NAVY PILOTS' LINGO
For another thorough resource on this important subject, check out the Tailhook Association's page at:
http://www.tailhook.org
| Around "The Boat" | Aircraft and Flying |
| The Pilot And Friends | Index of Terms |
Naval Air types: To suggest additions or revisions to this collection send me a note.
All text on this site © 2000-2007 by H.Paul Lillebo
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Around "The Boat":
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| Abaft | Even farther aft than aft. Behind the boat or whatever. As in, "Honey, is that a police car abaft?" | |||
| Abeam | In Navy talk, adjacent to, not fore or aft, but toward your 9 o'clock or 3 o'clock.. The car that's doorhandle to doorhandle with you on the freeway is abeam. As in, "Damn, honey! That idiot who cut us off is abeam to port. Watch this!" | |||
| ACLS | "All-weather Carrier Landing System." A system that uses automated radio inputs from the ship to control stick and throttle on an aircraft's final approach to a carrier landing. The pilot could be hands-off all the way to landing, but you bet he keeps his hands on the controls to override them if needed. A pilot had best not use this system all the time, or he'll be rusty at the skill he will need when the system fails: the very tricky job of manually bringing the aircraft aboard the carrier. (Like back when men were men ...) | |||
| Aft | Uh... That's the back end of the boat. Or, adverbially, toward the back of anything. For example, "Sweetheart, has your aft section spread just a bit lately?" | |||
| Air Boss | The Commander in charge of the carrier's Air Wing (see below). This is no desk job. During flight operations the Air Boss is located in the tower in the carrier's "island," and runs flight ops in the immediate vicinity (5 miles) of the carrier, where his word is law. Has access to scary loud loudspeakers. He believes – rightly – that humiliation is a great teacher, so as you (the pilot) cross the flight deck after you've committed some airborne flub, you (and everyone else on the deck) are likely to hear some choice words over said loudspeakers referring to your aviation skills. But to be fair, the Air Boss will just as quickly praise extraordinary professionalism with an "Attaboy". | |||
| Air wing | The aviation squadrons and aircraft aboard a carrier (except for the rescue helos). The air wing is under the command of "CAG" (once "Commander, Air Group" - but now "Commander, Air Wing" but still "CAG") – a senior Commander, and joins the carrier for the duration of a cruise. At the end of the cruise the carrier goes to the yard to be glued back together, while the air wing squadrons may scatter to several airfields. For the next half year or more, the squadrons operate more or less independently, fiddling with paperwork, until the time comes to go to sea again. Then they meet the carrier for another cruise, and become one happy air wing again, under a new CAG. | |||
| Alpha strike | A major, supposedly coordinated, air-to-ground strike, involving much of the air wing (see above), perhaps 50 aircraft or more. Getting all those aircraft "rendezvous'ed" and on their way to the target is always a minor miracle. | |||
| Angel | The carrier's rescue helicopter, which hovers off the starboard (that's "right" to landlubbers) side of the ship during all launch and landing (recovery) operations. Every Navy pilot's best friend. Angels is an entirely different word. | |||
| Angled deck | "The Angle" for short. A brilliant WWII era invention, originally British, though it took the U.S. Navy to make it work. Setting the landing area at an angle (10-12°) to the ship's axis allows for low wave-offs and bolters without plowing into aircraft and crew on the forward part of the flight deck, like they used to back in the day... On the other hand, the pilot on final approach has to line up on a centerline that's wandering off to his right. So he has to crab the aircraft all the way to touchdown. That gives you the hazard of right-to-left drift on touchdown, with a very real danger of the aircraft going over the left side of the deck, even if the hook has caught a wire. And then there's the problem of wind. So see that. | |||
| Arrested Landing | A successful carrier landing; a "trap". The worst intentional abuse of the body a Navy pilot experiences. Literally a controlled crash into the deck, with shoulder straps jerking you from 150 mph (about 170 mph in the Crusader back when men were men) to zero in about 2 seconds. It's a ride! Special heavy duty landing gear and suspensions distinguish naval aircraft. Here's why: At the moment of touchdown, the vertical speed of the Navy jet is about 13 feet per second. For the pilot it's like being strapped into a chair, lifted 6 feet into the air, and dropped. Tough on the back – my lumbar disks still feel it. A pilot may say, "Whew! Had 5 arrests yesterday." It's an appropriate term. | |||
| Arresting Gear | The 4 cables ("wires" to the aviator) stretched across the landing area of the carrier; the aim of the aircraft's tailhook. The ideal pass catches the No.3 wire. If you snag the 1-wire (closest to the ramp) the LSO (Landing Signal Officer) is unhappy. The cables are spooled below deck onto huge hydraulic braking engines, which are adjusted for the weight and speed of each aircraft coming on board. If the setting is too tight, it can rip the tailhook out of the aircraft. If too loose, the cable will play out too far and the aircraft can go over the side or, if it caught the 4-wire, off the end of the angle deck. Often just "gear," as in "Finally caught the gear at bingo fuel." | |||
| Athwart | Or "athwartships." Across the ship, from side to side. Across anything, really, as in: "Wow, honey. Little Billy's foot measures five inches athwart!" | |||
| "Attaboy" | The highest praise from the Air Boss. You've saved an airplane, or performed a minor miracle, or perhaps just looked less hopeless than the day before. The only time the Air Boss uses his loudspeakers without sounding PO'ed. | |||
| The Ball |
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| Ball call | The pilot's radio call to the LSO as he rolls into the "groove" and sights the ball. The call includes the aircraft's callsign, type, and fuel state, which the Arresting Gear Officer will use to set the gear's braking power. For example, "Thunder 204, Hornet, Ball, State Three Point Five" – meaning the aircraft's an F/A-18 (a "Hornet") of the squadron using the "Thunder" callsign, with 3,500 pounds of fuel. The LSO may answer "Roger, ball" and Roger Ball has become the prototypical name for a carrier pilot. (Wonder if there's ever been a real one...) | |||
| Barricade | A 12-15 foot high contraption of vertical nylon straps stretched across the carrier landing area to trap an aircraft with a malfunctioning hook or landing gear. Going into the barricade often results in some minor skin damage. To the aircraft, that is. The pilot will be good as new as soon as the skivvies are laundered. | |||
| Beach | 1. Ashore. "On the beach" means "In town," or anywhere but on the ship. To "hit the beach" is to go ashore. "I'll be on the beach the next two days" (Transl: I'll be riding out a drunk in the squadron's admin). 2. When flying, "Over the beach" means "Over land". Radio report: "Feet dry." | |||
| Bell | The ship's bell has kept time at sea since bells were invented. The bell is struck every half hour and divides the 24-hour day into six 4-hour periods or watches. After midnight, 1 strike of the bell gives 0030; at 0100 two bells are struck, and so forth until 8 bells at 0400. Then the sequence begins again with 1 bell at 0430. Whole hours get an even number of bells, half hours odd. (I'm reminded that onboard ship the Navy thoughtfully avoids broadcasting the bells on the shipboard speaker system between 2200 and 0600.) So when a Navy husband says, "I'll be home at six bells, love," he means he'll be back at 7 p.m. Or eleven. Or 3 a.m. Perhaps this explains the origin of the system. | |||
| Below | You can't say "downstairs" on a ship. It's Below, or Down Below. A Navy man would never say "downstairs" at home, either. Like, "Billy, run below and get my hammer." (Of course he would no more say "upstairs": "Billy, if you don't find it below, check topside." And of course there aren't "stairs" onboard ship.) | |||
| Bingo | "Divert to alternate landing field." Verb, noun, adjective, and expletive. In peacetime operations, carriers nearly always have a divert (bingo) field available. An accident can lead to a foul deck, requiring all airborne A/C to bingo, or a single A/C may have a problem that prevents shipboard landing. The most common reason for bingo'ing is low fuel. At each flight pilots are briefed on the bingo fuel state: the minimum fuel level with which you can safely reach the bingo field. If you reach bingo fuel and you're still in the air, you'll hear, "Your signal bingo." Sayonara. The Navy spouse needs to know this term, because during the 3rd movement of a Mahler symphony, the aviator hubby will almost certainly say, "Let's bingo." | |||
| Black-ass | Darker than just black. There is nothing blacker than a moonless, overcast, black-ass night in the middle of the ocean. That's when CAG doesn't fly. It's not the flying. It's bringing it back aboard! Nothing raises the pulse rate and pucker factor more than a carrier landing on a black-ass night. That's true. It's been measured. (The pulse rate, not the pucker factor – the world waits for a device to measure the latter.) Scarier than combat! | |||
| The Boat | A blackshoe sailor never calls a ship a "boat". An aviator never calls it anything else. To him, everything that floats is a boat. But the carrier is "The Boat". | |||
| Boat officer | One of the 4-hour watches even an aviator may be assigned aboard the carrier. An in-port watch: you're officer-in-charge of a liberty boat taking sailors ashore and back. Can be OK in daylight and good weather; you actually get to know some of the sailors. Can also be hell. (Do see the "Liberty boat" link.) | |||
| Bolter | An intended arrested landing where the hook fails to engage a wire. There can be several reasons for this, but the most common is simply being high (not like on drugs!) on the glideslope and missing the 4-wire. Other reasons can be hook-skip (more often an excuse) or a damaged hook. | |||
| Bulkhead | There aren't "walls" aboard a carrier. They may look like walls but they're bulkheads. If you're married to a Navy man, you've probably heard, "Where on this bulkhead should we hang this picture, honey?" And you learn to live with it. | |||
| Burble | An area of air turbulence in the final approach groove right behind the carrier, caused by the island structure, particularly when the ship makes its own wind. You need to be prepared to add power when going through the burble; it acts like the proverbial "air pocket." (When there's enough natural wind that the relative wind comes down the angle deck, the burble will be away from the groove, to starboard, and is no problem. That is, there's only the normal turbulence caused by a giant floating building in a strong wind.) | |||
| CAG | "Commander, Air Group." The Commander of the Air Wing (earlier "Air Group"), i.e., all the aviation squadrons aboard the carrier. Now officially "CAW," but nobody says that. CAG (rhymes with "rag") flies aircraft from all or several of his squadrons, and his name adorns each squadron's endearingly yclept "Doublenuts" bird. | |||
| CarQuals | (Pronounced "care-quals"): Carrier Qualifications; really a shore-based activity. For a Navy pilot, sea tours alternate with shore duty. After a tour ashore, the pilot has to carrier re-qualify by spending time practicing MLP's and performing a number of arrested landings on a carrier, before going to sea. (Initial CarQuals is one of the scariest moments in a student pilot's training. If you make it past this, you'll probably make it to the fleet.) | |||
