Night of Flaming Terror

By KURT ANDERSEN

A tragic crash kills 14 aboard the world's biggest warship

Landing a jet on an aircraft carrier at night. That flat description understates the most harrowing exercise in military aviation. Seated at the controls of a plane that may weigh as much as 25 tons, a pilot approaches his carrier from the stern. All he sees to guide him are the ship's banks of dimmed, tiny lights. Slowing his airspeed to 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.

The 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 4 1/2-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 two miles aft of the Nimitz, and banked into position for a final approach. But the plane veered critically and crashed into a string of other aircraft packed close together on the carrier's flight deck. Within seconds, the three Marine officers flying the Prowler died; so did eleven of the ship's crew, burned by flaming jet fuel or struck by flying shrapnel. Forty-eight more sailors were injured, some seriously.

As the Grumman-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 the way. Finally it rammed broadside into a "six pack" of fueled F-14 Tomcat fighters. "There was just one big boom," recalled Naval Aviation Technician Dale Stewart, 19. "It all happened so fast. All you could see was flying pieces of aircraft." Said Petty Officer Richard Elkin: "There were screams of pain everywhere."

When the shrieking Klaxon sounded general quarters, many of the Nimitz's 5,000 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.

Fuel tanks became incendiary bombs, ejector seats blasted from burning planes, a superheated machine gun opened fire spontaneously, missiles detonated. "It was pure hell," said Chief Warrant Officer Bob Henderson, "just ungodly." Rob 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 an arm."

The dozen other jets from the Nimitz that were airborne when the Prowler crashed got orders, as standard procedure, to land ashore. By 1 a.m., thanks to courageous work by the young Nimitz seamen, the fires were quelled, and the first of 13 corpses picked from the smoldering havoc; the 14th body was never found. With 48 men in sick bay, the casualties exceeded the capacities of the medical facilities. Medevac helicopters arrived at 4:30 a.m. and minutes later took off for Jacksonville with the 21 most seriously wounded crewmen. Then the reckoning of hardware destruction began: the incinerated Prowler, packed with ten jamming transmitters and computerized receivers, was a burned and twisted hulk, a $68 million loss; two of the $36 million F-14s were totaled, three others badly damaged; four A-7 Corsair II jet fighters were inoperative; ten other jets and a helicopter were less seriously banged or gashed or charred. The aggregate loss may be upwards of $150 million.

Official inquiries into the cause of the crash could take as long as six months, and the investigators will lack some evidence in their search for explanations: hours after the accident, the EA-6B and the two unsalvageable F-14s were pushed overboard. Captain John Batzler, the Nimitz's commanding officer, was authorized to jettison the three irreparable aircraft by Vice Admiral George E.R. Kinnear, Commander of Naval Air Forces Atlantic, who flew to the Nimitz hours after the crash. The wrecked fighters still carried their loads of unexploded missiles and ammunition, which posed a danger to ship and crew.

Although the sunken Prowler is irretrievable, there is a record of its crash: every landing on the Nimitz is videotaped. The responsibility for the accident may finally fall on the pilot. Did White do something wrong? Probably, in Batzler's opinion, though he cautions: "We're not certain." From his perspective on the bridge, the approaching Prowler looked "not in the right position" for a landing, yet "there was no early indication he should have been waved off." There are signs that the plane's crew tried to escape during their fatal career down the flight deck. Said a Nimitz crewman: "They found one of the fliers burned in his seat with his hand still clutching the ejector handle. He had pulled it, but by then the plane was crashing."

The death and destruction were grim enough, but could have been much worse. A battery of Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles might have been set off, or the crashed plane could have been an A-6 Intruder loaded with heavy ordnance. The ship's enormous elevator portal could have been open, making the ship's lower levels and hundreds more men vulnerable to the fireballs from above. As it turned out, the Nimitz, which cost $2 billion to buiid, sustained only superficial damage. The nuclear reactor --housed several steel-reinforced levels below--was never at risk.

On Thursday the Nimitz steamed into Norfolk, its home port. At the pier the crew was met by a throng of kin and well-wishers. By Saturday the carrier, checked and scrubbed, was back on regular duty; its Caribbean training cruise had been delayed just three days.

--By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Jonathan Beaty/ Norfolk

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/ Norfolk

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