Sunday, February 25, 2001

By Fred Knapp
Stars and Stripes

IWO JIMA — At night, only dim red lights illuminate the trailer at the end of the runway, making it resemble a darkroom.

But the real picture is developing outside as the planes of Atsugi-based Carrier Air Wing FIVE practice landings for next month’s deployment with the USS Kitty Hawk.

The practice on Iwo Jima was scheduled to last from Feb. 17 to Monday.

Lt. Trey White and other landing signal officers in the trailer watch closely as planes take off, fly around, descend, touch down and take off again without stopping.

"It’s really a controlled crash at 700-feet-per-minute descent," White said during a break from his duties last week.

The landing signal officers’ job is to judge the planes’ approach for proper angle of descent, or "glide slope"; azimuth, or left to right deviation; and angle of attack, or the orientation of the aircraft itself to the ground.

"We basically have a mental picture" of what the approach should look like, White said.

The LSOs communicate with pilots on the radio and by manipulating a Fresnel lens, an array of lights to the side of the runway. A row of green lights shows pilots the ideal glide slope. A series of vertical yellow lights show whether they are above or below that ideal.

As the plane approaches, the LSO can indicate by radio or light whether the pilot is clear to land. If something is wrong, the LSO turns on the red vertical "wave off" lights, signaling the pilot to make another pass.

Typically, pilots get three night practices and three day practices, each consisting of six landings. The Navy requires that six of the night landings be conducted within 10 days of the ship’s deployment.

The Navy says it tries to conduct as much of the practice as possible at Iwo Jima, an island 700 miles from Atsugi Naval Air Facility. But last September, a typhoon forced pilots to practice at Atsugi, sparking hundreds of noise complaints from neighbors of the base.

White said practicing on the island, site of the famous World War II battle and now a Japan Maritime Self Defense Force base, has its pluses and minuses.

On the positive side, the darkness of the island — surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with no civilian population or city lights — appears much like a darkened aircraft carrier at night.

That same lack of population means that "we can fly around at the altitudes that we need to get quality training without bothering anyone," White said.

During the day, planes can fly at 600 feet above the ground at Iwo Jima, as opposed to the 2,000 feet they are restricted to at Atsugi. The restriction at Atsugi means that planes must descend to 600 feet at a rate different from what they would at sea. Then they must adjust, resulting in training that is almost negative rather than positive, White said.

The downside to practicing at Iwo Jima includes challenging weather conditions and the lack of an emergency landing site. These factors interrupt the gradual escalation of training difficulty that is preferred, White said.

Typically, "you practice somewhere safe before going to the ship," he said. Even the first landings once the ship is under way are practiced while the ship is within range of a place to which pilots can divert if something goes wrong.

But at Iwo Jima, "if the weather goes bad, these guys have no place to go. … If you don’t land here, you’re landing in the water," White said.

While an F/A-18 fighter, for example, can carry 15,000 pounds of fuel, enough to fly back to Atsugi, it can only have 5,500 pounds to practice touching down — not enough to make it back to the base, he said.

On Monday, the weather cooperated and everything went smoothly, said Lt. Cmdr. Bob Cady, air wing landing signal officer.

Monday night it was the S-3 anti-surface and refueling planes of squadron VS21 and the E-2s early-warning aircraft of VAW115 that were touching down, as LSOs watched and graded them on a scale of 1 to 5. There is no set formula to qualify any pilot for the deployment, White said, adding that he expects all of the air wing’s approximately 110 pilots to qualify.

"You can’t just say ‘He had one bad night, so he’s not going,’ " said White, himself a pilot, as are all LSOs.

Tuesday morning it was the F-14 Tomcat fighters of VF154 that came screaming in, as Cady watched.

"One eleven Tomcat ball 46 Nelson," radioed in Lt. Dan Nelson, signifying that his F-14 numbered 111 had 4,600 pounds of fuel as he approached the runway.

"Roger ball," Cady radioed back, signifying he’d heard Nelson say he could see the ball, or the vertical light indicating his descent path, and he was clear to continue.

Throughout the 10-day practice period, personnel from all eight fixed-wing squadrons at Atsugi were scheduled to rotate through Iwo Jima, White said. About 1,300 Americans, including support personnel from the Kitty Hawk and Atsugi, were due to spend time on the island, said Cmdr. Jim Otis, executive officer of VAW115.

In the end, said Cady, the commanding officer of each squadron has to be comfortable that all of the pilots going on the deployment are ready to fly.

To that end, he said, the practice includes "a certain amount of brute technique. You’ll do it until you get it right."

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