| Carrier | This shouldn't even need an entry; a "carrier" is of course an "aircraft carrier," a capital ship. But while we're here ... American carriers have traditionally been named for 1. Politicians, 2. Battles, or 3. Inspirational/memorial/patriotic buzzwords: Politicians (these days new carriers are all named after politicians, including some congressional military budget committee chairmen – but of course this is not for the purpose of flattering or obtaining funding): USS Hancock (fondly "Hannah Maru" or Han-job, CV-19)And not to be confused with the above group is one actually named for a good Navy man: (Admiral Chester) Nimitz (CVN 68) Battles (this has been out of fashion for about 40 years; why waste a good opportunity to grease the political wheels?): Ticonderoga ("Tico" CV 14)Inspirational/memorial/patriotic (this isn't fashionable anymore either; perhaps for the same reason): Intrepid (CV 11)Carriers are designated by the letters "CV" (V for fixed-wing), e.g., CV-8, the original "Hornet." The letter "N" is added to the carrier's designation to indicate nuclear power, e.g., CVN-65, the USS Enterprise. A further refinement was the letter "A" for Attack (meaning fighter and attack type aircraft), or "S" for anti-submarine warfare. USS Shangri-La is an example of many carriers, particularly of 1940s and 50's vintage, whose designation and role changed, from CVA-38 in earlier days to CVS-38 in later years, when the demands of late generation fighters and attack A/C outstripped its ability to accommodate them. In the 1970's the designations of Attack carriers were changed to indicate a multi-mission capability, and CVA's became simply CV's again. | |||
| Catapult or Cat |
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| Catapult officer | A brave man. One of many on the flight deck. The cat officer stands on the flight deck between the catapults during launch, and gives the signal to fire the catapult after ensuring readiness of the pilot, the A/C, the bow, and the deck. He uses flamboyant signals, to be unambiguous. When the pilot is ready to launch he salutes the cat officer, who returns the salute. Quickly checking the cat track, the movement of the bow, and whatever else is on his list, the cat officer then touches the deck with his hand, usually with a flourish, followed by pointing down the cat track toward the bow, which finally constitutes the signal for the operator to fire the catapult. (The test of the cat officer's nerve comes when a pilot needs to abort the launch - yes, before the cat shot, of course. The pilot signals the cat officer with a shake of the head; the cat officer signals this to the cat operator by crossed forearms. He then signals to release tension on the cat, and steps in front of the wing of the aircraft. This A/C is still at full power, perhaps in afterburner. This takes nads. Only after the cat officer is in front of the wing does he signal to the pilot to reduce power.) | |||
| Centurion | An aviator who has made 100 landings on a given carrier. Even if you're a nugget, when you get your 100th trap you're given a tiny bit of respect. And then there are double, triple, and quadruple centurions. The respect increment falls off; much more than 400 traps on a given boat and it goes negative. They start to wonder why you're stuck on this ship. | |||
| Chopper | Any helicopter. | |||
| Clara | Simply means:"Can't see the ball." When a pilot rolls into the groove, the LSO expects a ball call within a couple of seconds. If he doesn't get it, we hear on the radio: LSO: "In the groove; call the ball." Pilot: "Clara." This usually happens on a straight-in instrument approach, at night or in the soup, where the pilot has to transition from flying on instruments to looking out of the cockpit for the ball for the final 30 seconds or so of the approach. It's a tricky transition. | |||
| Clearing Turn | When launched off the carrier's bow catapults, the pilot makes a quick jog to port or starboard, depending on which catapult he is launched from. The idea is that if the aircraft experiences a problem requiring it to ditch, it won't get run over by the ship. Clearing turns were evidently thought up by the brass, since they make little sense: If an aircraft is in danger of going in the drink, executing a turn loses lift and will exacerbate its condition and make it more likely it'll ditch. No way is a pilot in extremis to stay airborne going to do a clearing turn. Let the Captain turn the ship! As a result, clearing turns are made by all the aircraft that are not in any danger of going in the drink. It's a nice custom anyway. Sort of a polite wave back at the Captain. | |||
| COD | "Carrier Onboard Delivery," pronounced like the fish. [Yes, yes, I know there's no fish called "Carrieronboarddelivery." Don't write me about it.] The transport airplane that delivers mail and VIP visitors, evacuates medical cases and performs "other duties as required." For decades the COD was synonymous with the S-2F aircraft – the "Stoof" – a 2-engine prop A/C and one of the ugliest A/C anywhere. But it had the Volkswagen kind of ugliness: you could love it for it. (Many old Navy Stoofs are now distinguishing themselves as forest fire tankers.) Lately, the 2-engine jet S-3 Viking has taken over the COD tasks. Faster, better looking than the Stoof, but with a lot less soul. | |||
| Cold cat | A catapult shot that gives the aircraft less than flying speed. The aircraft, of course, goes in the drink. While always rare, they're a lot more rare now than they were in the days of the hydraulic cats. Reasons for cold cats have included flawed holdback fittings which broke before full power developed in the cat stroke, wrong weight settings, and failures in the catapult mechanism. | |||
| Cut pass | Tsk, tsk. You're in the Ready Room after making a suspicious landing. Unfortunately the rules require that you remain in the Ready Room until the LSO comes by to verbally and publicly proclaim the landing grades. You got a No.1-wire, with a red ball in close. In other words, you endangered several million bucks worth of Navy property. (That includes the pilot.) LSO comes: Your grade: "CUT." Worst landing grade. Publicly shamed. Scarlet letter. A few more of those and you'll get remedial training. (Shipboard is a lot like in prison: Little rewards and punishments make all the difference.) See "OK." | |||
| Cyclic Ops | Cyclic Operations: The dance of the carrier task force. Let's say the carrier wants to stay in roughly the same area during flight ops, which may last all day. Here's roughly how it works: The carrier must steam into the wind to launch & recover aircraft. This may take, say, 45 minutes. The ship then turns 180° and steams downwind for roughly the same period of time, until it's time to recover the previous launch. Then the carrier turns into the wind again, in approximately the same place where it was located an hour and a half ago. Launch & recover aircraft. Repeat. Repeat again, all day. | |||
| Davy Jones' Locker | The depths of the seven seas, as in a grave. Honored final resting place of tens of thousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of seafarers. (The origin of Davy Jones and his locker is lost, as I understand it, but the legend has persisted for centuries. It was described by Tobias Smollett in "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," 1751: "...according to the mythology of sailors, the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, ship-wrecks, and other disasters to which sea-faring life is exposed, warning ... of death and woe." And his appearance? "I'll be damned if it was not Davy Jones himself. I know him by his saucer eyes, his three rows of teeth, his tail, and the blue smoke that came out of his nostrils.") Just trying to help, in case you should happen to meet... | |||
| Deck | 1. Of course it means what we expect it to mean: A "floor" on a ship. On the carrier the decks are labeled as being over or under the Hangar Deck: The Flight deck may be deck "O-3" – the third deck up from the hangar deck. And not just on a ship: If you grew up in a Navy family, how many times did dad say, "Quit whimpering and get up off the deck!" 2. When you're flying, "The Deck" usually means the ground, as in: "After the GIB barfed during the zero G maneuver, I was glad to get back on the deck and get hosed off." On ACM (dogfighting) training hops squadron policy may require pilots to observe a "deck" at 10,000 feet. The idea is to pretend that 10K is the ground, so if you dip below it you've crashed and lost the fight. Of course no one ever admits to busting "the deck," but (shh ... don't tell) you do what you have to do to win. | |||
| Deep six | Whatever gets "deep six'ed" is on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Like: "Pay me the $5 you owe me or I'll deep-six your girlie mag." | |||
| Dip | There are dips and there are dips. This dip is a common but completely unauthorized maneuver by a pilot on final approach to the carrier. Just about when passing over the ramp, the pilot makes a quick coordinated move with stick and throttle: Slightly relax back pressure on the stick, while easing off the throttle. Then reestablish. Takes about 1/5 of a second, and drops you perhaps a foot on the glide slope. If you're quick enough the LSO may not notice, but he probably will. (Sometimes known as a CAG-dip, 'cause CAG is often a master at it.) | |||
| Dog | Most hatches on the carrier can be secured against flooding or fire with a system of pivoting steel levers ("dogs"), either on the edges of the hatch or on the surrounding bulkhead. When a lever is moved, the short end of the lever is wedged against the opposing surface, securing the hatch. Dog is also a verb; you dog the hatch. | |||
| The Drink | The Sea. Going into the drink is not a good thing. Not in an airplane. | |||
| Engagement | Has nothing to do with prospective marriage. In pilot lingo, this has a couple of different meanings: 1. The tailhook catching a wire on a carrier landing. A good engagement is a trap. You've engaged the arresting gear. An inflight engagement is a really bad day. 2. In tactics, an engagement means "engaging the enemy aircraft," e.g., a "dogfight." Used both in real battles and in training flights. A "Hassle." | |||
| Expansion joint | This Dante'esque invention deserves to be better known. An aircraft carrier is made to bend in the pitch axis in a couple of places along its hull. This is accomplished by building in "expansion joints," transverse spaces running the width of the hull, one fore and one aft, nominally about 3 feet in width, that have overlapping side plates, allowing the spaces to contract and the hull to "bend" in heavy seas. No one would care about this except that these expansion joints are also passageways. (That's Navy for "corridors.") More particularly, they're passageways that have led to my stateroom! (Keep calm, Paul.) So you innocently step out of your stateroom in heavy seas, into the passageway, because you've been ordered to make a flight to defend the country, when without warning the bulkheads ("walls" to you landlubbers) of the passageway squeeze inward and threaten to impact your body with some 200 thousand gross tons of force, and you're hoping the engineers have correctly figured that it won't quite squeeze your head to the size of a turnip. Keep calm, you say?? | |||
| Fantail | The back end of the 'boat'. The stern. I know where it's at. Somebody else knows why it's called a "fantail." (Isn't that a kind of pigeon?) | |||
| Fire | Nothing gets your attention aboard the carrier like the rapidly repeated bell over the loudspeakers, followed by "Fire, fire, there's a fire in space ...." Fortunately, the ship's emergency procedures are usually equal to the situation, and the small fire is put out. (Let's not talk about the BIG fires, the ones we all worry about. The ones on the Forrestal and Oriskany, that took hundreds of lives.) We may even get a little blasé about fire calls onboard. No matter, as long as you're on the carrier, with its constant fueling and ordnance-handling operations, fire will be your chief nightmare. | |||
