Tom and Jane: Interlude - 503

Interlude - 503

"Did you hear about VF-2?" asked the ECM (electric countermeasures) operator in my right seat tonight, LT Dave Baker.

I chuckled "yeah, I heard something", not letting on that I had been present for the event.

"I can't believe Jobbo threw a punch at the XO" Baker continued. I kept up my preflight, chuckling but keeping it hidden. The XO of VF-2 was a guy who was not particularly well respected, and Jobbo, or LT CDR John Oboe, had finally grown tired of the martinet who would be CO as soon as the Eisenhower got back to port.

LT JG Christopher Wallon, over the com system, chimed in from the back "He must have had a hell of a cheering section when he did it" and I could hear 'Chirp' Baker laughing.

"Guys, knock it off, checklists." I said, and the conversation died down. I had our front canopy mostly closed, and the two guys in the back had sealed in. "Alright, pre-start complete, starting two" I said, mainly to myself, but also so the other guys would know. I hit the switch, and got ready to move the throttle out of detent. RPMs coming up, temps holding steady, I pulled the throttle past the detent. The Prowler's Pratt & Whitney engine came up beautifully, into the hum and structural rumble that I loved to hear. I watched the temps and RPMs settle, the electronic system take hold, and got the all-clear from all three of my ECM guys.

I flipped the switch over to one, made sure the hydraulics came up, and double checked the engine temp and RPM gauges. All is well. I pulled one out of the detent, and the engine came apart. When an engine disassembles, sometimes the fan blade from one of the compressor stages will be the root cause. That's what the board would find out, that a hairline crack in a blade caused the eventual shattering of the entire disk. Now free of its mount, the blade and disk went flying, blade into an arc that probably took it clear of the Ike entirely, as it was never found. The disk, however, went straight through the inboard left fuel tank, rupturing it, and continued on to lodge itself in the left outboard ECM pod.

This all happened in well under a second, less than the time needed to react.

Smoke almost immediately filled the cockpit, which I assumed that it was a failed air system, and immediately went through the process to shut it down. I could hear Wallon and Faber in the back, yelling over the intercom that their canopy was stuck down. I yelled into my mic "Blow it, get out!" but found myself yelling to dead silence. The comms system had just gone down. I looked over at Baker, and he had pushed our canopy up manually, and was climbing out, dragging his attachments over the side. I needed to buy the guys in the back some more time. I looked at the engines, and engine 1's RPM was down, and temperature all the way up. We were on fire. To illustrate my point, the left engine fire warning light illuminated. I looked left, and the world was ablaze. "Oh Jesus oh God fucking help me help the guys in the back" I prayed the world's worst prayer into my mask, and realizing that I no longer had air coming in, flipped it off. I hit the fire extinguisher, started doing all I could to keep the fire from spreading, and then darkness. I was alive, because I could see by fire illumination, but the entire inside of the cockpit was dark. I looked down, and realized that I had pulled engine 2 back and shut it down, without thinking. I was trying to save the bird by blind instinct. The two guys were still back there, though, because I hadn't felt them eject. I continued punching more fuses, and kept making sure the extinguisher system had fired off, when AT3 McNeal appeared at the right side of the cockpit. I heard him yell, and turned to him to tell him to back away. I stopped when I saw the absolute fear in his eyes, from a man I had considered fairly fearless. Stunned for a moment, McNeal jumped into action for me; he essentially punched the harness off me, and ignoring all my intercom and oxygen connections, yanked me out of the cockpit, the first time in my life I had been thrown by a human being.

We landed, 10 or so feet down, on the deck of the Ike. Ray was on his back, and I had obviously knocked the wind out of him by landing on him. I got up to pull him away, and realized my right hand no longer worked right. I wrapped my good arm around him, and tried to pull, but my legs couldn't get a grip on the deck for some reason. A space alien in silver appeared at that moment, with help from a guy in a purple shirt. The alien grabbed me, and half carried me clear of the firefighting foam that had apparently replaced the deck. I finally was dropped, at a safe distance, on my hands and knees. Arms were helping me up, and I realized one set of them belonged to Wallon, and the others belonged to Faber and Baker. I realized that I could actually hear them talking, and my neck hurt, and my helmet was gone, probably part of the fire that was now consuming 503. All three were talking at the same time, asking three different questions, and I just turned to see McNeal, laying on the deck. I rushed over, and he was holding his ribs, but slowly getting his breath back. "Commander what the hell is wrong with you" he was trying to say. I waved over the corpsmen who were on deck, and they began to attend to him. With McNeal being safely attended to, I just got up and walked over to the clear side of the deck, found the stairs, dropped down a level, went inside, and collapsed. One of the deck crew found me a couple minutes later, and I spent the next few days in the ship's hospital.

McNeal won a Distinguished Service Medal for his actions, to go with his broken ribs.