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Overview
The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet was born in 1978, a state-of-the-art supersonic fighter and attack aircraft with a top speed of Mach 1.8, more than one thousand miles per hour. It was versatile, fast, and reliable, and no war machine in the air could match it. The marines adopted it first, followed by the navy, impressed by its incomparable ability to engage in close aerial combat while at the same time efficiently delivering explosive payloads to designated enemy targets. It became the aircraft of choice for the US Navy’s famous Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron in 1986 and served ably in combat from its first mission—America’s launched air strike against Libya that same year—through 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and well beyond. Yet the Hornet has always been shrouded in controversy, and while still in its planning stages, it sparked an unprecedented political battle that nearly doomed the miraculous machine before it could take flight.
Orr Kelly, the acclaimed military author who has notably chronicled the remarkable histories of the US Navy SEALs and other branches of America’s Special Forces, tells the fascinating true story of the F/A-18 Hornet—how it came to be, how it almost wasn’t, and how it forever altered the way our nation’s wars are fought.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497645677 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/24/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hornet
The Inside Story of the F/A-18
By Orr Kelly
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1990 Orr KellyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4567-7
CHAPTER 1
The Battle of the Admirals
In July 1970, an American Big Bird satellite passed silently over the Soviet Union, as it did routinely every hour and a half. Through superb lenses capable of photographing an item the size of a tennis ball, cameras aboard the satellite recorded the scene 120 miles below.
A short time later, as Big Bird crossed the Pacific, a trapdoor opened and a canister of exposed film plummeted downward. As it entered the lower atmosphere, a parachute deployed automatically and the canister drifted toward the sea near Hawaii, a radio beacon signalling its position. Before it hit the waves, an airplane with a large boom extended behind it snagged the parachute, and the canister was quickly reeled in.
For photo analysts examining miles of film, the challenge was to find change: anything that wasn't there yesterday or the week before; anything that was there before, but was gone today.
What caught the eyes of the analysts on this particular day was a new shape, the shape of an airplane they had never seen before. It was spotted at an airfield near the city of Kazan, at the confluence of the Kama and Volga rivers, about 400 miles east of Moscow. For years, there had been speculation that the Soviet Union was working on a new bomber, and in the previous year, rumors about such a bomber had become more frequent. Now, the speculation ended. Here was a picture of the bomber.
Skilled photo interpreters with a background in aeronautical engineering can reach some remarkably accurate conclusions about the probable performance of a plane by studying a photo, without ever seeing the plane itself or watching it fly. The length of the wings and the dimensions of the fuselage tell a good deal about a plane's range and payload. The engine inlets and exhaust ports provide clues to engine performance and thus tell something about speed and altitude.
In this case, as more information came in, it was clear that the shape seen on the ground at Kazan was indeed something quite new. The West gave the plane the code-name of Backfire. The Soviets, it was later learned, called it the Tu-26, a product of the Tupolev design bureau.
This is what it looked like: With its wings capable of moving backward and forward in flight, its appearance was much like that of the American F-111 fighter-bomber that had been in service for several years. But it was bigger and it carried a crew of four, rather than the two in the F-111. Its wings, swung full forward, as they would be for landing or takeoff, spread nearly 113 feet and it was almost 130 feet long. With a weapon load of 26,450 pounds, its maximum takeoff weight was 286,600 pounds. Its two engines, originally developed for the Soviets' abortive effort to build a supersonic transport plane, hurled it through the air at better than twice the speed of sound at high altitude and just under the speed of sound on the deck.
As word of this new bomber spread from the intelligence community to the Pentagon, the White House, and Capitol Hill, one question dominated all others. Did the Backfire have the range to attack targets in the U.S. and return home again? If it did, then it might be a dangerous new strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, requiring large amounts of money to be spent on air defenses. As more information about range came in, the answers to the questions about the purpose of this new plane were ambiguous. With an unrefueled combat radius of 2,485 miles, a Backfire attacking under U.S. radar would have to be refueled coming and going. Perhaps it could go on to land in Cuba or—and this was not entirely unthinkable in a nuclear war—it might be used in one-way suicide attacks.
