Those touch and goes at El Toro California in 1958 and 1959 were especially important.  They had a new plane, the F4D.  They called it the Skyray--and it had never been aboard a carrier.  Ken was the safety officer for his squadron and also the LSO. (Landing Signal Officer.  Back then, they didn't use a green light to get on board, they had an LSO on a platform on the side of the 'boat' waving them aboard with paddles.  He had a chute--kind of like a water slide chute--behind him so that if a plane crashed, he could fall backwards and slide to the bottom of the ship.  And not get hit.)

So Ken was getting everyone ready to qualify in the F4D to land on the carrier.  The plane was built to go from ground to altitude in the shortest time possible.  He said that when you lit off the afterburner, it was like riding a rocket.  Problem was, it took so much gasoline that when you got up there, you didn't have much time left because you had burned all your fuel up getting there.

It was a super dangerous airplane.  They lost so many of them that they started calling the ocean off shore "Skyray bay."  I was at the squadron one day and a pilot came in holding his helmet, dripping water everywhere.  Nobody seemed surprised.  It must have been a regular occurrence.  They would have to eject and end up in the ocean.

The day came when Ken took them all aboard.  Twenty-seven of them.  (One million touch and goes on ground beforehand.)  In the two weeks it took them to qualify on board, they lost four planes.  Killed one pilot and broke another one's back.  It seemed normal by that time.

They took the planes and squadron to Japan one week later (for a year) and never had another accident.  Amazing.  They were running the Korean and Japan perimeters because the Migs were testing them.  Trying to see how fast they could scramble from ground to air.  It was the cold war and Russia was aggressive.

I had two babies in diapers when he left.  I was just glad he was alive.  And thankful for the chute.