Talking about moments in history reminded me of a moment I experienced when I was around seven or eight years old.  My dad was doing anything and everything he could do to augment the family's income that year.  He and another man started an egg business--something that is now automated.  But back then, everyone did what needed to be done by hand.

Farmers would sell their eggs to a middle man who would clean them, size them, check for breaks, "candle" them and crate them.  That's what my dad was doing.  And of course both men were looking for all the free help they could get.  Which was me and the other guys son--Shelton.  

"Candling" was done by holding the egg in front of a light to see if it was good or bad.  The farmer couldn't tell--he just brought the eggs in.  But sometimes an egg was rotten and needed to be culled and trashed.  I got good at judging whether an egg was good or bad because every time Shelton found a rotten egg, he threw it at me.  Typical boy behavior.  If you've never been hit with a rotten egg, you haven't lived all of life's experiences.  It is the worst smell ever.  Of course, when I found one, I returned the favor.  He deserved it.

At the end of the day, I got to keep all the good eggs that were slightly cracked and could peddle them up and down our street for pennies on the dollar.  As long as they candled out ok, you could use them to cook with--and women in the nineteen forties were glad to get them cheap.  I would use my proceeds to buy an important investment--a comic book! 

Washing those eggs was another one of my jobs. I know about eggs, and chicken poop.  You can leave eggs on the counter for days and days and days.  Or refrigerate them forever.  They come in nice sealed sanitized containers.     

I'll add one last thing about the carrier and the LSO.  In the years Bill was flying, he said that after you hooked wire, the LSO rated every landing.  In later years (after the LSO used paddles), you were flying by a light that they called the ball.  Depending on the color, you could tell if you were on the correct glide path.  

Speed, level, steady and hook.  Did you hit the deck at the right point, or was it the first or fourth wire which--wasn't optimal.

The LSO still had the last word.  He still controlled the deck.  He graded every single landing and could abort your landing at any time.  I didn't know that.  Once Ken retired, we started living in a different world.

When Bill was flying, the LSO would post your landing score, rating, and mistakes you made on the ready room wall for the world to see.  Bill said it was a great motivator.  You didn't want to embarrass yourself--especially in front of the other pilots.

I wouldn't take anything for the years I got to be a part of Marine aviation.  But I would never want to do it again.  The Marines had a saying, "If the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one when you joined up."  Aviators were doing something that they loved.  Families--not so much. Some marriages didn't survive.

The life, separations, and stress were difficult.   Ken had two tours overseas--thirteen months each--back when we couldn't afford to call. One of those tours was war.  Vietnam.  No facebook.  No Google.  Just letters.  I saved them all.  

And I've never read them again. It was moment in history.  

My brother Bill was also a Navy pilot.  He was a flight surgeon--the guy that says yes you can fly, or no, you can't.  He was the flight surgeon for NASA, on point for the guys that were in the capsule that burned on the ground.  Gus Grissom...and two others.

Bill said the the most frightening thing he ever did was take a night cat shot.  The carrier is pitch black.  No lights.  The sky is pitch black.  And then they pull you back in the sling shot and Wham!  He said that it is "Jolt acceleration."  Accelerating acceleration. 

And when you come back aboard, it's at full speed--and if you aren't properly belted in, it will snap your head off when you hook the wire and are jerked to an instant stop.  Doing that over the years doesn't do your back any favor either.

He corrected me on one point that I didn't know.  Bill flew twenty years after Ken, and things had changed in aviation.  But Bill said one thing didn't change.  The LSO still controlled the deck.  He was never obsolete.  Every plane that came aboard was rated by the LSO.  (And there were four wires.)  

If you caught the first, or fourth wire, the LSO gave you a demerit.  It meant you weren't on a perfect glide path coming in.  If your wings jiggled, demerit.  The meatball--Bill said they just called it "The Ball"--guided your path, but the LSO was always able to override the ball.  He held a "pickle" that if he punched, red lights flashed everywhere.  Which meant you were on path to kill yourself--and needed to pull up, abort, bolter.  You weren't going to make it and would kill others as well.  Bill said the LSO had the final say.  His judgement was law.

Planes changed.  The carrier changed.  The LSO didn't. 

Ken spent three years--after he returned from the war in Korea--teaching cadets who had qualified for Naval flight school to land on the carrier.  He saw every kind of accident that could be imagined.

He took me out once on the deck and pointed to the "coming aboard end of the ship."  There were dents along the edge.  "That's where Mike didn't do what I told him; there's where Nate didn't listen.  They think they can judge the pitch of the deck.  They can't.  And they didn't."

Where the LSO stands on the side edge of the deck there is a chute for those crash occasions.  The LSO can fall backwards into the chute which takes him down below deck.  If he tried to turn around to go down the chute, you couldn't make it because it all happens so fast.

If a wire snaps, the LSO has somewhere to go.  Not so for the people working the deck.  The wire slithers like a snake.  It's so hot, it cauterizes amputations that occur. 

