Since 350 knots seemed to work OK going up and jinking, I saw no real reason to worry about slowing way down for the trip to Ubon. Willy had proceeded on ahead with his low oil pressure light, and one of the guys had gone home with him and the last guy in our foursome stayed with Bill and me.
The base had been alerted and was getting ready for our arrival and landing. It seemed like only a few minutes before we started descending and setting ourselves up for some sort of long straight in approach (something else we didn’t really practice under VFR). I could use the ILS for a back up reference, but it didn’t really work very well with a 200K final, or at least it seemed weird. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to approach initial and break. The airplane wouldn’t like that at all. Control was OK, but I had to lead roll in, roll out, etc. by a huge margin. The rudders helped a lot, Lord, it was sloppy!
As we came down into the local area, I decided to wait for three or flights of four to recover from up North, so I sort of “held” over a point (more or less) north and east of the strip. It was during one of those 360’s that some O-6 in the tower told me to set up for a low pass before I tried the approach. I guess he wanted to see how extensive the damage was or something. I encouraged him to change his mind or pretended I didn’t hear him or something. Anyway, one line up and approach was enough for that afternoon. I never did hear back about it, so I guess he was OK with my decision.
Once everybody had recovered I got lined up several miles out, (probably a whole lot further than several) at what I remember was about 2000 feet above field elevation. We ran some various check lists and got the gear down and locked. My chase said they looked good and I had green lights now to go with all of the amber ones. I remembered to put the hook down (first time for everything!) and proceeded to settle the airplane in at about 190K. The Phantom, once trimmed, was a very stable airplane. That probably came from its initial design as an air to air platform for fleet defense. The thud drivers had to work harder than we did at low airspeeds, but at 500K the “Farmingdale Squat Bomber” was stable as a rock. Anyway, once we got on the final approach heading, we were pretty much under control. I used the rudder for alignment and thrust management kept us on some sort of acceptable glide path. Obviously, I didn’t need as much power going down clean as you did with the leading edge boundary layer and full flaps. That was a little strange, as we RARELY pulled the power back below 83-87% on final at approach speeds. I had a student do that for me later in life, and he nearly killed us. But I digress.
The airplane had to take the number one wire (there was no number two or three) and I had to miss the MA1A chain link barrier. This means that the hook had to hit in a space some fifty feet in length or there would be a go around and lots more talking. Oh well, guys in the brown shoe Navy do it all the time. What’s to worry?
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