Life of an F/A-18 Pilot: LCDR Mike Smith

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Lieutenant Commander Mike Smith. Smith served in the Navy as an F/A-18 pilot, and deployed 3 times between 2002 and 2014. He was stationed in Japan, Italy, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida. Smith was also named Strike Pilot of the Year in 2009.

LCDR Mike Smith:
My name's Mike Smith. I retired as a commander from the U.S. Navy Reserve after about 20.5 years of active-duty service following the Naval Academy and then I left active duty as a Lieutenant Commander in 2014.

Yeah, the Navy's kind of a choose your own adventure sort of place, which is there's so many different ways that you can go. And at the Naval Academy, you can be a pilot, you can be a submarine officer, you can be a Marine. And so, for a long time if you wanted to be a pilot, you became a pilot, that was pretty much how it went. Like the class of ‘99, for example, something like 99% of those that put pilot as their first choice, got it.

But I was class of 2002 and I was the first class, I believe that allowed you to be able to have corrective eye surgery. And so, as a result, that was the first time where pilot selection actually became fairly competitive, so there was that. But still, it's easier to go pilot out of the Navy counterintuitively than it is out of the Air Force just because you have a lot of people that joined the Naval Academy or joined the Navy, go to the Naval Academy more broadly for other things, including myself, I didn't join to become a pilot.

So, my call sign when I was flying was TABB, which is short for, that's a big bitch because I'm about as big as they come in my former line of work. And so, I just always thought I was too big. I had, from the time I was a kid, that was just how I thought that my life was going to go. Went to the Naval Academy, thinking I was going to be a ship driver was very okay with that, I liked the idea of being out at sea leading men and women out doing real work.

But my junior year, I went through my pre-commissioning physical, they said, “Yep, turns out you're not too big to be a pilot.” I still thought I was too big to fly jets so during the summer before my senior year, I did what amounts to an internship, summer training for the Naval Academy with a helicopter squadron. Loved the people that I was working with there as a midshipman. And I said, “You know what, I'll give this a whirl.” So, I went into pilot training, wanting to become a helicopter pilot and the irony is, is that I was too big to be a helicopter pilot. They qualified me out of that because they put a seat cushion in the training helicopter and so, for me, I didn't want to go shore based. So, it was jets or bust, I had to go get jets.

They measure you in so many dimensions. So, for me I'm just the right freakish set of dimensions to make this work. So, one of the biggest ones is actually back to knee length. They worry that if you had to eject, if your knees are sticking too far out, you're going to whack them on the dash coming out, which would not be good. They look at back or excuse me, sitting height to see whether you kind of fit into that, they look at your shoulder width. One of the things I know about myself, because I got measured as a pilot is, is that my shoulders grew four inches from the time I graduated from college until I hit the fleet during pilot training because I grew until the age of 25. And yeah, so there was just a lot of dimensions. Ultimately, I started growing out of a lot of them anyways but I think the Navy had spent enough money on me that they just gave me a bunch of waivers.

No, I had to select four jets out of primary. I felt sometimes a little bit like an imposter because I knew a lot of folks that had been dreaming of being a fighter pilot since the time they could talk and I just kind of wandered into it.

Yeah, quality spreads, it's important every community in the Navy exists for a reason. When you're a jet pilot, you may be predisposed to think how about important you are but I love the helicopter pilots. Sometimes they wear T-shirts. I would say because even fighter pilots need heroes because the helicopter guys are the ones that are pulling you out of the drink if you have a problem. And yeah, every community needs talent, that's just it's important for national security, it's important for the operation of the Navy and frankly, it's important for you even if you are lucky enough to be able to be selected for tackle aviation, kind of get your first choice, all the way to know that there's a lot of talented people in other communities that you can rely upon.

So, I had a weird career. I was the first class to graduate post 9/11. So, we graduated right into the first war that the U.S. had been involved in, in a long time. And we all thought we were going to go off and do important work in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But by the time I got trained, I qualified as something known as prior A or priority A, which was, is that I was towards the top of my class in my strike fighter flight training, learning how to fly the jet, and that I did well enough at the carrier during carrier qualifications to be ready for immediate deployment. So, it was a little bananas. I had 14 days from the day that I last landed on the aircraft carrier in training until I had to move all my stuff across the world to Japan and be ready to deploy on another aircraft carrier.

Fresh lieutenant in the fleet, snotty noses, don't know top from bottom. But I get out there and my home port was a naval air facility Atsugi, which is kind of in the Tokyo suburbs, which was an adventure in and of itself.

But as attached to the USS Kitty Hawk, which was sometimes known as the 911 air wing, like ready for immediate deployment. So, part of that weird career was, is because we had this mission associated with being on ready for rapid deployment to the Western Pacific to deal with a potentially Chinese threat to some of our allies in the region. The admirals never let us leave and so we had all of these … all my classmates were all going and doing combat deployments and we were hanging out in the western Pacific flighting Cold War 2.0. So, a ton of flying crazy, operational sort of stuff, operating blue water, no divert, big pitching decks off of Western Australia.