| Flat-top | An aircraft carrier. | |||
| Flight deck | The business district of the carrier, about 60-70 feet above the sea surface. Includes the angle deck landing area and the forward catapult take-off area. The 70-some A/C of the carrier's air wing are parked aft on the deck in preparation for take-off on the catapults. During the landing phase, A/C are taxied forward after landing and parked on the bow end, leaving the landing area free. Huge elevators carry A/C to the Flight deck from the Hangar deck, where maintenance is performed. No film representation can do justice to the deafening sound level, the constantly hazardous interaction of men and machines, and the precise application of immense power that is Flight deck operations. There is nothing else on land or sea remotely like it. The flight deck is coated with a "non-skid" substance, which is slightly tacky when dry, and which when sprayed with salt water, jet fuel, and oil – as it almost always is – becomes the slipperiest surface known to man. When the ship heels, heaves, yaws, and pitches, which it does in spite of stabilization, aircraft on the deck want to move in undesirable directions. And they have. (For this reason, all aircraft aboard ship are tied down with chains at all times when not being moved.) | |||
| Fore | Forward or front. Used mainly in phrases like fore & aft, viz. "Fore-and-aft cap." | |||
| Fox Corpen | The carrier's heading for flight operations. Normally, if there's natural wind, there's only one ideal heading for launch: straight into the wind. For recovery the ship would turn slightly to starboard to get the wind down the angle deck. (Hearsay: "Corpen" indicates course, while "Fox" stands for the "F" in "Flight ops." Analogously, "Romeo Corpen" means the course steered during an "Unrep" – Underway Replenishment – operation.) | |||
| Fresnel lens | An ingenious arrangement of prismatic lenses, invented by the Frenchman Augustin Fresnel (pronounced frenél) early in the 19th century. After decades of use in lighthouses, the technology became standard for U.S. carrier OLS only in the 1960's. Provides a more powerful, narrower beam than the traditional mirror, and is more readily stabilized. If technically interested, check this site: http://www.lanternroom.com/misc/freslens.htm | |||
| Galley | The word "kitchen" doesn't exist in the Navy. It's a 'galley.' Naturally, to a career Navy man the room in his house with the stove and fridge is also a galley. | |||
| General Quarters | "Boing, boing boing" reverberates throughout the ship, followed by: "General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill." G.Q. is the ship's battle readiness and emergency condition. The ship goes to G.Q. when there is serious danger of battle damage, from within or without. At G.Q. each sailor and officer has an assigned station. Pilots muster in the squadron's ready room. | |||
| GQ | General Quarters, as above. Used colloquially to indicate an overreaction: "She went to GQ when I told her I had donated her ugly red shoes." | |||
| Groove | The aircraft's final, visual approach to the ship, when the pilot picks up the "ball" on the ship's OLS. The pilot makes his ball call, adjusts the angle of attack, and concentrates on the ball, controlling speed with the stick and rate of descent with the throttle, unless using autothrottle, in which case it's backwards, or ACLS, in which case he "monitors" with hands on. In the groove the (perfect) pilot does not look at the deck, except for quick scans for line-up, but "flies the ball" all the way to touchdown. | |||
| Hangar Deck | The carrier's vast cavern of a deck, enclosed and running nearly the length of the ship a couple of decks below the Flight deck, where aircraft are brought for maintenance, or tucked away in bad weather or when the Flight deck needs to be clear for any reason. The Hangar deck has space for all the carrier's aircraft. The Hangar deck is labeled the #1 deck of the ship; lower decks are numbered 2,3, etc. downward, while decks above the Hangar deck are numbered O-1, O-2, etc, upward. (The Flight deck is typically deck O-3.) Each squadron has its assigned areas on the Hangar deck. Almost any level of maintenance short of a total rebuild can be done here. Three huge A/C elevators allow movement of aircraft between the Hangar deck and the Flight deck. | |||
| Hatch | There aren't "doors" onboard a carrier. Even if it looks like a door, it's a "hatch." Most hatches have a method of watertight closure by, say, four to eight dogs around the perimeter of the hatch. The high-speed type is tightened (or "dogged") quickly with a turn of a wheel centered on the hatch, which wedges the dogs against the surrounding bulkhead. An old-salt sailor will naturally call a door in his house a hatch. | |||
| Helo | Helicopter. Around the carrier, "The Helo" is the rescue helicopter (angel), always airborne during flight ops. | |||
| Holdback | The lowly holdback fitting stands (or hangs) between the pilot and a cold cat shot. It's a solid steel rod, 6-7 inches long, with a machined collar at either end. As the aircraft taxis onto the catapult track, the forward end of the holdback is fitted into a receptacle in the aircraft's belly. The aft end is secured to a cable from the deck. The A/C is inched forward very slowly to take up the slack in the cable. (If this is done too quickly the holdback can be stressed, and the A/C must be pushed back and a new holdback fitted. An unpopular mistake by the pilot.) As the aircraft turns up to full power, the holdback fitting is the weak link in the high-tension train that holds the A/C back. And here's the idea of the holdback: At one point the rod is machined down to a smaller diameter which gives a weak point. When the catapult fires, the force of the cat stroke breaks the holdback fitting at the weak point, and the A/C is free to be pulled down the cat track. Simple, but the Navy pays a lot for holdback fittings because the tolerances and quality control must be perfect. The tensile strength of the steel must be exact, and the tensile breaking point at the weak groove must be precisely known. The holdback fitting (which is specific to each type of aircraft) must break at the right millisecond during the pressure build-up phase of the cat's power stroke. Too soon, you may have a cold cat shot. Too late, you can tear the aircraft apart or smack the pilot silly. The aircrew's lives literally hinge on the holdback manufacturer's quality assurance program. Development of the "zero/zero" ejection seat relieved this danger only slightly. | |||
| Hook-skip | Every Navy pilot's favorite excuse for a bolter. If the pneumatic bungee pressure (or whatever) holding the hook extended is low, the hook may bounce upon hitting the deck, and will probably not catch a wire. A worn hook point may give the same result, or, worse, may spit a wire. | |||
| Hook-to-ramp |
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| Huffer | The jet engine start-cart, used on the carrier, and ashore if no fixed airhose is available. The jet engine compressor needs to turn at perhaps 20% RPM before it'll sustain ignition, and since fighters don't have starter motors (too heavy), the huffer does the job by blowing a high velocity air stream to turn the engine. The pilot signals with a two-finger "turn-up" sign to the plane captain to start turning the engine. | |||
| Inflight engagement | No, not romance on United Airlines, but an even more hazardous adventure: On a carrier landing, the tailhook catching a wire before the wheels touch the deck. Ooh. A bad moment in store. The arresting gear slows the still flying A/C abruptly to below flying speed, and unceremoniously slams it to the deck. Usually busts the landing gear and much of the rest of the airplane, not to mention the pilot's back. How do we get into this scrape? Probably a wave-off in close (too close), scraping the deck with the hook, and the aircraft in a nose high attitude, desperately seeking succor. | |||
| Integrity watch | When flight ops aboard the carrier are secured and civilized folk hit the rack for the night, an "integrity watch" crew patrols the flight deck and hangar deck to ensure safety and proper tie-down of the aircraft, which can work themselves loose in a heavy sea. Nominally in charge of the watch is the integrity watch officer (of course a chief is really in charge of the crew, as always), a job that falls mainly to the nuggets in the squadron. It's a lonely watch, wandering the decks for four hours in the middle of the night, the time ticked off by the bells each half hour; and it usually comes when you're scheduled for three hops the next day. What the hell. Sleep some other night. | |||
| Island | The carrier's superstructure, rising from the Flight Deck on the starboard side. Contains the bridge, "Pri-Fly" and other mysteries. Messes up airflow on final approach. See Burble. | |||
| JBD | Jet Blast Deflector. Large steel plates that pivot up out of the flight deck behind a catapult, to protect from the blast from an aircraft at full power on the cat. | |||
| Kneeknocker | Busted knees are a Navy man's occupational hazard. Ship-board passageways are interrupted at regular intervals by waterproof, airproof, fireproof hatches, which supposedly will prevent the ship from sinking or going up in a conflagration. Well, the lip of the hatch is just below knee level. If you lift your legs just right you'll make it through; if you don't your knees are toast. | |||
| Ladder | Onboard ship, what you would elsewhere call stairs is a ladder. A Navy man calls stairs a "ladder" even in his house. | |||
| Launch | The first phase of a carrier's cyclic flight operations. (See Recovery.) At the start of the launch sequence, the A/C are parked on the aft half of the flight deck. As launch operations begin, A/C are taxied forward and directed by Yellow Shirts onto the next available catapult. Typically, a catapult stands idle for only a few seconds before the next bird is being hooked up. | |||
| Leeward | The side of the ship away from the wind, or in the downwind direction. Pronounced "loo-erd". Opposite of Windward. | |||
| Liberty | Shore leave for the crew when the ship is in port. For the enlisted crew this is strictly enforced as a given number of hours ashore. (For the excitement of getting ashore, see "Liberty boat," below.) For the officers, there's more leeway. (Here's a mariners' term, by the way: leeway – the space between the ship and any downwind obstruction, like a rocky coastline.) Lots more leeway; see "admin." | |||
| Liberty boat | When the carrier visits a foreign port, it does not tie up to a pier. For reasons of security and operational readiness the Captain anchors outside the harbor, usually 1/2 mile to a mile offshore. But the ship has 5-6000 sailors and officers who have been promised liberty ashore. The solution is liberty boats, open inboard engine mass movers that hold 30-40+ human sardines. Operating the boats merges two factors which can lead to more excitement than you need: 1. There is often a sea state that makes the boats bob up and down several feet (which the carrier does not), so that to step from the boat's gunwale to the small platform at the bottom of the ladder hanging over the ship's side and moving up and down relative to the boat requires a sure and deft step; and 2. On the returning boats, in the black of night, most of the sailors are dead drunk! One or two sailors at the bottom of the ladder, tied with lifelines and outfitted with rescue equipment, stand ready to assist in this disaster-waiting-to-happen. If the sea state is too great, the Captain may cancel liberty, but the crew response would be near-mutinous. Also, canceling the return boats late at night if the sea picks up would leave the crew stranded ashore. There's always an officer riding and nominally in charge of the boat: the dreaded Boat officer watch! | |||
| LSO |