Through most of the 1970s, the Backfire was at the center of a continuing debate between those who considered the plane both a new threat to the U.S. and proof of ill-will on the part of the Soviet Union, and those who argued that its relatively limited range ruled it out as a strategic bomber.
This was the issue that was debated in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon and, increasingly, in public. But the navy's top admirals, in their offices on the outermost ring of the Pentagon's fourth floor, looked at the Backfire and saw something quite different and much less ambiguous. They didn't at all like what they saw.
For years, the admirals had worried about massed bomber attacks on their ships, especially the big aircraft carriers. Those worries, based on their experience in the great naval war with Japan, had been largely hypothetical. The Soviets had never put together a naval bombing force capable of a knockout blow. But the Backfire could change all that. Whether or not the new plane threatened the continental U.S., it could, in sufficient numbers, inflict major damage on the American fleet.
If a war with the Soviet Union broke out in Europe, the existence of a regiment or two of Backfires could vastly complicate what was seen then as the navy's primary job of keeping open the sea lanes between the U.S. and European ports.
The navy's strategy has evolved since that time, but this is how such a conflict might have unfolded in the early 1970s:
With the opening of hostilities, much of the Atlantic Fleet would move quickly toward the line that stretches from Greenland to Iceland, to the Faeroe Islands, and on to the United Kingdom—the G-I-UK Gap, as it is called. Destroyers and submarines would form a picket line to prevent Soviet submarines and surface raiders from sailing down into the North Atlantic. Carriers would move into place to provide air cover and aid in the search for submarines. In effect, the plan was to bottle up the Soviet Navy north of the Gap, in the Norwegian Sea.
The Red Navy already outnumbered the U.S. in submarines. Add to this a new threat from the air, and even strong defenders of the navy strategy began to wonder if it would work.
Each Backfire could carry two big AS-4 Kitchen missiles under its wings. Taking off from bases in the northern Soviet Union near Murmansk, the bombers would fly high over Finland, Sweden, and Norway, passing out to sea above the Arctic Circle. Then, to avoid radar detection, they would swoop down close to the waves and aim toward the American carriers at just below the speed of sound. At about 200 miles out, they would pop up, launch their missiles (doubling the number of targets the Americans would have to contend with), and then turn for home.
The Kitchen missile, first seen in the early 1960s, looks like a little airplane, with stubby wings and a cross-shaped tail. Its rocket motor propels it faster than the speed of sound and its own radar set guides it to the target. In its nose it carries either a nuclear or conventional warhead. Even the 2,200 pounds of ordinary high explosive is enough to sink a merchant ship or a destroyer. A hit from even one Kitchen would be powerful enough to cause serious damage to a carrier, at least disrupting flight operations for a number of hours.
If a combined bomber-submarine assault succeeded in breaking the American barrier at the Gap, then the whole Western strategy for the defense of Europe might quickly unravel. Submarine packs would be free to swing down into the mid-Atlantic or gather off ports in the U.S. and Europe. Backfire bombers and older Soviet Bears and Badgers—perhaps already operating out of bases in Norway—could wreak havoc with shipping. While the pilot of a Backfire would be foolhardy to come close to the warplanes of a carrier, he could freely attack cargo and troop ships with his twelve 1,100-pound bombs once the threat from fighters and interceptors had been removed.
It is against this background that two admirals emerge, representing conflicting views on the nature of the threat from Backfire and on what to do about it. The planes that fill the decks of America's carriers in the 1990s are what they are because of the decisions made while these two men—Vice Adm. William Houser and Vice Adm. Kent Lee—held the two top posts in naval aviation in the mid-1970s.
Houser, a fighter pilot who had commanded carriers and entire carrier divisions, became deputy chief of naval operations [DCNO] for air warfare in August 1972. That made him the navy's senior aviator, responsible for advising the chief of naval operations [CNO] on all matters relating to aviation: pilots, airplanes, weapons, training, carriers and bases. In effect, he was the representative in the Pentagon of the carrier navy.
