslope. The meatball is fairly instantaneous but the LSO's can see start to go high or low (they have a camera with a GS line on it) before your brain can process all the variables. So that helps. But yeah, especially the first several times you do it it is stem power and muscle memory that gets you through. Hard for people to fully grasp all that you are trying to process - angle of attack, power, airspeed, glideslope, lineup: and all on the backside of the power curve as you suggest, so everything is 180 out from how you would "normally" fly.
It does get easier as you get experienced, but at night it is always a butthole clencher. I could squeeze coal into diamonds most nights. Good tims.
What always blows my mind is how you fuckers line it up in stormy weather. All that shit is hard enough on a calm day but I have no fucking clue how pilots manage with swells exceeding 30ft. Same goes for coast guard pilots and rescue copters.
Welp, the good news is the sheer size of the carrier prevents a good deal of bobbing, but yes, on really rough seas it is pitching about a bit which just brings the margin for error down to miniscule levels and tightens the window to about the size of a pin head. If it was easy, they would have little girls and Oregon Ducks do it. PUMP MY AVGAS DUCK!
There's anecdote in the Perfect Storm (book, not silly movie) about a Coast Guard SAR helicopter. Well, for starters, crazy they were even out there. Crazier still, when the rescue swimmer gets out of the door, he immediately puts his hand into the top of a wave.