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| Marshal | Sometimes used as a synonym for "rendezvous," Marshal (as a noun) usually refers to the specific mid-altitude rendezvous point designated for check-in with the carrier's 'approach control' (which is called "Marshal" – as in "Allstar Marshal, Gruesome One checking in") before returning to the ship to land. It's the holding pattern, typically at about 20,000 feet, from which the carrier's radar controllers feed the aircraft into the landing pattern. "To marshal" is to show up at the marshal point. | |||
| Meatball | See the Ball. | |||
| Mess | While the officers' on-board eatery is known as the wardroom, the enlisted men's somewhat-less-than-4-star establishment is tellingly called the Mess. But officers have a "mess" too; a special round-the-back-of-the-galley greasy spoon for watch-standers and pilots between flights, where you are free from protocol and from the uniform of the day. You can eat in your flight suit and feel free to be as unwashed as you please. In fact you'd better look a little filthy, or you're not supposed to be there. A liberating place. | |||
| The Mirror | The optical landing system mounted on the port side of the flight deck, and stabilized for the roll, pitch, and yaw of the ship. The pilot keeps an amber center light ("the ball") lined up with green "datum lights" to stay on the glide slope. (This isn't easy.) It used to be an actual mirror; now a Fresnel lens is used but it's still called a mirror. | |||
| Moon | Naval aviators' distaste for black-ass night carrier landings makes them all expert on the phases of the moon. The moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, and savvy carrier pilots know exactly how it will relate to their scheduled flight time. | |||
| "Mother" | Radio designation for the carrier, e.g.: "Gruesome four, Mother advises foul deck; your signal delta." | |||
| Night Trap | Night landings are a Navy pilot's scariest moments, unless they're pinkies. | |||
| OK | A well-executed carrier landing, as graded by the LSO. The ideal "OK-3" pass catches the target No.3 wire. An OK-3 grade by the LSO in everyone's earshot in the Ready Room may be the greatest high you'll have that day. Your chest comes out a bit, and that smile just suggests that you'd be willing to teach the rest, if there was only time. (An almost-OK pass is "(OK)." But see "Cut.") | |||
| OLS | Optical Landing System. See "Mirror". | |||
| Paddles | A sort of endearing term for the LSO, from the days when LSO's used a paddle in each hand to "wave" aircraft aboard. Actual paddles can still be used if the mirror fails, or under no-radio conditions. | |||
| Pass | An attempt at a carrier landing. Often successful, but some pilots like to make two or three passes (see "bolter") before making a trap. | |||
| Passageway | There aren't hallways or corridors on board ship. If it looks like a hallway or corridor it's a "passageway." (To a Navy man, of course, the hallway in his house is a passageway, too.) Things you're likely to see in a passageway include hatches, bulkheads, spaces, ladders, kneeknockers, and dogs, and none of them mean whatever they sound like. | |||
| Pattern | The daytime VFR flight pattern around the ship is the place for the squadron to look good. A flight of four (say) approaches the carrier from abaft, passing close abeam the starboard side of the ship at 400+ knots, 800' altitude, in starboard echelon. The drill is to make the coolest sound you can as you enter the break. (Some years ago, opening the "oil cooler door" on the F-8 Crusader would give a very cool wolf-howl-like sound. Coming to idle just before reaching the ship gives an eerie silence.) Each A/C breaks hard left in turn, with a few seconds interval between each. With power at idle speed bleeds off in the 180° turn, and the A/C levels downwind off the port beam of the ship. When abeam the fantail (at the "180" position) you start your port turn toward the ship, which pulls away during the turn. You intentionally overshoot the ship's wake by about 10° to line up with the angle deck, roll out in the groove, acquire the ball, reduce power to establish your rate of descent, and make your ball call to the LSO. Then you merely stay precisely on glideslope, speed, and centerline of the deck which is moving away and to the right at perhaps 30 knots. The pass is perfect; you go to full power on touchdown, power to idle when you're stopped. As you touch down the next A/C is at the 90° position (the "90") in the pattern, ready to roll into the groove. You're pulled backward by the arresting cable. The yellow shirt signals hook up. You raise the hook and follow his signals to move forward, fold the wings, and turn right. He passes you on to the next director who signals you to speed up. You cross the yellow foul line on the deck. A red light has indicated "foul deck" since you touched down. Now you're clear and the green "ready deck" light comes on. By this time the next A/C may be just 5 seconds from touchdown. A landing will occur every 20-some seconds during recovery. And that's the pattern. | |||
| Pinky | A daylight flight that lands just after sunset, giving you credit for a night landing while you essentially still have daylight. The squadron flight officer had better be equitable with giving out pinkies, or fights are likely to develop. (There are occasional rumors that CAG, an older and wiser man than most, often has important meetings later in the evening and finds it necessary to get his quota of night traps earlier in the day, i.e., a pinky, but we think that's just malicious gossip. Wouldn't happen. Eh?) | |||
| Pitching deck | This is when you really need the LSO. What am I doing flying off the carrier in a storm, anyway? Well, OK, "operational necessity"... But in spite of stabilization of the ship, the flight deck will rise and fall. And since the OLS is stabilized to the glide slope, all that pitching is hidden from the pilot. The LSO's visual call is still the best way to avoid a meeting of the aircraft with a rising deck. Even if a ramp strike does not occur, the rising deck can crush an aircraft's landing gear. | |||
| Plane captain | The "PC" is usually a junior enlisted man with a great responsibility. His assignment as plane captain for a particular aircraft means he ensures that the aircraft is preflighted and ready for flight when the pilot comes to man. The PC assists the pilot in getting strapped in, and directs the start-up sequence from the deck. The PC's name is often painted on his aircraft, which is a great source of pride. | |||
| Plane guard | Normally, when an aircraft carrier is conducting flight operations, a destroyer of the task group takes a "plane guard" position a half mile or so aft of the carrier, safely out of the flight pattern. The purpose is simply safety: To pick any eventual crash victims out of the water. (In a crash the "angel" helo is usually there first, but you never know; the COD could crash with a bunch of folks.) The plane guard serves other incidental purposes for the pilot: In the VFR flight pattern it's a convenient line-up aid, since it's in a dependable position. And it makes it (a little) easier to pick up the carrier visually from a distance. All in all a good addition to the safety procedures. | |||
| PLAT | "Pilot's Landing Aid Television." (Or something like that.) A typical Navy acronym for a very scary "Pilot's Landing Aid." The camera for this demonic device is buried in the flight deck, looking up the glide slope. Each landing on the ship is televised live in the Ready Room. How motivational is this? I've watched several aircraft go up in flames on the PLAT before going out flying. | |||
| Poopy Suit | Or "bag." It's not what it sounds like, whatever that is. Formally an "Antiexposure suit", exposing yourself in this contraption would be damn near impossible. Relieving yourself is equally impossible. Plan an extra ten minutes in the Ready Room to get this monstrosity on. This rubber coverall fits, more or less, over the standard flight suit, and is required flying gear over water whenever the air-and-water temperature goes below what the chart says. Without it, should you go in the drink, you'd be flounder-food in a hurry. In temperate climates the "bag" will normally be worn throughout the winter months on carrier-based flights. | |||
| Port | Now let's learn this once for all: Port is LEFT. Starboard is the other way. | |||
| Pri-fly | "Primary Flight Control." This is the carrier's 'control tower'. The domain of the Air Boss, the god of the flight traffic pattern. Pri-fly is also staffed with experienced pilots who can advise on emergency procedures if needed. | |||
| Ramp | This is the part of the carrier you hit and kill yourself on if you're low on landing. | |||
| Ramp Strike |
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| Ready Room | A spartan room on the carrier (or in the hangar, when ashore) where the pilots spend much of their time yabbering. Contains a desk for the SDO (Squadron Duty Officer), a black-and-white TV set (the PLAT) that shows all landings from a camera buried in the flight deck, and a reclinable chair for each squadron officer, to do with as he likes. Flight briefs and debriefs, personality clashes, and games of Ace-deuce take place here daily. | |||
| Recognition | An entertaining slide show-slash-quiz which the AIO puts on from time to time in the Ready Room. It consists mostly of endless dozens of slides with fuzzy black-and-white photos of "enemy" ships. You're supposed to learn to tell them apart, so you can report back in the flight debrief. (But it's a generic trait among pilots that they don't care about ships. They recognize three kinds: Flat-tops, subs, and "others." The AIO eventually just gives them a camera.) The second best part of the show is that the AIO turns off the lights in the Ready Room so you can sleep. The best part is that your squadron mates' howls will wake you up when the spicy shots come up on the screen. No matter how long the ship has been at sea, the guys have no recognition problem with these uh ... hulls. An AIO who fails to spice up his Rec. show would be shunned, since he has no other known redeeming social value. | |||
| Recovery | A carrier's cyclic flight operations is separated into launch and recovery (landing) phases. During the recovery phase the flight deck starts clear of aircraft. Upon landing, each A/C is taxied forward and parked clear of the landing area. An aircraft will land every 20-some seconds during the recovery phase. HEY! WANT TO RIDE ALONG ON AN APPROACH AND RECOVERY? REALLY! YOU CAN LOG A CARRIER LANDING! JUST CLICK THIS LONG LINK. | |||
| Red Ball | When the pilot is low on the glide slope, the ball turns red. Red like blood. Better do something about it. Like add power. Lots of power. Now! | |||
| Romeo Corpen | means the ship's heading during underway replenishment ("unrep" - you're now one of very few who know this; go out and impress someone). See the analogous "Fox Corpen." | |||
| Rounddown | The Ramp, Fantail, the hurtin' zone of the carrier deck. But if you don't hit IT, it won't hurt YOU. | |||
| Sand Crabs | Usually plural. Civilian so-called workers who are contracted to do repair work on the ship, often in a foreign port. In most countries they're laggards. In Japan they're real workers. | |||
| SDO, or "The Duty" |
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| Shooter | Slang for the Catapult Officer. | |||
| Space | More often "spaces." Any or all rooms or areas on board ship, in or around a hangar, etc. Each room or segment of a passageway or deck has a space number. "The Chief will inspect the Avionics spaces at 0800." A Navy dad will naturally say, "Not until you've cleaned your space, Billy." (That would be Billy's room.) | |||
| Spaghetti | The "wires," collectively, on the carrier. The arresting gear; the landing area. | |||
| Spit a wire | The steel point of the tailhook works in a violent environment, and needs frequent replacement. If it becomes worn, the hook may initially catch a wire, but fail to hold it when the pressure builds as the aircraft decelerates. If the hook "spits" or releases the cable at this point, the aircraft will probably not regain flying speed and will likely end up going in the drink. A serious, sometimes fatal, consequence of overlooking a small part. | |||