I just kissed him goodby each morning and tried not to think about it.  "Is your insurance paid up," was a lighthearted phrase everyone used from time to time.  

I never saw Ken rattled.  I don't know how he did what he did.  I don't know how any of our military do what they are sometimes called on to do.

God bless the USA.  God bless the Marines. 

  

Living with an LSO, I felt like my education of landing on a carrier was almost like being a Naval cadet.  Minus the actual experience.  I heard it all.  Over and over.  From multiple pilots.  All the time for years and years.  What went wrong, what went right, what ended up in an accident.  Accidents were continual.  This was in the 1950's at the beginning of carrier capabilities. They killed a lot of pilots.  Pilots were cheap.  Planes were expensive.

When you were trying to come aboard, the LSO gave you signals with paddles.  Too high; too low; too fast; too slow.  The pilot is trying to hit the carrier deck at an exact point. On a dime.  He's done it a zillion times on a runway, but this is different.  The landing surface is moving in four directions.  Up, down, side to side.  Rolling and pitching. It looks easy in the movies.  It isn't. 

Come in too low or slow and you'll catch your hook on the front of the carrier and rip out your fuel tanks, kill yourself and people working the deck.  Come in too fast and you'll break the wire you're trying to hook--and the cable will slither like a snake across the deck and dismember or kill someone. You have to follow the LSO's signals exactly because he controls the deck.  Stress on the pilot is nothing compared to stress on the LSO.  When Mad Dog trained Ken, he said, "You have the right personality to do this.  "Calm and confident."  He was.

There are three wires.  If your hook hits the deck in front of the first wire, it bounces--bolters--and hopefully hooks the second or third.  You have to come in full power because if you bolter all three wires, you have to have enough power, speed, to fly off the deck and try again.  In the training command, some of Ken's students would pass all nine stages, get to the tenth (carrier) and never make it.  Wash out.  Sometimes because they just couldn't do it.  Sometimes because they were scared to death and went back and landed on base.

Very seldom did you have a catapult failure.  If you had one, you were going into the water.  You might have enough power to make it a few thousand feet, but you just didn't have the power to climb out of it.  You were going down.  The carrier was going to run over you.  It was just a matter of when.

And when you hit the water, that was pretty much the end of it.  I remember Ken telling about one pilot who survived a failed catapult.  His plane sank into the water canopy up.  Which was unusual.  When you took a cat shot and it failed, the ship was going to go over you at that point one way or another.

This guy hit the water with wings level, and had the presence of mind and guts to watch the ship pass over him.  But had to wait an eternity for the ship to pass over him--praying the screws would miss him.  When they missed him, he was still canopy up, so he ejected.  It wouldn't have turned out very well if he ejected after he hit the water because he would have hit the bottom of the ship.  It wouldn't have turned out very well if he had rolled the plane in the water, or he would have ejected downwards.  I can't imagine that kind of bravery--sitting under water, slowly sinking and watching a carrier pass over your plane hoping the screws didn't chew you up.  Hoping you didn't roll.

Ken said the pilot told them that waiting for the ship to pass over was an eternity, wondering if you were going to roll over upside down before you could eject--underwater.  Wondering if you were going to hit the screws.  Waiting.

Most of those guys had horror stories.  The worst was landing at night in a storm.  Pitching and rolling deck.  Catching wire.  Trusting the LSO.  Hoping you didn't kill yourself.  I lived it second hand.  Hearing the stories.  Trying not to think about what Ken was doing to put bread on the table. 

The one thing I did keep from Ken's LSO gear was the glo-stripes that went down the legs of his "carrier waving" suit.  I'm sure that suit had a name, but I've forgotten it.  It might have been an adapted flight suit with snaps down the legs for the glo-strips.  What in the world did I think I was going to do with glo-strips??  Now, they are draped over a picture of an LSO in the "museum."

I finally gave Ken's his uniforms to a young lad that trades in military gear.  He was trying to set up a booth in Edmond's Antique Store.  He needed a jump start.  There comes a point that you can't keep it all.  I certainly wasn't going to wear a uniform.

Scott sent me a picture of an LSO on a carrier who was waving a plane aboard and had given the pilot a "cut."  He asked if the LSO was his dad.  I told him "No."  It was a rear view of the LSO's back--arms in the air, signaling the pilot.  I told Scott that I would know that butt anywhere and it wasn't Ken.  (I was married to the guy 57 years--so I would know.)

The Marines only had three LSO's back in the early fifties.  He was one.  Another one was "Mad Dog Oster," who got so mad a a group of pilots who wouldn't obey his signals that the threw his paddles overboard and left the planes in the air to fend for themselves.

It was pretty much impossible to land on the pitching, rolling deck of a carrier without an LSO.  The pilots who were left in the air--running out of fuel--were begging Mad Dog to help them aboard and promised to obey signals.  But he had no paddles.  So, he got a couple of pairs of skivies--one pair in each hand--waved the signals best he could and helped them hook wire and get aboard.  Innovation.  I loved to listen to the LSO's stories.  I've got a bunch of them.