FIGHTER PILOT : Hurtling Through the Heavens at 800 m.p.h., El Toro’s Gray Ghosts Hone the Skills of War

As the Hornet jet screams out over the gray-blue Pacific, past the sailboats putting out from Dana Point, past Catalina Island and into the empty aerial corridors beyond where sky, sea and mist tumble riotously together, Mach 1 passes with a thrilling shiver across the wings.

And the digital airspeed indicator mounted in the canopy keeps ticking. The 35,000-pound fighter jet accelerates to 800 m.p.h. over the ocean swells--a hissing, roaring cannon of speed, and there are no ears to hear.

On the fringes of one of the most heavily populated urban centers in the world, the waters off San Clemente Island become an enchanted playland, a safe haven for the F/A-18 Hornet, the U.S. Navy’s $24-million premier fighter jet, which is capable of traveling at twice the speed of sound and delivering up to 17,000 pounds of bombs, cannon shells and missiles on a single mission.

“Ever since I learned to talk, I wanted to fly,” says Marine Corps Capt. Andrew Allen, who pilots an F/A-18 as a member of the Gray Ghosts, an elite squadron of some of the Marine Corps’ top pilots

based at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County.

When his classmates had posters of the Beatles and Jim Morrison on their bedroom walls, Allen had photos and diagrams of the F-4 Phantom, the A-4 Skyhawk--and through his college years, long before the first plane ever rolled off the McDonnell Douglas assembly line, the Hornet.

Now, at 30, Allen is serving his eighth year in the Marine Corps--and there is a sky-gray, twin-tailed monster of an airplane in the Gray Ghost hangar with “Capt. Andrew Allen” stenciled in black letters on one side. Below it, almost by way of explanation, is the name its pilot more often goes by: “Slick.”

“It’s just like having an expensive toy,” Allen says, letting his eyes rove over the graceful airfoils, thrusting gun mounts and jutting tails that make the F/A-18 unmistakable. “You know, you can’t help growing old but you can stay immature all your life.”

The other planes wait silently in the late-afternoon shadows like the ghosts they are for men with names like Fokker, Thumper, Magoo and Fang, to fire them back to life.

Logo’s Roots

Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 531 got its name--and its characteristic logo of a gray skeleton, stars and lightning bolt--during World War II, when its pilots became some of the first in the armed services to fly missions under cover of darkness. The Gray Ghosts went on to become the first fighter squadron dispatched to Vietnam.

But Allen typifies a modern breed of pilot who belies the hard-drinking, hard-flying image memorialized in Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.”

It is a new generation of highly disciplined aviators, trained in everything from advanced combat tactics to computers, who are keenly aware that, in addition to being soldiers, they also are full-time guardians of multimillion-dollar showpieces of technology.

“Everybody used to think if you weren’t a chain-smoker and drinking coffee all the time and driving around in a little Triumph or MG and drinking to all hours of the morning and then come in and fly your airplane, you weren’t a fighter pilot,” Allen says.

A pilot who was feeling shaky around the edges, who came to work with a hangover and forgot the proper emergency response for a hydraulics failure, a pilot who pushed his plane past its performance limits and entered a spin dangerously close to the ground, could simply eject from the aircraft, walk sheepishly back into the hangar, grin that pilot grin of his and ask for a new one.

Accidents Costly

But with an aviation accident bill that topped $530 million in 1983 for the Navy alone, “today’s armed forces do not want the hard-drinking guy you think of as a fighter pilot flying airplanes that are worth $30 million,” says Lt. Col. Gary Elsten, coordinator of the Marine Corps’ fighter pilot program. “We’ve got to have a mature individual, because today’s airplanes are very unforgiving of immaturity.”

Allen is part of an elite cadre--representing only about 15% of Marine Corps pilots--whose role is to provide air support for ground troops in combat, either by fending off enemy planes or laying bombs over targeted territory. He must be a master at both before he is ever called to war.

Yet, as assistant operations officer for the squadron and an instructor for 17 other pilots, Allen is behind a desk as often as he is behind a stick. During a day that frequently stretches 14 hours, he is briefing other pilots, making schedules and answering phones as often as he flies.