| Spotting the deck | A nasty habit. Like in baseball, taking your eye off the ball is a bad idea in carrier landings. "Spotting the deck", or switching your attention to the deck for even the last second before touchdown will usually result in an increased sink rate and often a three-point landing and overstressed landing gear. LSO's uniformly condemn the practice, but nevertheless it thrives. Especially after a couple of bolters when it's "Get aboard or bingo." All this said, many experienced Naval Aviators routinely spot the deck, using the dip method to get aboard, often safely. | |||
| Stabilization | More or less successful efforts to fool Mother Nature. The carrier is stabilized to reduce pitch and roll movements. The result may be unpredictable figure-8-like movements of the ramp. The mirror is stabilized to the glide slope. The result is a ramp that can rise without the pilot having any clue. The aircraft is also stabilized in pitch and yaw, by systems that can and do go out of control. You can't fool Mother Nature. | |||
| Starboard | The Right side. If you had to look this up, maybe this will help: Port and Starboard alphabetizes like Left and Right | |||
| Stash | A theoretical term for booze illegally stashed in pilots' staterooms. This would be a violation of Navy Regulations, and therefore is thought by some to not actually happen. | |||
| Stateroom | Senior pilots get their own room, but don't have any fun. Junior pilots share a stateroom, and that's where the parties are, such parties as you can have with a bunch of sleepless zombies. | |||
| Steam | The U.S. Navy is not known to operate steam vessels any longer, but still the ships all "steam" when they're underway. [No sooner do I make this fine ironic point than Dave "Fireball" Johnson points out that nuclear ships run by steam(!) – correct, of course, but I ask you, is a nuke a steam ship?] Navy ships at sea spend a fair amount of time just ... being, but like sharks they have to keep moving so what's there to do but ... steam? | |||
| Tailhook | Or just "Hook". What distinguishes a naval aircraft. A steel hook lowered hydraulically or pneumatically from the rear of the aircraft, intended to engage a cable of the carrier's arresting gear to bring the aircraft to a quick stop. Attaches to the aircraft via a flexible fitting required to take the full force of bringing a 25 ton aircraft from 150+ mph to zero in about 2 seconds. Its engineering is one of the marvels of modern technology. | |||
| Three-point landing |  Ouch! A Navy jet is built to land on its two main mounts. After touchdown the hook catches a wire and slams the nose gear down. But landing on the three mounts together is a bad deal; it may well collapse the nose gear. You get into this predicament when you're high on the glide slope. Seeing the meatball climb on the mirror you try to correct down with a poorly executed dip. Your nose gets low, your sink rate's high, and before you're reestablished you hit the deck with all three mounts. If you're lucky, the hook will catch a wire, and though the nose gear may collapse, as on the grim-looking Crusader at right, at least you're aboard. If you're less lucky, with the hook farther from the deck than in the normal landing attitude the hook may skip, the A/C may bounce, and you're back in the air with a busted nose gear. You'se in trouble. | |||
| Tilly | A wheeled crane used on the flight deck. Painted yellow, like all moveable (nonflying) flight deck equipment, the tilly is compact but powerful, able to clear disabled aircraft or parts thereof from the landing area in a hurry. | |||
| Topside | You just can't say "upstairs" onboard a ship. It's Topside. Navy folks use this term ashore, too. (You can't say "downstairs", either. And of course there aren't "stairs" onboard ship.) | |||
| A Trap | An arrested landing. Navy pilots practice carrier landing techniques constantly when ashore. See MLP. | |||
| Unrep | Underway Replenishment. A carrier can stay at sea for months at a time, but needs a steady supply of groceries, razor blades and toilet paper. And one or two other things, like fuel if it's oil burning, and jet fuel in any case. While some high priority items may be delivered by COD, most supplies come aboard from a cargo ship or oiler which rendezvous'es (?) with the carrier at sea. The at-sea resupply "evolution" (the Unrep) can be more exciting than you really want when the high seas are really high (sea state of 5 is the max for Unrep), as the two ships are steaming side by side, connected by one or more high lines or fuel hoses, with about 160 feet of separation. (As a bonus factoid for trivia buffs, the Unrep heading is known as the "Romeo Corpen.") | |||
| Wardroom | The officers' dining room onboard. Chipped beef is a real favorite. And coffee made with water that tastes of jet fuel. (The ship makes its unique "fresh" water from the polluted salt water it's steaming through. It also disposes of its wastes in the same waters. During "cyclic ops" the ship steams back and forth in the same sea lane, dumping waste and making drinking water.) You're expected to behave in the wardroom, a challenge for most aviators. (But if you're in-between flights in a sweaty flight suit you can go to the dirty-shirt mess and not have to behave at all.) You're not supposed to talk about politics, sex, or religion in the wardroom. It often gets very quiet there. | |||
| Wave | Traditional term for what the LSO does. As in "Who's waving this recovery?" | |||
| Wave-off | An aborted carrier pass, where the pilot adds power and climbs back in the landing pattern. A hazardous condition may have developed – such as the deck pitching up, or the deck was fouled, or the pilot's pass was unsafe. Usually the command to wave off a pass is issued by the LSO, but the pilot can make his own choice to wave it off. | |||
| Wind | The aircraft carrier likes to have close to 30 knots of wind down the deck for aircraft launch and landings. If there's natural wind, the Captain heads the carrier into the wind to launch. For landings, you want the wind to come down the angle deck, 10-12° off the ship's axis, to reduce the need to crab on final approach. If there's no natural wind, the Captain makes wind. It's not what it sounds like. He does this by steaming at 25-30 knots; but in this case the wind relative to the carrier will come down the axis of the ship, giving the pilots a starboard cross wind on final approach and bringing the burble into the groove. | |||
| Windward | The side of the ship closest to the wind, or in the upwind direction. If you're planning to relieve yourself over the rail, select the leeward side instead. | |||
| Wire | "The Wires" is the set of 4 heavy wound steel cables comprising the Arresting Gear. They're numbered from 1 (furthest aft) to 4. On the ideal landing the hook snags the 3-wire. Miss all 4 and you bolter. Each wire has a personality. The 1-wire: You don't want to catch this. The LSO's unhappy and you may get a cut pass. You're too low at the ramp and putting the aircraft in danger. The 2-wire: This isn't necessarily bad [the LSO may mark it "(OK)" in his book]. It just isn't perfect. You'd like a little more ramp clearance. The 3-wire: This is the target wire. Your hook-to-ramp clearance is normative. An "OK-3" grade from the LSO is the goal. If you're "on rails" down the glide slope to an OK-3, your grade is underlined and you gain stature in the Ready Room. A 4-wire is usually safe, though you're high on the glide slope. But if your glide slope is leveling in close, or you have a right-to-left drift, you may get an inflight engagement, or wind up at or over the port side scupper of the flight deck, hanging by the hook (more a problem on older, smaller carriers), or worse. "Fly-by-wire" is something else altogether. | |||
| Yellow Shirt | The enlisted flight deck directors who have control of movement of A/C on the flight deck. A pilot does not move his aircraft, or any external component of his aircraft, without a positive direction from a Yellowshirt. The Yellowshirts of course wear yellow shirts. There are also White, Green, Purple, Red, and a couple of other color shirts on the flight deck, designating specific roles. (Green = maintenance, Purple = fuelers, etc.) These guys work in an indescribably hazardous environment, and deserve a lot of the medals the pilots get. |
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Aircraft & Flying
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| A/B | Afterburner. |
| A/C | 1. Aircraft. An aircraft may be called an airplane, but never a "plane". 2. Air conditioning and pressurization system. 3. Anti-collision light. 'Blinker.' (Blinking red light.) |
| Ack-ack | Anti-aircraft artillery (AAA – "triple A"). An unfriendly reception when going downtown. |
| ACM | Air Combat Maneuvering. Informally "Tactics". The traditional essence of fighter pilot training. |
| Acute | In formation flying, if a wingman is forward of his proper position in the formation, he's "acute." (Those who paid attention in Geometry might object that in this case the angle he makes with the flight is more obtuse, i.e., less acute. I say don't worry about it.) If he's too far back (more acute angle) he's "sucked." Don't laugh; these are the actual professional terms! |
| ADF | "Automatic Direction Finding," an obsolete piece of VHF radio direction finding equipment. The needle points toward whatever station you've dialed in. When you pass above it, the needle goes nuts. Big deal. You turn up the volume and the Morse code dits'n'dahs are supposed to tell you what station you've got, if you actually remember your dits'n'dahs. Which you probably don't. |
| Afterburner | (Also A/B, Burner, Blower, Heater, and (Brit) Re-heat.) The go-fast mechanism that makes fighter planes unique. The 20 feet of flame shooting out the back on a night take-off. Simple in concept, but tricky in design and execution, the idea of burning hot air and fuel in a jet exhaust made supersonic flight possible. The afterburner is basically an extension of the jet engine exhaust pipe. You "simply" spray fuel into the hot exhaust gas (while providing back-pressure protection for the engine) and you get yourself a mess of thrust. You can get twice the power of the basic engine, but you'll use 3 times the fuel. In a tactical environment the 'burner will be selected for short bursts of acceleration or climbing power, because fuel management is always critical. If you run out of fuel, you may as well have been shot down. (Of course you'll use the burner as needed in a dogfight. If you're shot down, you might as well have run out of fuel.) |
| Airway | The air equivalent of roads and sea lanes. Airways are defined by TACAN fixes (radials and distances), and keep commercial traffic organized. Anyone (including military aircraft) flying above 18,000 feet in the U.S. flies under air traffic control by FAA, and is normally on an airway. High altitude (jet) airways are designated with a "Juliet," as J-22, while low altitude airways are designated with a "Victor," as V-20. |
| Alpha | The letter "A" in radio comm. In squadron and aircraft abbreviations it stands for "attack"; e.g., aircraft such as the A-1 Skyraider, the A-3 Skywarrior, the A-4 Skyhawk, and the A-7 Corsair II. In squadron designations, together with the letter "V" (meaning fixed-wing) it designates attack squadrons, e.g., VA-81, VA-83, etc. Also useful in common naval shorthand such as "The new skipper's an Alpha-Hotel." |
