The metaphor that kept coming up in pilots’ accounts was that landing on a carrier was like trying to land on a postage stamp (one of the guys I met later on the carrier would use exactly that phrase). Which takes some doing, of course, but if it’s daylight, with a steady wind, perfect visibility and the sea flat as a pond it looks fairly routine. But then you throw in some variables: a storm, cross-winds, rain and pitching seas so that looking through the Plexiglas of the cockpit is like being on a trawler in the North Sea. Or maybe one engine’s gone. Or both engines are gone. Or you’re blinded by gunfire, unable to see anything, taking instructions from a plane on your wing and the LSO, nobody raising their voices, just ‘Right rudder, right rudder’—until the last moment when the LSO shouts, ‘Attitude, attitude, attitude!’
You can see footage of this stuff, along with a lot more escapes and disasters—recent and vintage—on YouTube. A plane that seems on the brink of stalling, almost vertically, right over the carrier, somehow takes wing again. A malfunction means the navigator has partially ejected and so the pilot has to bring the plane in with his colleague riding on the remains of the cockpit as if at a rodeo. Hearing the LSO yell, ‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’, pilot and navigator obey instantly, only to see their plane gather speed and fly gamely into the distance like a horse whose jockey has fallen at Becher’s Brook.
If all goes as planned, the plane comes to a halt, the tail hook is raised, the arresting wire is released and comes snaking back, helped on its way by crew members who prod it along with brooms to discourage it from even thinking of taking a break. Within seconds it’s back in place, kinked and quivering somewhat from the strain of its existence—understandable in the circumstances—but otherwise ready for the next tug of war with an F-18.
2
We trooped back down the stairs, took off our float coats and cranials. In the course of my stay I moved constantly and quickly between the numerous levels below the flight deck, often barely conscious of where I was (didn’t have a clue most of the time), but the difference between the flight deck and everything below was absolute. It was like entering the dreamtime up there, a martial realm of the supersonic, where the sky gods G and Negative G had constantly to be assuaged and satisfied. Launch and recovery may have been organized as they were in the interests of efficiency and safety but it was a religious ritual too—a ritual from which it was impossible to return as a non-believer or sceptic even if one didn’t understand exactly who was doing what or why (actually that qualifier binds it more tightly to traditional religious ceremonies).
Now it was time for another, more ordinary ritual: lunch in the Ward Room reserved for commissioned officers. My anxieties about what life on the boat would be like had not been confined to whether I’d have my own room. I was also worried about the scran, the scoff, the grub. I’m the worst kind of fussy eater. I don’t have any allergies and aside from seafood I don’t have any generic objections to food types, but I have aversions and revulsions so intense and varied that I struggle to keep track of them myself. I grew up hating all the food my parents cooked, was always being told I didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. That’s probably why I’m so skinny, why I joined the lunch queue with some trepidation. Trepidation that turned out to be entirely justified. It was all revolting. The smell of cooked meats and the jet fuel they were cooked in made me heave. There were salads, yes, but with lettuces represented and disastrously symbolized by the iceberg they were deeply dispiriting. I’m not a principled vegetarian but I was on the look-out for a cooked vegetarian option which I found in the form of spaghetti with tomato sauce. It was almost cold while it was in the serving containers. By the time it had sat on a cold plate for thirty seconds and I had sat down with the snapper, Newell and some friends of his from the Reactor Room, any residue of heat had gone. It was not a pleasant pasta but at least its unpleasantness was all in the moment of consumption; the unpleasantness did not turn into the gag-inducing aftertaste of the big meats. A veteran of assignments in the world’s most troubled and least appetizing spots, the snapper tucked in with gusto. He was hungry, the snapper, and he was adaptable. For dessert I had a couple of plums and a yoghurt which, coincidentally, was plum-flavoured though it didn’t really taste of anything. It wasn’t much of a meal but the sparrow had been kept alive, the wolf from the door. I had got through lunch but I was already—after just one sitting—calculating how many more meals I would have to get through in the course of my stay.
3
After all I’d heard about the size of these carriers I’d assumed there would be an abundance of facilities. Ping-Pong tables—and the prospect of a table-tennis league—were such a cert that I’d actually brought my paddle with me. Badminton seemed likely and, though this might have been a tad optimistic, I even had hopes of a tennis court. The reality is that a carrier is as crowded as a Bombay slum, with an aircraft factory—the hangar bay—in the middle. The hangar bay is the largest internal space on the boat. It’s absolutely enormous—and barely big enough for everything going on there.
Just past the hatch through which we entered a dozen men and women in shorts and singlets, all plugged into their iPods, were pedalling away on exercise bikes or running on treadmills. It was like stepping into a future in which the technology of renewable energy had advanced to the point where their efforts powered the whole ship. There was even a statue of someone running: George Bush Sr., of course, in flying suit and kit, scrambling for his plane back in the Second World War when he was a Navy pilot. Fuel tanks were hung from ceiling and walls. Every bit of space was utilized in the same way that my dad, on a smaller scale, maximized space in his garage (never trusting me, as a result, to park his car there after I’d borrowed it). The planes were nuzzled up close to each other. Mechanics were clambering all over them, with special soft moccasins over their boots to prevent damage. Each of the planes had a pilot’s name stencilled just below the cockpit where, in the Second World War, Japanese flags or swastikas would indicate kills. But the fact that Dave Hickey had his name here did not mean that it was Hickey’s plane for his exclusive use (which made me wonder what the point was of having his name there at all; I mean, when you write your name on the milk carton in the fridge of a shared student house you do it to indicate that it’s your milk, that it’s not for anyone to take a big gulp of or to pour over a bowl of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes just because they’ve got the munchies).
I was working my way through this analogy-reminiscence when we were met by Commander Christopher Couch whose businesslike pleasure it was to take us on a tour of this massive—and massively crowded—space. He was in his mid-forties, I guessed, and his hair was cut like everybody else’s on the ship. I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs—irrespective of the job—and if ever there was a man in love with his job it was Couch. He began by explaining that the E-2C Hawkeye had an eight-bladed prop and that this had only recently been made possible by advances in materials technology. Made sense. I thought back to First World War biplanes with their twin-bladed props and maximum speeds slightly faster than a bike’s. I had no chance to make notes; there was so much to see and it was impossible