“It’s all changing now,” Allen says. “There’s hardly anybody in our squadron who smokes. Most of the guys are health nuts. We’ll drink on occasion, we’ll even get crazy on occasion, but the main thing is, the airplanes are getting real complicated, real demanding. We only get one mistake now. You screw one little thing up, you do one little stunt, you’re done for. You’re history. Your wings are gone.”

For some, that means an office job at squadron headquarters. Or a transfer to another department within the Marine Corps. Or maybe a discharge to a civilian job. Or perhaps worse.

“A real close friend of mine a few years ago, he was getting engaged,” Allen recalls. “He had his fiancee and her parents all meet him at this little spot, and he said, ‘You go to this spot at this time, and I’ll come by in my airplane and do a little show.’ And he came by and did a little show, and they were all out there. His fiancee was waving, and his future mother-in-law had her eight-millimeter out taking pictures, and he just flew into the side of a mountain, right in front of them.”

Julie Allen, an obstetrical nurse at UC Irvine Medical Center, gave birth to their first child--a daughter--two weeks ago. In preparation, she and Andy have decorated the second bedroom of their Laguna Hills condominium--the one with the spectacular view of the traffic pattern at El Toro--in oak and a soft peach color.

In the hours she spends alone at night, when Andy is temporarily stationed overseas or training out-of-state or simply still not home yet, she has made a rag doll for the baby fashioned in the shape of her lanky, drawling husband with his huge, quick eyes, easy grin and green-drab flight suit.

In the years since they met as students at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Julie has learned not to worry, at least most of the time.

“In the beginning I did,” she says. “I never went by a day without at least thinking about it. And I still do, but I think it’s unconsciously. There are days when I feel really strong, and in control of every part of myself, and I’ll think, eh, so what? You know, not necessarily meaning that, but feeling that I could handle it. And there’s other days, some days when I feel really kind of weak, you know? And everything’s going wrong, and all of a sudden I think: Don’t let it happen today.”

She had never been far from her home in New Jersey when she married Allen, fresh out of flight school, and followed him to his first duty station in Yuma, Ariz.

“I was a brand new guy and low on the totem pole, and we rented our first apartment. A very interesting place,” Allen recalls. The previous tenants of the one-bedroom apartment had left “about 30,000 cockroaches” in hiding behind.

Sat and Cried

Says Julie: “I just kept thinking: What did you get me involved in? I remember putting away all my nice new things, and he’s at work, and I can’t even begin to describe how terrible this place was. Finally, I had just had it, and I put a chair in the middle of the living room and I cried until he got home.”

Six months later, they were off to Beaufort, S.C., and a few months after that, Allen was on his way to his first six-month overseas deployment in the Philippines.

Only since they moved to El Toro has Julie been able to find a good job at a major hospital. They have bought their first house here. They had to. Rents outside the base were running $1,000 a month, and the waiting list for military housing was nearly 2 1/2 years.

Now, Julie and Andy socialize infrequently with others on base. But the military community is sometimes the only source of emotional support available during times of trouble that outsiders could never understand.

They had been married eight months and had become close friends with a couple in Beaufort, another pilot and his wife, when the man was killed in a flying accident.

Soon after, Maj. Jim Cripps, a close friend of Allen’s and a tremendously popular officer who had taught the young pilot almost everything he knew about flying, was killed in an accident in the Philippines. Julie had met him when she had flown over for a brief visit with her husband just before Thanksgiving.

The accident had happened on the day she returned home. “It made it very hard, because the wives were all hearing bits and pieces in South Carolina, and everything’s going on over in the Philippines,” she explains.

“At times like that you kind of rely on each other for comfort, and you didn’t have that. All you had was a bunch of girls. And you wanted to avoid maybe one of them more than another, because maybe one wasn’t taking it as well as another one, and you were just kind of right in the middle holding your own.