His chief rival in the battle to shape the future of carrier aviation was Kent Lee, who had shot down one Japanese plane as a World War II fighter pilot and later served as commander of an attack squadron. In the late 1960s, while serving as commander of the nuclear-powered carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, Lee became deeply discouraged with the quality of the planes the navy was flying. He had two maintenance crews working twelve-hour shifts, and they still couldn't keep up with the workload. It was not unusual for the crews to put in forty or fifty manhours for every hour a plane spent in the air.
Lee made a deliberate decision to spend the rest of his career in the nuts and bolts world, trying to change this situation. This was an unusual career decision. Normally a captain who had achieved command of a carrier would look forward to promotion to rear admiral and to flying his flag at sea as commander of a group of carriers. Lee's decision, some of his colleagues felt, had been influenced by a tragic accident aboard the Enterprise. On 14 January 1969, while Lee was the skipper, an explosion aboard the ship set off a chain reaction in which rockets, bombs, and ammunition went off, tearing three large holes in the deck, destroying fifteen planes and killing twenty-four sailors. Instead of seeking a command at sea, Lee set as his goal the job of commander of the Naval Air Systems Command [NAVAIR], responsible for designing and building the navy's airplanes and aerial weapons.
Although little known to the public, or even to many in the navy, the Air Systems Command, which was formed in 1921 as the Bureau of Aeronautics, should probably be considered the world's most successful weapons design bureau. Together with the navy's weapons laboratory at China Lake, California, NAVAIR has been responsible for the development of most of the aerial missiles in use by the U.S. Navy and Air Force and many of their allies: the Sidewinder, Sparrow, Phoenix, and Walleye, as well as the cruise missile. It was also responsible for a series of successful airplanes, many of them used by the U.S. Air Force and other nations. They include the F-4, the A-7, and the E-2C airborne battle station. Lee couldn't have chosen a position with better leverage from which to try to make the changes he thought were needed. In January 1973, five months after Houser had become DCNO for air warfare, Lee reached his goal and settled into his office at NAVAIR, in the new Crystal City complex about a mile down the Potomac from the Pentagon. Houser and Lee had once been good friends. But for the next three years they became locked in a bitter debate over the future of naval aviation.
The conflict had actually begun to fester several years earlier when Lee headed the office of program appraisal for the secretary of the navy. Houser had been director of aviation plans and requirements under Vice Adm. Thomas Connolly, then the DCNO for air warfare. The issue was the F-14, named the "Tomcat" to honor both Tom Connolly and Admiral Thomas Moorer, another aviator who was chief of naval operations during the plane's formative years.
The F-14, built by Grumman in Bethpage, Long Island, was the navy's answer to the Backfire before the Backfire came into existence. A big fighter-interceptor, it carried a two-man crew, a large, very powerful radar, and six Phoenix missiles capable of knocking down a target as small as a fighter plane more than a hundred miles away. It also had wings that could be moved in flight. When the crew wanted to fly slowly and loiter far from the carrier or when they wanted to slow down for landing, the wings would be fully extended. But if the Tomcat ran into enemy fighters, the wings would automatically swing back close to the fuselage, turning the plane into a formidable dogfighter.
Navy Secretary John Chafee, concerned about reports of cost and technical problems with the F-14—the navy's biggest aviation program—asked Lee and a civilian official to study the situation for him. They reported to Chafee that the problems were much worse than anyone had acknowledged, that he had "a monster" on his hands. The engines were underpowered and sometimes exploded in flight. Dogfight maneuvers had to be limited because the engines tended to stall. Grumman was in such shaky financial condition that the company's president even threatened during a congressional hearing to close his doors, and this situation was reflected in poor reliability and discouraging instances of shoddy workmanship.
When Connolly heard about this attack on the plane for which he had fought so hard, he stormed into Lee's office, read him his charter as the navy's senior aviator and stomped out.