Like, we had one where we were actively conducting flight operations and shipping water over the bow which was, we just had this yahoo of an admiral so just an incredible adventure. Looking back on it, it seems just bananas, some of the stuff we were doing, just it was like fighter camp. You're out there with all of your buddies flying jets, thinking you're the coolest things to ever hit God's green earth and then you blow into port like a hurricane and then spend four days and then go back out to sea, hopefully to dry out a little bit.

It's worth stipulating, I was very much a working man when it came to landing on the ship, generally, pretty safe but I wasn't the best ball flyer. But with that said, daytime launches and recoveries are about as fun as you get with your pants on and you sometimes just can't believe you're getting paid to do it. You get to launch off the front of the ship, and it is tropical water, go off, dogfight with your buddies for fun, and then come back in and do something that people would pay millions of dollars to have just a one-time experience and you get to do it over and over and over.

There was one time over the Gulf of Thailand where there was all the stars above and there were so many fishing boats down below that you actually, they all had their little lights on and you didn't really know where the sky began and the earth ended, that was a pretty incredible experience.

There was one particular moment where it's just this one cut shot, not a particularly notable mission doing anything of interest. But I had a buddy in my backseat, I had a buddy on my wing, it was an early morning launch, so it was cool and crisp, and we were out over these tropical oceans. The seas were not like glass flat, but they were fairly laid down.

And we did a covey launch, which is to say one jet launched off of the bow and one jet launched off of the waist. And then we joined up immediately thereafter so at 200 feet off of the front of the ship and then we went out and we did some dog fighting and some cloud surfing and it was just, again, you're like, “I get paid to do this. This is amazing.” Yeah.

So, over top of the carrier, we practice something fairly frequently and we got really good at in CAG 5, which is no verbal communication at all in the landing pattern. And so, you have this little bees nest above the aircraft carrier of everybody visually getting side of each other and sequencing themselves in for when the carrier turns into the wind and is ready to recover airplanes.

You can have 20 airplanes directly over top of the ship in usually formations between one and four planes and you'll have more than one formation per altitude stack. And so, then when the carrier turns into the wind and it's ready to start recovering aircraft, the one at the bottom of the stack, one of the formations there just says, “Okay, it's my turn to go.” Drops in, flies over the ship and does something called the break.

While that's happening, everybody in the stack, the higher above it, takes one step down and so, you have it all sequencing in there. And the idea is, is that you want to be landing an airplane every 45 to 60 seconds on an aircraft carrier. And when you're good, you get it down to about every 45 seconds, like the crew, like the whole thing's working and it's really an awesome thing to be a part of.

And so, you come in there, you're trying to fly your eye through about a two-foot-tall window. As you're coming into land, depending on the ship, there's now mostly three wires but on the Kitty Hawk, there were four wires. If you're two feet too high, you're going to miss the wire, two feet too low, you're going to scare everybody on the back there because it's a three-degree glide slope. And so, you're making these constant power corrections. It's just you're moving the throttles literally nonstop and then you're making these small adjustments with a stick in order to keep your angle of attack right.

And most pilots kind of know this is like you need to kind of have a general awareness of where you are. But in the carrier environment, it's particularly important because if you are looking at the deck, usually what's happening is, is you're starting to settle and settling at the aircraft carrier is super dangerous. Because one of the fastest ways to kill yourself in the carrier environment is to strike the back of the ship. And unlike when you are landing on a land-based field where you kind of float as you get into ground effect close to the runway, and it's a little harder to land, you have to take off a little bit more power, let it settle a little bit. The back of the ship you have they call it the burble, and the burble is where the wind is coming up over the ship, and then it's pushing back down on the back end of it, it actually kind of sucks you down and so, if you are spotting the deck, you're going to be settling.

Anyways, you fly that ball all the way until you just get surprised that you hit the ship without a flare. Unlike any other landing like that you do on a land-based thing, you just plan it and you just kind of slam into the deck. You've got your harness, and so if you're lucky, the hook catches the wire, not if you're lucky, if generally, most of the time your hook catches the wire, you feel it pay out, and you go from flying 140 miles an hour to zero in the span of a second or two. By the way, you're not done because your buddy's 45 seconds behind you.

And so, the flight deck, just as soon as that wire is done paying out, and you're stopped, you make sure that the wire will pull you back a little bit in order to get you rolling backwards a little bit so that way you can disengage the hook from the wire. The yellow shirt that's on the edge of the flight deck is yelling at you non-verbally with his hands to get your hook up, get out of the landing area so they can reset the wires, check the landing area to make sure everything's clear and then by the time you're out of the landing area, the next guy's in the groove and so, it's just a bang, bang, bang thing.

And then you're having to park on not a whole lot of space. So, they're taxing you with your nose over the edge of the flight deck sometimes and so there's just a lot of trust. And when all of that's happening without any verbal communication, it's just awesome. If you've ever had an experience of being on a team where everything's just working really well, this is hundreds of people all knowing their job and doing it without talking, and it's just such an amazing experience to be a part of.