Wanted Feedback

“I remember calling him and not getting the feedback from him that I needed, even though I was giving it, and I understood why he couldn’t give it to me. He was really upset, because they were so close, and because he ended up having to do this man’s job, and him not having the preparation or the experience working in maintenance and things like that, which is what this guy was in charge of, so he had all this on his mind, and I’m on the other end, getting upset, you know . . . .

When the Philippines tour finally ended, and Allen came home, there was a difficult process of getting to know each other again, a process somehow made more difficult because of Cripps’ death. “It was like something was lost,” Julie explains.

More recently, Julie has had to travel back and forth from El Toro to Yuma, staying as often as possible with the widow of one of Allen’s supervisors, killed after the flight controls apparently jammed. Just before the crash, both the pilot and the co-pilot had tried so hard to pull back on the control wheels that they were broken off.

It is that type of support, the sharing of fears and grief with peers, that is important in the close-knit military community.

The young nurse had her own experience with terror on the day Allen earned the prestigious Air Medal, normally only awarded after a pilot has flown a great many missions under actual combat circumstances.

Tearing along at 500 m.p.h. in his F-4 Phantom, Allen collided with a turkey buzzard, which sounds humorous in the retelling but which has all the effect of a cannon strike at those speeds. The bird shattered the plastic canopy that covers the cockpit and struck Allen in the face and neck, smashing parts of his vocal cords, dislocating his shoulder, cutting his eye and gouging his neck, sending an ominous flow of blood streaming down only an inch from the jugular. He still has bits of glass embedded in his neck.

‘A Little Medal’

“I came back and I landed,” Allen says. “It wasn’t the easiest thing I ever did. They gave me a little medal for it, for bringing the airplane back . . . .”

“A little medal!” Julie interrupts. “An Air Medal, you mean.”

“Yeah. Well, I didn’t have much choice. It busted up the ejection seat, so I wasn’t gonna go anywhere.”

Meanwhile, Julie was waiting at home, hamburgers on the stove, when the phone rang. “He called me from the squadron, and he said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve got a few more things to do, and I’ll be home,’ and I said, OK, whatever, why are you going to be late? And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got some stuff to fill out on the plane.’ ”

Julie heard a car outside that was not Allen’s Cutlass. Instantly, she knew something was wrong and was terrified as she ran to the door. Her husband emerged from a friend’s car, bandaged, bruised and still covered with blood, but alive.

She shrugs. “His philosophy, and I guess I’ve adopted it, is that if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, and he believes that it’s written or whatever somewhere that if he’s going to go, he’s going to go, and it’s been planned out way before. I guess I’ve also learned from him that he’s doing what he likes to do, and if there’s any way he would like to go, that would be the way that he would like to go.”

The Allen grin comes out again: “Either that, or fooling around.”

Fatalistic Attitude

But he explains a moment later: “Sometimes things happen so fast, you’re out there, and you’re in a big dogfight and there’s 40 airplanes out there with you and all of a sudden right over the top of you there’s an airplane, and you catch your breath, and you say, ‘Well, I guess it wasn’t my day. A couple more feet, and I woulda been done.’

“Or you’re out on a low-level, and you’re looking around and you’re doing something or you’re busy and you just miss a hill or something and you figure, ‘I guess somebody’s taking care of me. They moved that hill while I was going by.’ ”

Julie swears she would never fly in anything smaller than a DC-9.

But once, she says, very late one clear night, she was allowed to get in the back seat of Allen’s F-4 and taxi to the end of the runway while he did full-power tests on its engines before flights the next day.

“I kept asking him about everything, and I knew what I wasn’t supposed to touch, but I really felt like all I needed to be was a couple of hundred feet, or just off the ground, and that would be it: the total feeling.”

“It was about 11 at night,” Allen recalls. “I’m taxiing down with the canopy up and she’s there in her helmet with her red hair just streaming back . . . .”

There has been another accident. Off the coast of North Carolina during late-night maneuvers, a pilot from another El Toro-based squadron failed to make the landing strip during late-night maneuvers on the carrier Coral Sea, crashing his F/A-18 into the deck.

