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5
Lieutenant Commander Gabriel “Angel”Brown had waited four-point-six-hundredths of a second too long to act effectively. At a hundred and thirty-five nautical miles an hour, a hundred and fifty-five mph, his actions started ten feet, seven inches too late.
The F-35C Lightning II could accelerate while climbing straight up, especially when as light on fuel as Number 892 was. But not this time.
Because LC Brown had raised the nose to a high angle of attack in his attempt to return to flight, the retracting tailhook was tipped down enough to snag the fourth wire with three inches to spare.
The inch-and-a-quarter-diameter arresting cable had a braking ability of two hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. It could stop a landing jet one hundred and twenty-five times between replacements. Wire Number Four had made a hundred and seventeen arrests since installation. Its replacement was already coiled on the deck like a giant tabletop coaster, waiting on the deck.
An empty F-35C weighed thirty-one thousand pounds.
For today’s patrol, Number 892 had carried a full load of ordnance, both the load hidden inside the stealth fuselage and the load on the external hardpoints. The latter decreased the F-35C’s stealth profile, but it was intended to give the Chinese something to see and think about.
The ordnance load added sixteen thousand pounds.
The pilot and the two hundred and nineteen pounds of remaining fuel were of little consequence.
At a normal landing speed of a hundred and thirty-five knots, an F-35C would apply under half of the cable’s capacity as it spooled out to slow and stop the jet. In any successful landing, thistraprequired three seconds and three hundred feet of the deck.
Standard procedures dictated that the moment a pilot trapped the wire, he retracted the jet’s speed brakes and advanced the throttle to max. If a plane broke a wire or tailhook, or missed all of the wires, it would become abolter.
The pilot’s only hope of remaining aloft, if the planedidbolt off the short aircraft carrier runway, lay in power.
The added load on the wire by applyingmax thrustincreased from the typical twenty-eight thousand pounds to forty-three thousand as LC Gabriel Brown drove ahead on full afterburners trying to get clear of the deck before whatever was burning his plane caused a catastrophic failure.
This load was still safely within the cable’s capacity.
But 892’s acceleration from LC Brown’s preemptive attempt to return to flight meant that he was traveling at well over two hundred knots by the time he snagged Wire Four, instead of the typical hundred and thirty-five. This increased the force on the wire by half again.
Snagged on the wire, the F-35C Lightning II jet fighter nonetheless did what it was designed to do—it drove up into the sky. The hydraulic pistons underneath theTheodore Roosevelt’sdeck slowed the arresting cable despite the massive overload.
The cable’s three-hundred-pound weight played no factor in what followed.
Caught between the forces of the arresting cable firmly snagged by the tailhook and the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine at afterburner thrust, the plane rose to hover above the deck, angled forty-five degrees upward into the sky. It bucked and swung like a caught fish fighting the line.
The downblast of the driving engines sweeping back and forth across the deck killed nineteen members of the deck crew in the first two-point-five seconds—eleven were burned alive, six were tumbled into objects hard enough to break backs or cave in helmets, and Chief Petty Officer Maria Gonzalez and Seaman Melvin Friedman were blown overboard. They tumbled into the ocean and were never found.
Still striving upward but arrested in midair above the deck, the F-35C was no longer under the control of its pilot.
Its tailhook slid to the right along the loop of the arresting wire.
On Vulture’s Row, a narrow balcony directly aft of the Flag Bridge and four stories above the carrier’s deck, off-duty carrier personnel are welcome to stand. There, high up the side of the Island, they can observe flight and deck operations. For many of the carrier’s five thousand, six hundred and eighty crew, it is one of the few opportunities to see daylight whenever active operations are in progress. It was shortly after shift change between the two crews alternating twelve-hour shifts on the carrier. Twelve of the eighteen personnel observing LC Brown’s landing attempt were the main shift’s forward officer’s mess culinary specialists.
The F-35C, the variant specifically modified for carrier operations, had an additional four feet of wingspan to either side that could be folded up for tighter storage. That extension was sufficient for Number 892 to ram its starboard wing tip into the crowd of observers on Vulture’s Row. Six of them were cut in half as easily as slicing bread. Another nine died when the twisting flight tore the balcony off the side of the Island and dumped it to the steel deck three stories below.
At this moment, Lieutenant Commander Gabriel Brown performed the last act of his life. Still unable to see, but believing he must be clear of the aircraft carrier by now, he managed to wrap a hand around the yellow-and-black-painted half-inch-thick loop between his knees. He didn’t need to see it or feel its searing heat against his palm, a thousand rehearsals and thousands of hours aloft located it with his instincts.
He yanked the ejection handle despite the fresh source of burning pain.
Det-cord cut the canopy around the edges and across the center.
The cannon under the Martin-Baker ejection seat fired and launched Lieutenant Commander Gabriel “Angel” Brown clear of the F-35C Lightning II aircraft with a force of eighteen g’s.
As designed, the cracked canopy was knocked aside by the top of the seat.
Knocked sideways at high speed, it passed directly into the Captain’s Bridge. The captain and the executive officer had stepped to the window to see what was amiss.
With his head severed at the chin, the captain died immediately.