In all the ways that the day got more fun, as you got better, the night got scarier. And so, I remember when I was going through training, I remember being like, “Well, what's the big deal about night landings?” Because to a certain extent, it's just like every other landing. But the thing about a night landing is, is that it is the better you get, the more you realize how little you know what's going on. So, if you're in the middle of the ocean and there's an overcast night where there's clouds over you, that is the darkest experience you'll ever have, short of like being in a cave, deep underground with your lights off. And so, you break out of these clouds and you're doing a straight end, but you can see in the distance light usually. And there's a light that kind of projects off the back of the ship that kind of tells you whether you're left or right of center line. And once you kind of get onto that final course, you're looking at that, but it moves because the ship is moving. And so, you have to kind of internally, start accepting, “Okay, am I actually a little left of center line? I mean, I'm a little bit right?” You've got some instruments in your cockpit, I don't know what's going on here. So, you just have to kind of start to trust those instruments. And what ends up happening is, is that when the ship is nosed down, you look like you're low because all you're seeing when the ship is nosed down is kind of the butt end of the ship. And so, you get this sense like, “Uh-oh, I'm going to run into the water.” And so, you have this subconscious feeling of like, “This is scary.”

And so, you have to just kind of take it all in and trust your buddies, those LSOs that are on there, that they're not going to let you get into too much of a bucket where you can get hurt.

You know probably the craziest story I ever had in my again, I never really deployed to a combat zone so there are others with obviously far more exhilarating experiences. But for me, the biggest test I ever had about who I was as a human being, as a man was a dark night, very low clouds. Sometimes, I mean, again, if you're operating blue water operations, land on the ship or don't land on the ship, those are your options, there's nowhere else to go. And they try not to have you flying in weather where you're breaking out any lower than 200 feet above the water from the clouds but that happens sometimes too.

In this particular night it wasn't quite that bad but we were kind of in a scud layer as we were at about 1,200 feet coming in, which is to say the clouds were kind of flashing off and on, which itself can be kind of disorienting because of your lights. And so, you get this sense that you're in the dark and all of a sudden you have the lights around you and it's very bright, and so you're disoriented and then you make the push.

And as we're coming down, the ship was moving a little bit, not a ton. I came down, flew a pretty okay pass, but my hook didn't catch and so that's called a bolter. And so, the first thing that they train you when you land day or night, is to go to full power just in case the hook misses.

So, I didn't want to go flying anymore but I was, so, go back up, have to do another around, came back in, tried to trap, didn't happen, bolter again. Do it a third time, bolter again. And in your mind, you're starting to get tired because this is really high intensity flying, you're thinking about all these things in and out of the weather, it's pretty terrifying in a lot of ways.

And you also know all of your buddies are back on the ship watching the plat cam, we sometimes refer to it as danger TV, and they're sitting there eating popcorn. And so, what I found out later is, so my squadron had a bolter song. Every pilot had a song that they would play that the duty officer would play if a pilot bolted and they had a coming aboard song for the wizzos. And so, my wizzo, my back seater, his was Mama I'm Coming Home. And so, they'd have that playing as I was pushing and then every time I bolted, it was Black Betty. And so, as I was going around, “Oh, Black Betty,” it got loud.

So anyways, after the third bolter, there was only one other jet Airborne, and it was the tanker. And so, I had to go find the tanker up in the weather, which was, I had to do a radar join on this guy in the clouds, in the dark. Found him, broke out, he strung out the basket. It's bouncing all over the place. I stab at it probably about seven or eight times before I finally get into the basket, get some gas.

Went around again, bolter. Finally, on the fifth one the hook caught, and I remember as the line was paying out and I was feeling the chest straps pulling on me. I just unconsciously, like it just escaped from my mouth, like, “Oh, thank God.” It was all that it was. And the wire stops paying out, I have to get out of the landing area because it's the same sort of operation at nighttime as it is during day, get the heck out of there. And I just remember all the adrenaline releasing and I had a really hard time taxing around the flight deck because my feet were shaking so badly.

So, got the jet parked, chained up, turned it off, had a small aneurysm and then went down below and got myself a hamburger and that was my night.

I loved flying and teaching, I really enjoyed that. I was the demo pilot for a year, so I got to do these air shows all over the East coast, which was just an absolute license to steal. But then when it came time for my disassociated sea tour about that time, I knew I wanted to get out of the Navy. I kind of wanted to retire on top. I didn't think the flying would ever get that fun again.

And so, I was willing to hang it up. I didn't want to take that tour in Norfolk where I might be able to fly a night form with 106 every week or something like that. And so, I ended up going to Italy, having a great time out over there for my staff tour, and then I got off of active duty and I literally have never touched controls since.

So, what I do miss is I do miss the camaraderie, I miss the fact that there was this kind of sense of like, it's like being Peter Pan and The Lost Boys. It was just like all of your buddies out doing this thing that was super exciting and interesting and fun and an incredible way to spend your 20s. I miss the single-minded nature of flying. You didn't think about anything else when you got into that airplane, you were just focused on that.

I find the same thing with like sailing, for example. Sometimes I would do that a little bit with like horseback riding, but just like the idea of like, it's just me and the machine and kind of working on that, I miss that a little bit. But the actual thing of flying like the thrill of strike fighter aviation, I actually don't miss that at all.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Commander Mike Smith.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.