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A Pilot's Tale
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THE CAT SEAT

After dinner Doug and I entered the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center, which Doug called the "cat seat," a cool, dark room where a bank of radar screens and floor-to-ceiling clear Plexiglas backlit status boards formed a wall in front of us...

An aviation boatswain's mate drects an F/A-18 Hornet to the waist catapult prior to takeoff.

The longer I stayed on the carrier and the more I learned about the ship's capabilities, the more threatening the world became—like a big, bug-infested peach—and the safer I felt aboard. More than once I imagined a full-scale invasion of the United States by some unspecified aggressor and how safe I'd be here, and thought of my girlfriend back home, poor soul, innocent and trusting enough to sleep at night without a helmet. Unprotected, unarmed people of America seemed farcical to me, unbelievably naive and misguided dummies. Every few minutes I learned about some other amazing weapon: the radar-guided Phalanx Gatling gun on each corner of the ship that can fire 50 rounds a second at the front end of a missile the diameter of a pie plate approaching the ship at 500 miles an hour and obliterate it in midair. Others were too fantastic to believe: a secret radar so powerful it bounces off the moon and fries the electronics of anything airborne, causing it to drop out of the sky. Hearing about these weapons gave me the same dull cushiony feeling I had when I took Dilaudid, synthetic morphine, after having my wisdom teeth ripped out. Nothing could happen to me out here, nothing could touch me, nobody in the world. I come from a family of very paranoid people—if you wake one of us up in the middle of the night we jump to our feet in karate position—and this was the first time in my life that I was surrounded by people far more paranoid than I am.

ON THE FLIGHT DECK AT NIGHT

Doug looked at his watch. It was almost time to fly. He suddenly seemed fragile. The fear in his face reminded me of who he used to be. Then it was 9 p.m., and he said he was going to head to his rack for a few minutes, to get into his "box"—not some coffin he kept handy, but the common term for the inviolable time before flying. From the time he left the cat seat until he reached his jet at 10 p.m., if anybody wanted to speak to him he'd say, "I'm in my box," and they would have to wait until later.

A few minutes before 10, he dressed in his flight gear. It seems appropriate that when he's at work he wears an elaborate costume, a strange form-fitting G suit...

He went up to the deck. After his plane captain signed off as the final inspector of number 205, Doug did his own pre-flight check, looking for any oddity, maybe a blown hydraulic line leaking on the graphite and epoxy skin of the jet.

Up at the catapult, Doug pushed the throttle up, watching the plane captain for signals, waiting for the engines to spool up, watching the RPMs, temperature, fuel flow, hydraulic pressure. A second later the whole ship shook and off he went.

The pilot's view in the final seconds of approach is the ship's miniscule landing-strip light. At 4,000 feet, three miles, and a mere 45 seconds away, the huge ship is a dot of light the size of a pinhead held at arm's length. (The ship, painted matte, is designed to be invisible at night.) The sensation in pitch darkness, one pilot told me, is that one is sitting still while the tiny glowing pinhead of light becomes, in a disorienting and unnatural rush, the deck of the carrier. Beside me the woman with the wool pom-pom hat stared up into the black sky with binoculars, unable to see anything other than three colored lights, and spoke to Doug by radio, coughing up commands every half second: "Power." "Right." "Don't go low." He came over the landing area, and it disappeared beneath him. His landing gear took the intense shock, and I stepped forward as he went by and watched him pull the number 3 wire right to the edge of the deck.

Landing—perfect. Of course.

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