The pilot ejected safely, and no one on board the ship was injured. But the fighter jet cracked apart and slipped into the sea.

The next morning at squadron headquarters, the mood is subdued. It was the sixth major accident involving Marine pilots from El Toro and nearby Tustin this year, and the wing commander has called a two-day stand down: All pilots are temporarily grounded for an intense series of meetings and seminars that will focus, among other things, on flight procedures and safety precautions.

“It’s just basically to get guys thinking again,” says Allen, who, since Julie is in her first hours of labor, is manning the duty desk while the other pilots attend a training seminar at the Miramar Naval Air Station.

For the most part, there is a feeling of sympathy for the pilot, who will now undergo a grueling series of meetings and hearings to determine what went wrong, whether he was at fault, whether he will be allowed to continue flying.

A night carrier landing--planting a screeching aircraft on a pitching, tumbling, postage-stamp-sized landing strip in near-total darkness--is by far the most difficult task required of Marine Corps aviators.

Aim at ‘Meatball’

It involves plunging the aircraft at several hundred miles an hour down into the darkness, aiming only at a large yellow light known as “the meatball” that, if kept perfectly on center, will allow the aircraft to pick up the proper trap wire when it hits the deck.

There are four trap wires on a carrier deck. Ideally, the pilot will catch the second, but the aircraft’s engines are throttled to full power the instant the plane hits the deck anyway. If the trap wire has caught, it will hold the aircraft on deck, even against the tremendous power of two jet engines producing 16,000 pounds of thrust apiece. If the wire has not caught, the pilot at least has a chance of holding the aircraft out of the water if it shoots off the other end of the deck.

Keeping the meatball centered is critical: By the time the aircraft crosses the deck, if the pilot is on the proper course, he is just 13 feet above it. In this most recent accident, the pilot apparently came in too low, striking the edge of the carrier itself.

“You’re just basically descending into a black hole, and the margin for error at night, there really isn’t one. That’s why a lot of guys get so psyched out about it,” Allen explains. “You’re basically scared. You’re scared to death, there’s no other way to say it, because it’s really only a controlled crash aboard the ship.”

There is a good chance that the pilot will be cleared of any wrongdoing in the North Carolina incident, and will be allowed to continue flying. But many pilots never quite escape the fact that, right or wrong, justified or not, they have ejected from their ship and left it to founder.

“We’ve had friends that have ejected,” Julie says, “and it’s followed them. Even when they go to another duty station, they (the pilots there) find out that they’ve ejected, and it doesn’t matter how or why, it’s that it happened. You know, it’s a mark.”

Sometimes the air itself seems haunted.

Amid Strong Winds

“There was one night about six months ago that we were all out flying,” Allen says, “and we got worried about getting back, because the winds were up to about 50 m.p.h. We had some big Santa Anas coming, and there was all kinds of weather up in the desert. We got called back early.”

At 10,000 feet, the winds were blowing at 150 m.p.h., and planes already low on fuel strained against them. Landing soon was critical.

Allen, leading a flight of four, called the El Toro tower for recommendations on a runway for landing. “They’re telling me it’s variable from 300 (degrees) to 060, where do you want to land?” he says. “We’re all low on gas, we gotta get down, and it was all kinda crappy. And just as I landed on the runway, the wind shifted. So it was about 40 knots, 45 knots the wrong way, and I almost ran off the runway.

“I called to the next guy to go land on the other runway, the one that was 90 degrees from the one I was on, and the wind changed again and he almost ran off the runway. Finally, the last two guys landed, and they were OK. But it was really crazy.”

That night, a little more than 150 miles north, Capt. Steven Fris, an experienced A-4 Skyhawk pilot, was crossing the mountains near China Lake in the upper Mojave Desert in a small private plane. Fris, with thousands of hours of flying time in sophisticated military aircraft, was ferrying his girlfriend to Fresno. The ill winds slammed the plane into a mountain, killing both of them.

“We still get all choked up when we think about all our buddies,” Allen admits. And then, back in the flight-line cafeteria over cheeseburgers and fries, talk inevitably turns back to the sheer, every-single-day joy of piloting the most sophisticated fighter-attack jet in the Navy’s history through its maneuvers like a multimillion-dollar game of Space Invaders.