| Altitude | You wouldn't think there would be any dispute about this; how high you are. But there is a small problem: Standard altimeters work by measuring barometric pressure. Before taking off, the pilot adjusts the altimeter to the altitude of the take-off airfield. And why does he have to do that? Because the local barometric pressure has changed since he landed! This means that all the aircraft in the sky are operating with different altimeter settings, depending on the barometric pressures at their many departure airfields. And that means that my reading of, say, 10,000 feet may be widely different from another aircraft's reading of the same altitude. Who cares, when you're flying fighters VFR and you can see where you're going, but when you're an American Airlines jet with passengers walking in the aisle it's unpopular to be making constant violent avoidance maneuvers, so the FAA has come up with the idea of standardized "Flight levels" to solve the problem. I guess it does solve it, though I personally think that tossing a few passengers about in the aisle is a reasonable price to pay for maintaining a little excitement in flying. |
| Angels | 'Altitude', in thousands of feet. As in an air controller's: "Gruesome Five, Elevator Angels three zero" means: "Gruesome Five (callsign), climb (or descend) to altitude 30,000 feet." |
| Angle of attack | The angle between the plane of the wing (yes, the plane of the wing of the plane) and the relative wind as the aircraft flies. At low speeds, a higher angle of attack is needed to give enough lift, and the aircraft will fly with a nose-high attitude. To avoid landing in that attitute, we extend flaps and slats to increase the lift from the wing, and level the aircraft's attitude, allowing the pilot better visibility for landing. (The most drastic measure to achieve this was perhaps that of the nonpareil F-8 Crusader, where the pilot would pivot the wing up – or the fuselage down, actually – to be able to see to land.) On final approach, naval aircraft use Angle of attack as the primary indicator of proper landing speed. Its advantage over using the airspeed indicator is that the correct angle of attack for landing does not vary with the aircraft's weight, whereas the landing airspeed varies with fuel load. So the pilot flies a constant 14 units, say, of angle of attack on every landing pass. The aim, rarely realized, is routine repetition – as in bowling. |
| Attitude | Not the pilot's but the aircraft's. Refers to the pitch angle of the aircraft; nose high or low. On a carrier landing, the LSO, a man of few words, uses the word "Attitude!" to mean "Raise your nose!" Again, the aircraft's, not the pilot's. |
| Auger in | To drill a hole in the ground (or the sea) with your airplane, while still in it. Unfailingly fatal, and it rarely happens where a hole needs to be drilled. |
| Autothrottle (APC) | A system that's nice to have when it works, but can lull the pilot into complacency. On final approach to the carrier, the pilot engages the autothrottle ("Approach Power Compensator"), which will keep a constant angle of attack (i.e., speed control) while the pilot controls rate of descent with the stick. Problem is, when the APC isn't working right the pilot has to revert to a manual approach, which means controlling speed with the nose attitude (i.e., with the stick) and rate of descent with the throttle, an opposite procedure. The Air Wing or squadron requires their pilots to regularly make "manual" approaches, to maintain a level of proficiency. You just won't be as proficient. Every silver lining has a cloud. |
| Bag | 1. n. The Poopy Suit. 2. n. The Instrument Hood. 3. v. To bag an enemy aircraft is to shoot it down. You try to avoid getting bagged yourself in the process. |
| Balbo |  A huge formation of aircraft, organized for some non-operational purpose, such as to impress dignitaries or scare the enemy. (After Italian general Italo Balbo, who led a mass exhibition flight from Italy to the U.S. and back in 1933.) The balbo at right (I count 44) was to impress NATO brass visiting the Independence in 1968. |
| Bandit | An aircraft positively identified as enemy. |
| Banner | The air-to-air gunnery target. You arrive at the squadron (this is a shore-based exercise) to find out that on your first hop of the day you'll be the tow pilot for an air-to-air gunnery flight. You try to think of what you've done to the Flight Schedules officer to tick him off. There isn't much you hate about flying, but towing the banner (you're known as the "tractor") is right there. (See the Gunnery link.) So you brief with the flight and find out that it's a year since any of them did this, one of the most intricate and hazardous exercises in the fleet. You launch first as the tow. You meet the Ordnance crew at the end of the runway, where they have laid out the approx. 8' by 35' nylon banner (which weighs a bunch as it's weighted and stabilized with metal bars) and the 1200 foot cable that you hope will keep the bullets at a distance. The crew hook up the cable to your tailhook fitting, you take up the slack, and you're off – in afterburner to clear the area quickly. But you can't go over 250 knots to avoid fraying the banner or tearing it loose, so you're nose sky-high staggering through the air with this non-aerodynamic contraption dragging behind you. You hope the banner doesn't fall off (that's happened); it could kill a few folks. A chase plane from the flight has launched with you to discourage other aircraft from driving into your cable. Arriving at the gunnery range you spend 30 harrowing minutes watching the would-be gunners struggle with the pattern. The pattern's important because if the shooter comes in "sucked" – from too far aft – you'll be seeing bullets flying by the cockpit. It's not unheard of that the tow plane gets hit. Now the banner needs to be recovered because it's scored: Each shooting a/c has bullets painted a different color, and the color can (usually) be distinguished on the frays around each bullet hole. So, back at the field you line up over the grass strip next to the runway, and on the signal "Drop" from the tower you lower the hook. The idea is that the weight of the hook breaks the fitting that holds the cable, and the banner falls free. Usually that works, but if it doesn't you have an emergency. You're flying around, probably over civilians, with a weakened fitting, to try another drop. You could try to drag it off in the bushes... And if eventually you may have to land with the banner dragging... well, let's not talk about it. All in all, a flight where everything can go wrong. |
| Barf-bag | Just as some concert pianists never get over stage-fright, some fighter pilots never get over barfing. They're still great pilots. |
| Basic engine | The jet engine without the afterburner. The basic engine performance is shown in the cockpit on a tach (RPM gage) as percent of the rotor's rated full speed, so full basic engine power is shown as "100%." We call this "MRT" (Military Rated Thrust), in contrast to "CRT" (Combat Rated Thrust) which is full afterburner power. No matter how powerful your basic engine is, once you've felt the kick of afterburner power, it somehow seems pretty wimpy. |
| Basket | The Air Force has a good method for aerial refueling. The Navy doesn't. The Air Force's stabilized tanker boom, guided to the refueling probe by an airman on the tanker works fine if you have a tanker the size of a mid-sized building. Since the Navy's tankers have to operate off carriers, they're small, no room for a boom or boom-crew. So the system leaves the onus of maneuvering on the pilot of the receiving aircraft. And on a black night in the middle of the ocean with critical fuel state, that'll raise the pucker factor. The fuel hose that extends some 30 feet aft of the tanker, ending in a padded cone (the Basket – also known as the beaver), designed to receive your probe and guide it to a successful coupling. This whole business results in one of the trickiest maneuvers in aviation. Never mind that the basket is dancing around the cockpit (a hit on the cockpit plexiglass could ruin your whole day), the pilot has to hold steady until the basket settles down, then add power – if you're lucky, your probe is in the beaver, uh, basket. Thrust drives the probe tip deeper in and completes the coupling. (Enough...this is beginning to resemble a bad romance novel.) |
| Bearing | The direction of some object from your position, given as a magnetic direction in compass degrees (and normally with a distance in nautical miles). A pilot may hear an air controller report, "The bogey bears one five zero at three niner miles." (Note, a bearing is not a heading, silly, but it could be the required course.) |
| Bird | An OK word for airplane. |
| Black-out | Loss of vision, soon to be followed by loss of consciousness, as a result of high G maneuvering. Check the hazards of the high G environment at "tunnel vision" and "grey-out." Ignoring the warning sign of "grey-out" may take you to this next step on the slide toward unconsciousness. It's just a brief step from loss of vision (black-out) to loss of consciousness. If you lose consciousness while you're pulling 7 G's the aircraft may depart controlled flight as the pilot's grip is lost from the control stick, with possibly violent and unpredictable effects in the cockpit and on the airframe. The G-suit is the pilot's primary aid in combatting these effects of high G loads. |
| Blower | "A dear child has many names." Here's yet another for afterburner. |
| Boards | Speed brakes (or "air brakes", a Brit term not used in the U.S. but which makes a lot more sense, I mean, what kind of brake isn't a speed brake? What else would you brake??). One or more drag-inducing panels on the fuselage, tail, or wings that are hydraulically raised into the breeze to add drag and reduce airspeed. Effective enough at high speeds to throw the pilot forward in the straps. |
| Bogey | A UFO; that is to say, an unidentified flying object. Probably an aircraft, but it could be a weather balloon or a flight of geese. |
| Bravo | The letter "B" in radio comm. The phrase "Bravo-Sierra" (B/S) is a common and useful expletive. |
| Break | The traditional VFR flight approach to a Navy field, now surviving mainly on the carriers and at airshows. The flight screams down the duty runway at an impressive rate of speed, in right echelon and shortly beyond "the numbers" (the runway designation painted at the end of the strip, like "24L" for the left of two parallel runways in the direction of 240°, as at Miramar – "Fightertown USA" – God this is a long parenthesis) the leader snap-rolls (breaks) hard left to nearly 90° of bank, and pulls enough Gs to slow the A/C and set up downwind. Wingmen follow suit with several seconds between each break. There are variations on this traditional break: In the fan-break the initial roll rate is less, but the entire flight breaks together. The lead pulls max Gs, and the following wingmen use a progressively lower G loading. This produces separation on the downwind leg. When tried by the unpracticed it can produce a humorous effect. Another break, the tuck-under, involves a 270° roll to the right, resulting presumably in the aircraft in a 90° left bank. The less said about this the better. If it doesn't result in an accident it will probably result in discipline. See also The pattern for more on landing patterns. |
| Brief | Fooling around in the Ready Room before a flight. No, actually, this is taken pretty seriously: the flight crews gather for a flight briefing by the flight leader. The AIO may attend and amuse the flight crews with what the politicians want them to think. The brief covers stuff like radio frequencies, bingo field and bingo fuel, and a detailed preview of the upcoming flight: Rendezvous point, mission, target procedures, recovery, and Emergency of the Day. |
| Buffet | Not a cafeteria line, and not pronounced like one. (Good, solid "t"; two t's if you want: "Buff-ett.") Even though modern fighters have all sorts of artificial stall warnings (see "depart"), it's hard to beat the feel of what the actual airplane's doing when you're flying close to the edge. And one thing it will do before the wing stalls is to buffet; you pull G's to near the stall point and the airframe literally shakes, rattling your teeth. Flying the buffet to the max (the edge of the flight envelope) without departing the aircraft takes experience and guts. Each airframe buffets differently. Some, like the F-4 Phantom, have a wide buffet range; you expect to be in heavy airframe buffet in every high-G tactical turn. You have to learn to distinguish the point of no return. Other airframes have a very narrow buffet range, meaning it comes on quickly immediately before the stall. In either case you need a well-trained stick hand. These guys spend lonely months at sea. Plenty of time to exercise their stick hand. | Burner | Short for Afterburner. |
