Word: decks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about 150 m.p.h., the pilot tries to ease his howling machine down onto a bobbing runway barely 600 ft. long. At touchdown, if all goes well, a hook on the underside of the jet's tail grapples one of four cables strung a few inches over the flight deck, and the aircraft is yanked to a lurching halt. At 11:51 last Tuesday night, aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, that difficult maneuver went terribly awry...
...nuclear-powered U.S.S. Nimitz, at 91,400 tons the world's biggest warship, sailed imperiously in the calm Atlantic waters 60 miles off the Florida coast. On its 4½-acre deck, even as midnight approached, sailors and their officers worked amid a terrific din of pumps and engines and catapults. The ship was headed into a balmy wind, and a soft mist hung in the night air. Thirteen of the carrier's jets were still out on a routine training run. The pilot of one, an electronic radar-jamming EA-6B Prowler, had his plane a scant...
...built Prowler dropped in for touchdown, the Nimitz's landing signal officer, in charge of directing aircraft approaches, saw that it was too high and swinging dangerously leftward-and then too far right. By radio he ordered the pilot to gun his engines and fly clear of the deck, a routine procedure for aborted landings. But Marine Lieut. Steven E. White, 27, did not-perhaps could not-obey. His plane skidded at 145 m.p.h. onto the flight deck past the last of the arresting cables and caromed some 500 ft., its right wing lopping chunks off parked jets along...
...crewmen were asleep. Remembered one enlisted man: "They didn't say this wasn't a drill, but when the guy came over the p.a. system he was stuttering, and I knew then something was badly screwed up." Fire-fighting crews clambered across the deck and started laying down gallons of water and "purple K" foam, but to no immediate effect: the blaze had begun its own chain reaction...
...Burton, 21, one of the fire fighters, recalled: "The first explosion knocked down two whole hose teams." Added fellow Fireman Bob Barton: "There were some of us buried under wreckage. We went up with our hose but lost pressure." Another seaman remembered the shock of seeing casualties brought below deck from the holocaust: "My chief was on the first load from the elevator. He was missing...