The New Guy Gets His First Taste of Trouble
By LT Christian Sandroni
There was a full moon out in the North Arabian Gulf, I had good needles, and the boat was in sight. As a new guy who had already developed a reputation for settling in close, I already had the ball on my mind when the ever feared “deedle-deedle” from my master caution rapidly brought my attention back to the hereand-now. I had a flight control system (FCS) caution on my digital data indicator display (DDI), and all four angles of attack (AOA) channels were crossed out on the FCS page.
It was one of those nights where everything was going a little too well. I lost my heads-up AOA indicator, and neither probe was showing an AOA that correlated with our airspeed. Without reliable AOA indications, I was without my most important tool for making a safe landing. I would have to change my scan. I would have to rapidly incorporate airspeed, vertical speed indicator (VSI), and velocity vector, while simultaneously flying the ball and listening to the landing signal officer (LSO). With that in mind, my electronic warfare officer (EWO), and I decided to discontinue the approach to troubleshoot and work through the checklist. The controller vectored us to 2,000 feet, and we started talking through the four-channel AOA failure checklist. In the middle of our initial discussion, our rep came up and asked what was going on. We gave him a one-sentence summary and told him to stand by while we went through the checklist. The checklist itself isn’t all that long or complicated, but I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of flipping a guarded switch and going into gain override.
Photos by Seaman Jesus Aguiar
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The controller vectored us to 2,000 feet and we started talking through the four-channel AOA failure checklist.
