A Light to Guide You Home Because they were off the coast of a stilloccupied Japan, the carrier deck would not be illuminated, but the planes were equipped with Automatic Direction Finders (ADFs) that could follow a radio signal and bring them safely back to the ship. What Lovell didn’t realize was that a tracking station on the Japanese coast was also broadcasting a homing signal on the same frequency, and consequently, leading him away from his carrier.
On a
cold November night off the coast of Japan, Jim Lovell was feeling hopeless. The Lieutenant Junior Grade and naval aviator had done a few night landings on an aircraft carrier, but always in more ideal conditions. On this particular night, storms rolled in not long after his F2H Banshee was launched from the deck of the USS Shangri-La, forcing them to abort the mission. He and his patrol were directed to circle the carrier group to burn off some fuel before attempting to land on the deck.
There was no moon; cloud cover obscured the stars, and Lovell was having difficulty even discerning the horizon, much less finding a blacked-out carrier in a dark sea. He was worried. He checked his instruments again and again hoping for a clue. Desperate to regain his bearings, he followed his instincts, turning away from the homing signal on his ADF. He flipped on a light inside the cockpit so that he could consult his charts and flight plans and the situation got a whole lot worse. The light he had designed to help him read the small print of the charts overloaded the circuit, plunging the entire cockpit into complete darkness. Nothing.
by PJ Roup, 33˚, Editor, Active for Pennsylvania
be found. Neither of those seemed particularly attractive. He turned off the penlight and scanned the night, praying that another answer would appear, when off the right side of his aircraft he noticed a faint green swath undulating in the water. Lovell realized instantly that he was looking at the road home. He recognized that the path he was seeing was the glow of the phosphorescent algae being churned up by the massive propellers of the USS Shangri-La!
If knowledge is power, we think, then lack of knowledge must make us powerless. Lovell was able to follow the glow and eventually bring his craft safely home, but the irony was never lost on him. Had he not suffered the cockpit blackout, his eyes never would have acclimated enough to the darkness to have seen the road home.
Lovell knew it was bad—real bad. He used a penlight to illumine the instruments one at a time while he assessed his options. He could radio in a distress call and have the carrier light up its deck, a virtual admission of his poor piloting skill which would surely cause him a lifetime of embarrassment among his fellow pilots. Allternately, he could ditch his plane and parachute into the cold water, hoping that he would F2H Banshee on the deck of the USS Shangri-La
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The Northern Light