| Buster | Radio command to advance engine power to 100% basic engine, (i.e., "MRT"), without afterburner . Used by the flight leader, "Buster ... now" brings everyone in the flight to full power simultaneously. (The leader may then come back a percent or so as necessary to keep everyone onboard.) Used by an air controller it means proceed at maximum basic engine speed. |
| Button | A radio channel. No matter what the radio selector looks like, a preset channel is known as a "button." A flight leader will brief, "Primary frequency will be button five, back-up button four." A pilot at home may be heard to say, "Honey, you got the remote? Let's check the race on button eight." |
| Buy the farm | To get killed, preferably while flying. A lot of Navy pilots have been southern farm boys. The modest government insurance money might pay off the farm mortgage, or buy the farm. |
| CAP | Combat Air Patrol. The most common type of CAP is BARCAP (barrier CAP), in which a flight of fighters fly a pattern at an altitude, distance, and direction from the carrier task group that places the fighters between the task group and the threat. The CAP aircraft use their onboard radar to supplement the ship's radar in searching for bogeys. Other forms of CAP are TARCAP (target CAP) which involves flying fighter escort for a strike group and clearing enemy fighters at the target site; and RESCAP (rescue CAP), to suppress enemy activity and support SAR (search and rescue) efforts to extract downed aircrew from a combat zone. On board the carrier, if the degree of hazard from enemy activity is low – as in peace time – a "ready CAP" watch may be maintained on deck rather than airborne during non-flying hours. The degree of readiness can vary from "hot CAP," where the A/C on watch are manned on the catapults and plugged into the start carts, to a "30 minute CAP" watch where the pilots are in the ready room. |
| CAVU | Weather "Clear And Visibility Unlimited." Ideal flying weather. |
| Charlie | 1. Charlie time: The scheduled time of an aircraft's arrival at the carrier. If you're in a holding pattern, you may hear, "Your signal Charlie," meaning get in the landing pattern now. See Final Charlie. 2. The letter "C" in radio comm. And the letter C has a few meanings: In ship designations it stands for "Aircraft Carrier," which see. In aircraft designations it means "cargo or passenger A/C," as in "C-45" (the military version of the old "DC-3") or "C-130," the Hercules. In squadron designations it means "composite," as in VC-7. (The "C" of Composite is identical to the former "U" for "Utility," as in "VU-7," once the squadron name.) A composite (or utility) squadron flies various kinds of aircraft, carrying out duties such as ferrying A/C, flying as intercept bogeys, towing air-to-air gunnery targets (banners) etc. |
| Church | This code word was all you might hear if you asked about the outcome of a flight accident. The simple meaning: "There will be a memorial service." |
| Clean | Landing gear & hook up, flaps & slats retracted; A/C configured for high-speed flight. The way the airplane was meant to fly. Clean, not Dirty |
| Cockpit | A Pit for ... uh, a pilot. |
| Combat spread | A pre-engagement or patrolling formation by a section of two aircraft. In this formation the two A/C fly abeam one another with several thousand feet of lateral separation. The point of the formation is both offensive and defensive. On offense, the lateral separation decreases the chance that an enemy aircraft will visually pick up both A/C, leading to a great advantage for the section. Also, for any engagement commenced by one of the section A/C the other will be in good position to maneuver to advantage. Defensively, the combat spread formation allows each A/C to check the other's six to a great distance, and in any attack on the section one A/C should come out of the first defensive turn with a good chance to pressure the attacker. |
| Compass | The simple, unpretentious magnetic wet compass, anomalous in the modern high-tech cockpit, is still the final directional back-up in case of failure of GIS, Inertial Navigation, electric Radio Magnetic Indicator or whatever else the pilot has available. And for its rare use it gets an inordinate amount of attention. The aircraft gets taxied to the Compass Rose (see below) from time to time to calibrate the error ("deviation") induced by metals and electromagnetic fields in the A/C. Once the compass has been calibrated, to find the True Heading from the Compass Heading the pilot or navigator simply adds or subtracts the Compass Deviation, which gives the correct Magnetic Heading, and then adds or subtracts the published Magnetic Variation at the specific point on the Earth where the aircraft is located. Voila! You've arrived at the True Heading. Only, whether to add or subtract depends on whether the Magnetic Variation is "east" or "west" variation. A mnemonic is in order. Pilots use this to convert from True to Compass headings: "True Virgins Make Dull Company – Add Whiskey." Which means, going from True heading through Variation, Magnetic heading, and Deviation, to Compass heading, you add "West" variation (implying you would subtract "east" variation). The mnemonic for the opposite procedure, going from Compass heading to True heading, is the less flamboyant "Can Dead Men Vote Twice At Elections?" We'll leave that to the reader. |
| Compass rose | A good-size circle with precise magnetic headings painted on the tarmac in a lonely spot of the airfield, supposedly far from magnetic influences, used to calibrate the wet-compass. A J.O. is given the pleasure of taxiing an aircraft to the Compass Rose to "swing" the compass. As he lines up the A/C on various headings he reads off the indicated compass heading to the maintenance crew, who compile a table of compass deviations for the purpose outlined above under "Compass." Swinging the compass is hot work on a hot day (OK, it's cold work on a cold day...) and nobody's favorite job. |
| Con | A contrail (see below), or to leave a contrail behind the aircraft. A fighter pilot fears 'the cons' like the plague; his position there is visible for miles. A flight member will warn another if he's conning. A slight decrease in altitude is usually enough to get out of the cons. |
| Contrail | This trail of ice crystals forms behind the aircraft from water vapor emitted in the engine exhaust. Contrails form under certain conditions of temperature, pressure, and water content, usually at 30-some thousand feet. Climb high enough and you're out of 'the cons' (see above). |
| Course | So what's what? "Course, heading, bearing, track..." It can be confusing. You're flying a track over the ground, and your present course is the direction (usually magnetic) of that track at the present moment. If there's no wind, your heading will be your course. If you're going directly to a stationary target, such as an airfield, your bearing to the target will be the same as the course to the target. But if your target is not stationary, such as another aircraft, your course toward an intercept will not be the same as the present bearing to the target (unless the target is on the same or opposite course). So there you have it. Course, heading, bearing, track. Plain and simple. |
| Crab | 1. An airplane goes where it's pointed, except where there's a cross wind (which there almost always is, so the airplane hardly ever goes where it's pointed). There you have to "crab" – to head (or point) partly into the wind – in order to get where you want to go. Landing on the carrier, you essentially always have to crab to starboard, because you're not flying the same course as the ship; the angle deck is offset 10-12° to port. So even if the wind is straight down the angle deck the ship is continually slipping away to the right, and makes a 'virtual' relative wind. To fly the pass without a crab the wind would actually have to come from port relative to the angle deck; you'll grow old waiting for that day. 2. (Constructed as plural: crabs.) Damnable and persistent arachnid evidence that the naval aviator was not as morally upstanding as naval aviators are theoretically expected to be, in that last port of call. |
| Cross-country | A nice tradition. Navy pilots need instrument training. You get instrument training by flying cross-country flights. You're stationed in San Diego, and the fresh Maine lobsters are in Maine. You "instrument train" on a hop to Maine. You bring back lobster for a squadron party. A nice tradition. And of course good instrument training. |
| Cross-over | The move a wingman makes to cross to the other side of the flight leader in a formation. The lead gives a hand signal by raising a fist toward the top of the canopy on the side where the wingman is flying. The wingman then reduces power to pull just aft of the lead, dips down a few feet, and crosses under - that's under, not over! the flight lead to the other side, then moves up and forward to take the proper position. |
| CRT | "Combat Rated Thrust" or "Maximum Thrust" – full power in afterburner. |
| Cruise | 1. Or "free cruise." A more relaxed flight formation than "Parade." Wingmen have somewhat more separation and are stepped back farther from the flight lead, and fly on a more flexible gouge. 2. Six to nine months at sea with all the comforts of San Quentin prison. |
| Crusader (F-8) |  Ah, the Crusader. Fighter pilot Nirvana. "The last of the gunfighters." One of those few airplanes that linger in the minds of its pilots for decades as the ultimate bird. Introduced in the US Navy in 1957 to replace a bevy of subsonic fighters used by the US Navy (F9F Cougar, FJ Fury, F4D Skyray, F3H Demon, and F7U Cutlass), it immediately raised the bar. The first US Navy fighter to accelerate to supersonic speed in level flight, first production aircraft of any type to exceed 1000 miles per hour, the Crusader set a slew of time-to-altitude and speed records, including the coast-to-coast speed record – averaging supersonic speeds, including air refueling times – (with Major – later Astronaut/Senator – John Glenn, USMC, at the controls). Built by Chance-Vought (later "Vought," then "Ling-Temco-Vought" or LTV), the 'Sader (or 'Gator) was originally a pure day fighter, with limited radar and all-weather capability. In time the airplane was updated with longer-range target acquisition and mapping radar, a radar altimeter, and a more powerful Pratt & Whitney J57P20 engine. A unique feature of the Crusader was its variable incidence wing, mounted at the top of the fuselage, which was swivelled up 7° (from a hinge at the back end of the wing) for takeoff and landing in order to increase lift with a flatter fuselage attitude, allowing the pilot to see the landing area over the nose, and incidentally but importantly, to avoid scraping the tail. The Crusader (and this is written with a 'Sader driver's passion) was a near-perfect dogfighting platform, handling a high G environment smoothly. (OK, it could have used another 5K lbs of thrust, and you could wish for more warning of spin-outs, and its slow-speed handling characteristics ... well, it never cared for slow speeds. But it was one handlin' machine!) The French Navy finally retired the last Crusaders in active service anywhere, in late 1999. In addition to the small pictorial tribute to the Crusader on this web site, check Dave "Fireball" Johnson's marvelous site and home page of the Crusader Association at www.f8crusader.org. (And don't look for other aircraft in this Guide. There aren't any.)
