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A Short Hop in the Viking
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Once
airborne, we rendezvoused with the off-going tanker for a
package check. Just because your plane has an aerial refueling
store (ARS) attached to it doesn’t mean that it’s
de-facto going to work when you need it to. For this reason
the tankers join up with one another before the Hornets arrive
and check out the store to make sure the hose reels out, that
the indicator lights work, and most importantly that fuel
can be transferred to the receiving aircraft. Once the package
check is complete, we report to the carrier’s Departure
Control that “701 is a sweet tanker, 15 over 5”
and ready to provide fuel on demand. The “15 over 5”
call means that at this point in the flight we have 15Klb
of fuel on board, with 5Klb available for offload to hungry
Hornets.
As the
last plane from the recovery traps, Departure calls us and
says, “701, recovery complete, clear to proceed on mission,
push button 9 for control.” We head towards our assigned
search sector and switch frequencies to preset radio channel
9 to talk to the Surface Warfare (SUW) watch team on the carrier.
They’ll direct us onto any interesting contacts near
the strike group and have us identify them.
 With
the strike group at sea focusing on maintaining and refining
it’s combat readiness, we’re doing a lot of training
and practice missions with OPFOR (opposing forces) playing
the “bad guys” so we can work our tactics and integration
between the air wing and ships. SUW replies with an
immediate, “say simulated load-out” which means
they want to know what simulated weapons we have on board
for dealing with pop-up threats. Sounds like our surface search
mission just turned into a “hot” attack on some
OPFOR unit.
A Patrol
Craft or “PC” is in our sector simulating an enemy
missile patrol boat, and its currently making threatening
moves towards one of our Arleigh Burke class DDGs. SUW
wants us to observe the PC and let him know that “we’re
watching.” Our simulated load-out of 3 CBU-99 Rockeye
cluster bombs is perfect for attacking a small patrol boat
in the open sea if our presence isn’t deterrent enough
to keep him from behaving badly.
 We
descend through the thin overcast below and pop out of the
clouds about 1,000 ft above the slate gray water below. For
some time our TACCO has had radar contact on the PC, and from
that radar track our pilot quickly gains a “tally-ho”
on the tiny patrol boat on the slate gray waters below. We
get close enough to let the PC know we’re watching him,
but not so close that he can take a shot at us.
As we
watch, the PC accelerates to flank speed, making a big wake
and pounding through the white-capped waters. It’s heading
straight for the DDG, as if engaging it was more important
than avoiding the wrath of our S-3B. SUW declares the
PC hostile and orders us to engage with our simulated Rockeye.
We back off a few miles from the PC and set up our weapons
system for the simulated CBU attack.
Feeling
like an A-10 in LOMAC, we push our TF-34 high bypass turbofans
into full “zorch,” which isn’t very fast at
all by this old Tomcat RIO’s standard, but it’ll
certainly be faster than the flank bell that the hapless OPFOR
patrol craft is making.
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