“You ever see ‘The Blue Max’? That’s what it’s like,” says Maj. Robert Foltyn, squadron operations officer, whose flaming red curls earned the designation “Carrot” on his airplane. (Above his desk, a matching red needlepoint wall hanging proclaims, “Communism Sucks”).

There were big-time games ahead, a series of maneuvers at Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base in which the Gray Ghosts would be up against one of the Air Force’s premier fighter jets, the F-15. Allen’s tactical briefing for other squadron pilots before the trip had all the intrigue and romance of a computer manual.

“The important thing is to get out of the pinch,” Allen explains, drawing an ominous-looking formation of two enemy jets closing in from each side on the chalkboard.

“The Air Force says, they see a double pinch and they send one guy after each of ‘em. But then they end up five or six miles apart. We like to stay closer . . . But remember to sterilize your airspace. If not, wingman might call target at five to six thousand feet, you’re shimmying on down there and wham, there’s somebody else up there you didn’t even have a clue about . . . Remember the lookout doctrine.”

The pilots in the briefing room nod knowingly.

Team Takes Off

Afterward, Allen dons flight suit, helmet and survival gear, straps himself into the F/A-18, and smokes off to the southwest with Thumper, Stitch and Lake not far behind to practice creaming each other.

It is a delightful game. Later, over beer that night at the Officers’ Club, they will take half an hour or more to dissect a single, two-minute engagement. It is also a game that hones these pilots into precise instruments of destruction.

“When the Soviets have defectors and stuff, they’ll tell us what they think about us. They think that we’re the best-trained pilots in the world, and they’re ready for it. But they also think that we’re fat and lazy, and that when the going really gets rough, we’ll just kind of turn tail and go home,” Allen says.

“They don’t think that we have the drive, or the love--they have this big thing that they call love of their motherland. They’re so dedicated to their country that it’s not a problem for them to go out and do whatever they have to do, whereas they think we’re so argumentative and so independent that we think before we act. Which is sometimes all it takes to lose a battle.”

Allen says he thinks about it this way: “When I was a kid, there were a bunch of bullies, and there was a karate expert. And the bullies were always going around and saying, ‘I’m going to get you, I’m going to beat you up.’ And the karate expert, he was very quiet, he never said anything to anybody. And one day they fought, and the karate expert beat the crap out of them. I like to think of myself as the karate guy.”

Battle remains an ever-present possibility. Though they are not allowed to discuss it, each of the Gray Ghosts is familiar with the squadron’s real-world mission, and all are keenly aware of the scenario of world events that would most likely call them to their jets for deployment. Accordingly, says Allen, they read their newspapers carefully.

“There’s a big sense of duty there,” he says. “You know, if I had my choice, I don’t think I would go to combat. But if I do go, I’ll do what I have to do, and I’ll do the best I can do when I get there. That’s our job. That’s our purpose.”

Glimpse of Combat

The June maneuvers at Tyndall provided a glimpse into what that combat might be like: several flights a day, each of them in rapid-fire engagements with the highly maneuverable Air Force F-15s.

On one mission, Allen was leading a flight of four pilots against four from Tyndall. “We picked up three of ‘em on our radar, but we couldn’t see the other one,” he recalls.

Three of the enemy pilots moved in closer, becoming tiny white blips on the transparent glass radar screen suspended in the window before each of the F/A-18 pilots. Slowly, one of them moved into the bulls-eye at the center of Allen’s radar screen, and the word SHOOT flashed below it. Allen shot.

Before long, two other enemy planes had been shot down, and Allen was scanning his radar screen for the last plane, seemingly invisible in the blue Florida sky.

Then, on the large radar monitoring screen at ground headquarters below, a bright rectangular box suddenly enclosed the image of the Marine flight’s lead plane, Allen’s F/A-18, in the shape of a coffin.

Ah. There was the enemy plane. “Slick,” the radio man called out, “you’re dead.”