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| Deadstick | A "deadstick landing" is a landing with a dead engine. This works nicely in Cessna and Piper light planes and in the Space Shuttle, but forget it in a jet fighter. The basic problem is that your average fighter doesn't "glide." It falls. It has to do with "wing loading." The NATOPS manual says it's something you try if you're unable to abandon the aircraft. In other words, if this doesn't work you die. Usually this maneuver involves showing up right above the touchdown point of a runway at about 8,000 feet above ground level, then executing a precision power-off maneuver to a landing which you have never practiced, because NATOPS forbids practicing it. It doesn't help that you're on backup and partial instruments and flight controls. You don't do this if you can help it. |
| Debrief | The most critical part of the flight, even though you're back on Earth (or sea). You see, whatever happened up there didn't really happen until it's been said and admitted on the deck. If you were on an "air combat maneuvering" (dogfighting) training hop against another pilot, you never know how the flight will transmogrify in the Ready Room debriefing. Probably the rest of the squadron's pilots are listening. You're just going to have to outshout your opponent: "On my six, my ass! I Fox'ed you out of the first turn and you know it." Oh well. Not much has changed in this area since airplanes were invented. |
| Delta | 1. The letter "D" in radio comm. 2. "Delta pattern": A holding pattern. If there's suddenly a fouled deck on the carrier, you may hear, "Your signal Delta." You proceed posthaste to the standard carrier holding pattern. |
| Depart | The aircraft "departs" from controlled flight when it enters a spin or other out-of-control state. A departure most often happens in a high-G maneuvering environment, like a hassle, as a result of the wing stalling. (An aircraft can theoretically stall at any speed if the angle of attack is increased sufficiently by back pressure on the stick. But at high speeds you'd pull the wings off the A/C before stalling it.) Typically, pulling too much G at the slow-speed top end of a vertical maneuver (perhaps helped by a little rudder input to asymmetrize the wing lift), or too much G for the speed in a rolling maneuver, are favorite ways to lose control. At the moment of departure the A/C may snap rapidly out of control, or at slow speed may "wash" into the stall. A departure can be a serious business in swept-wing jets. Most don't just fly themselves out of the condition, but require positive pilot actions, like activating various combinations of drag chute, speed brakes, slats, droops, crossed stick and rudder input, etc. All this while the cockpit is behaving like a washing machine agitator. After a departure, it can easily require 5-10,000 feet of altitude loss to recover. Fighters also don't typically enter a neat predictable spin. They may enter flat spins, inverted spins, "falling leaf" maneuvers, and variations where both nose and wings gyrate unpredictably up and down through 180° or more. In other words, almost anything can happen. A departure is a high pucker factor moment. |
| Diamond | One of the parade formations of four aircraft. Wingmen No.2 and 3 fly a parade wing on either side of the flight lead, while No.4 tucks just below and behind the lead's tail. It's especially exciting in single-engine A/C, where No.4 ("assman") is a few feet from the tailpipe of the lead. |
| Dirty | Landing configuration of the airplane. Everything's hanging out: Landing gear, flaps, slats, droops, hook (at sea), wing swept forward (F-14) or raised (F-8). Man, you're dressed to go slow. And you're just not Clean. |
| Ditch | Landing the aircraft on the water. Only thing is, jet aircraft don't land on the water. They crash into the water. It's not pretty. It's deadly. As the NATOPS manual says, you do this if you're unable to abandon the aircraft. Call home base first, and they'll get a head start on arranging the memorial service. |
| Division | Four aircraft flying as a unit. The Division is divided in two Sections of two aircraft each, and in combat will normally operate as Sections. |
| Dogfight | A term not much used by naval aviators, who prefer "hassle." If the fight is described as a "dogfight," it was a real DOGFIGHT! |
| Down (status) | An aircraft is "down" when it is not safely flyable. (Otherwise it is of course "Up.") Some criteria for down status are listed in the Navy's maintenance manuals (e.g., fuel pressure out of limits), others are more subjective (pilot reports: "the stick was sticking"). But some gripes are in the grey area. And there's conjuring involved: If the Skipper needs sorties to meet the squadron's quota, a Down A/C can magically become an Up A/C without any maintenance work at all. |
| Downtown | "Goin' downtown": An airstrike aiming for the center of the enemy's position, such as a capital city, where a warm welcome usually awaits. Fireworks and everything. |
| Drag | Drag is really a drag, it's your enemy as a fighter pilot. It prevents you from going faster. As you punch a hole in the air with your airplane, you're pushing molecules closer together than they like to be. Can't blame them for pushing back. Flying is always a battle between thrust and drag. |
| Echo | The letter "E" in radio comm. In aircraft designations, E stands for electronic countermeasures aircraft, such as the E3 Hawkeye, the EA-6 Intruder, and the EP-3 Orion. (Echo is otherwise sadly underutilized. There aren't any graphic expletives starting with E.) |
| Echelon | In formation flying, 3 or more aircraft in a straight line angled back from the flight lead. Like the right half of a flight of honkers. |
| Eject | To activate the ejection seat to escape from the cockpit. The normal ejection handle is a "face curtain" at the top of the seat, which is pulled down over the pilot's face. An automatic sequence is started which jettisons the canopy and fires the rocket and/or explosive charge that powers the seat up the seat rails and out. The sequence continues with drogue chute, seat separation, and main chute deployment. (Where there's a flight crew of two, it gets trickier. Some recent a/c have an ejection capsule that essentially ejects the entire cockpit intact. But where 2 seats need to fire individually, they are sequenced so that the pilot's seat fires a fraction of a second after the other crewmember.) Modern ejection seats have a "zero/zero" capability: the pilot can successfully eject sitting still on the deck (zero elevation and zero airspeed). Pilots put a lot of trust in the guys in the Seat shop and "Parachute loft" who maintain the seats and maintain and pack the chutes, and usually take care to treat them well. A few bottles of 12 year old Chivas Regal may change hands after a successful ejection. |
| Elevator | At least 3 important uses: 1. A verb used by air controllers meaning "Change your altitude to", as in "Elevator angels Two Zero," meaning "Climb (or descend) to altitude 20,000 feet." 2. An elevator is also a flight control surface on the horizontal stabilizer, but not many fighters have distinct elevator surfaces any more. Most are designed with a "flying tail" (or "UHT" – unit horizontal tail) where the horizontal stabilizer moves as a unit to provide vertical control. 3. And there are huge aircraft elevators on a carrier, that move a/c between the hangar deck and the flight deck. |
| Envelope | Tactical performance graphs show altitude and speed restrictions for an aircraft. Add drag index lines and G limits and you wind up with a graph with criss-crossing lines that resembles an envelope, which is what it's called by pilots: The Flight Envelope. When you fly the aircraft near its operational limits you're "pushing (the limits of) the envelope." Next time you hear someone other than a pilot use that term, remember: he/she has no idea what it means. Now you do. |
| Feet dry | Flying over land. |
| Feet wet | Flying over water. |
| Fighter |  What's a fighter? An aircraft with an "F" in its designator? Hardly. A fighter is an aircraft made for close-in fighting against another aircraft, and one that can fight. It's nimble, powerful, and fast. It lives to get to the enemy's 6, and it usually does. And to get the job done, it's got a fighter pilot trained for the job and the weapons to finish off the enemy. Back in a time that now is history (say the late 1960s), the quiet protest decal at the right was literally true. We, the last fighter pilots, were flying the last of the fighters, the incomparable F-8 Crusader. It was soon to be retired, and no further fighter aircraft were planned, the fighter pilots' skills were to be shelved and forgotten. Then the Viet Nam war happened and awoke the sleepy brass at the Pentagon. Entering the Viet Nam war may not have been the smartest thing this country has done, but it served to remind the Pentagon that you can't command airspace without fighters and fighter pilots. So today there are again good fighters in the inventory, and good fighter pilots to fly them. The beat goes on. |
| Finger Four | A balanced "parade" formation that looks like the four fingertips of your right hand (fingers straight & together, palm down): Flight lead ahead (middle finger); wingmen #2 on the left and #3 on the right equally spaced, and #4 on the right extending the line from the lead to #3. |
| Flame-out | When a jet engine quits, it "flames out," the fire is gone. A suspenseful situation, especially if you've only got one engine. All multi-engine aircraft are designed to fly safely with the loss of one engine. If you're multi-engine, you'll have bleed air and electrical power from the operating engines to help restart the quitter. If you're single engine you'll probably be extending the emergency RAT (Ram Air Turbine) package into the air stream to give electrical (and perhaps hydraulic) power. The aircraft's airspeed is counted on to turn the engine, and if you have fuel, this should do it. The usual causes of flame-out are compressor stalls, or slow-speed high throttle setting situations where the engine isn't getting enough air, or of course running out of fuel. |
| Flathatting | The time-honored practice of a pilot scaring the bejeebies out of innocent civilians on the ground by swooping as low and as fast as possible, preferably over an unsuspecting outdoor assembly, in an ad hoc individual air show. A popular target is always one's parents' farm. Less public, but still a lot of fun, is back-country flathatting, or terrain-avoidance flying. The occasional residence that pops up to be terrified adds satisfaction. On the other hand, the occasional powerline!... The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may have come from the threat of early barnstorming aerobatic pilots to flatten top hats among air show bystanders. |
| Flight Lead | Every Navy flight has a designated flight leader. The flight lead is normally the senior aviator in the flight. The lead calls the shots (literally and figuratively) in the air. Basta! See Wingman. |
| Flight Level | A kind of formalized definition of altitude, which see. For some reason, the controllers of the FAA have a problem with aircraft reporting their altitude on the basis of their varying local barometric pressures. The scenario of two aircraft in the same piece of sky confidently reporting two well-separated altitudes, but in fact both being at exactly the same altitude, seems to bother them. They clearly don't have the adventuresomeness of the naval aviator. So to make the FAA (and similar world-wide air tyrants) happy, when we venture into space above 18,000 feet, we reset the altimeter to the barometric standard 29.92 inches of mercury, and we report our altitude as "Flight levels", which, to confuse everyone, is reported in 100's of feet! Thus if we're at 24,000 feet (with a standardized altimeter) we're at "Flight Level 240". That way everybody's altitude reporting is consistent, and airline passengers will live a lot longer. Maybe that's worth the bother. |
| Flight Ops</ |