Houser, who had been involved in the early work on the F-14, thought then, and continued to believe, that the F-14 was the plane the navy needed. He feared growing sentiment on Capitol Hill, and even within the Pentagon, to abandon the Tomcat because of its numerous problems or to supplement it with a cheaper and smaller fighter. Even Houser, the navy's staunchest defender of the F-14, had to admit that it "wasn't doing many things well." But the proper thing to do, he felt, was to fix the problems and keep the F-14 in the fleet.
At the heart of the dispute between Houser and Lee was the threat from the Backfire force. Lee vividly recalls one meeting when he and Houser made their cases before the chief of naval operations. Houser argued that the most serious threat to the fleet was a massive bomber attack, and the only way to handle it was with an all-F-14 force. The plan was that the F- 14s would be able to knock out the Soviet bombers before they launched their missiles. "Shoot at the archer rather than the arrows," the argument went.
"I didn't think the bomber threat was all that real," Lee says. "I felt we could put a bunch of F/A-18s out there and they would do just as well against the bombers. Houser convinced everybody the only way to handle this was with the F-14. We were kind of laughed out of the room."
Lee was then giving serious thought to a new type of plane for the navy—a plane that would be both a fighter and a light bomber. At that time, of course, the F/A-18 was still little more than a concept in Lee's imagination. It had not been built, nor flown, nor even given a number. A small group of aviators had begun studies of such a plane in the mid-1960s, but the navy, even more than most tradition-bound organizations, is slow to take to new ideas. Few in the navy took this new idea very seriously. And when they thought about it at all, they tended to see it as a threat to the F-14.
The attachment that officers like Houser and Connolly had to the F-14 is understandable. In the early 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, in his zeal to rationalize the defense business, decided the country needed one basic airplane—he called it the TFX—that would serve as a fighter and bomber for the air force, and a fighter, long-range interceptor, and bomber for the navy.
The air force actually developed the TFX into the F-111, which is flying today as a fighter-bomber, long-range bomber, and radar jammer. The navy publicly went along with McNamara, even up to the point of carrier trials of the swing-wing plane. But it also quietly worked with Grumman to develop the F-14, which was waiting in the wings when the naval version of the TFX faded away.
The TFX did not do well in carrier trials, but what really finished things off was a brief comment by Connolly at the end of a day-long session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. After listening to civilian officials defend the plane, the committee chairman, Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.), finally asked Connolly whether more powerful engines would make the TFX a suitable plane.
Tired and frustrated after the long session, Connolly gave the kind of candid answer seldom heard from a three-star: "Senator Stennis, there's not enough thrust in all Christendom to make a fighter out of this airplane."
That was the background from which the supporters of the F-14 came. After the long fight to protect the navy from what they considered a grievous mistake, many senior admirals had committed so much time and emotional energy to the cause of the F-14 that, as Lee later put it, "they had F-14 religion."
The feud between Houser and Lee cannot be explained entirely by looking at the issues that divided them. In fact, it can only be understood by a look at internal navy politics and at the personalities of the two men.
Houser was an Annapolis graduate and had risen to his three-star rank through the the normal career path followed by a bright young officer, in which candidates are singled out for promotion by review boards of other officers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hornet by Orr Kelly. Copyright © 1990 Orr Kelly. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Preface
- Chapter 1 The Battle of the Admirals
- Chapter 2 Wings Over the Ocean
- Chapter 3 “Holy Moly! We Are in Trouble!”
- Chapter 4 One Plane, One Man
- Chapter 5 “Excess Energy” To Fly and Fight
- Chapter 6 When Weird Things Happen
- Chapter 7 “A Tremendous Amount of Grief”
- Chapter 8 “A Deep-Seated Drive to Kill”
- Chapter 9 “It Starts Raining F/A-18s on You”
- Appendices
- I. F/A-18 Vital Statistics
- II. The Author Learns to Fly Back Seat
- Image Gallery
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright Page