Update May 1998
I'm sorry I haven't been able to update my web page since march, but since then I have been quite busy working with the U.S. Navy in carrier landing trials with my Beaver RX-550. You see, it seems that the Pentagon became aware of the work I had been doing with NASA (see March 1998 update for full story), so they gave me a call at the beginning of April and asked if I could assist them in a feasibility study that the Navy was undertaking. The Navy has plenty of fighter jocks capable of piloting a craft at twice the speed of sound, but no-one familiar with the idiosyncrasies of an airplane that flies at 50 miles an hour!
THEORY
Officials in the war department got the idea of using ultralight type aircraft to land U.S. Navy SEALS a couple of miles inland from the coast in situations where the shoreline was particularly treacherous or well defended. Ultralights were chosen for this mission because of their minimal radar signature and because of their ability to land in small areas. They wanted the operatives to be free to carry out extended covert operations behind enemy lines, so the SEALS can't fly the ultralights themselves because then the aircraft would have to be left on the ground where they could be spotted by enemy patrols.
OPERATIONS
During the second week of April I got the chance to land my ultralight aboard the U.S.S. Carl Vinson (CVN-74) steaming three miles off the coast of Virginia. It was quite a rush as I headed out from the coast. I could already see the carrier from my altitude of 2500 feet and as I got closer it just got bigger and bigger! I wasn't nervous at all as I came in, and I tell you, landing on the carrier was a piece of cake. Since the carrier is able to steam at over 30 knots, when I came in over the deck I was practically at a standstill! Any type of arresting gear was unnecessary, as my ground roll was less than 30 feet. In fact, the carrier had to actually slow down in order to take me aboard because of the ever-present winds out at sea (you will notice in the photographs that the carrier is hardly making any wake).
The only modification made to my aircraft on the carrier was the addition of a Hughes-Raytheon ALQ-139N passive electronic countermeasures pod (you can see the pod on the upper leading edge of my wing in photo 1). With this pod and the already minimal radar signature of my mostly fiberglass and fabric craft, my airplane was essentially invisible to all known ground-based tactical radar tracking systems.
TACTICS
After 4 days aboard the carrier practicing day and night landings (for night landings I wore a pair of Eloptro NG-45 night vision goggles) we headed south to the coast of North Carolina to participate in joint Army-Navy exercises at Camp Lejune, North Carolina. My mission was to insert an entire SEAL strike team into the simulated battlefield undetected. To do this, I approached the landing area at 3000-ft AGL. At approximately one mile from the target area, I switched off the engine and glided into the landing zone without a sound. I arrived over the landing zone, which was a clearing in some trees about half the size of a football field at about 1000 ft AGL and from there I began a spiraling decent directly down over the leeward side of the field. Landing my airplane in the field went without a hitch and was certainly a lot easier than the spot landing contests we have at the Fox Valley Flying Club Fly-ins. Of course one drawback was the fact that I could only land one member of the strike team at a time, so I had to make five such trips to insert the entire team. In actual use I would envision a flight of five aircraft such as mine flying together so an entire team could be inserted at once. After landing, all I did was fire up my engine and with the high climb rate of the RX-550; I was up and out of the landing area in less than one minute.
ABOARD THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER
Needless to say, the fighter jocks aboard the carrier were quite interested in seeing my little craft taking off and landing on the carrier like a butterfly. Navy fighter squadron VF-2 (Bounty Hunters) out of NAS Oceana were embarked for this cruise, so I gave two of them rides in my plane. The fighter pilots found flight in my craft to be quite enjoyable and they responded by giving me a ride in an F-14B Tomcat. Talk about exciting! We rocketed straight up from the deck after a catapult launch and were at 10,000 feet in an eyeblink. After about 10 minutes of doing loops and rolls the pilot let me take the controls. My heart was pounding as I put the F-14 through her paces but flying the multi-million dollar craft seemed to come naturally. I even taught the fighter pilot a thing or two about air combat maneuvering when I put the F-14 into a radical right hand slip and we descended almost vertically at 8000 ft per minute and less than 100 mph forward airspeed. The pilot told me that they were told that the F-14 couldn't be slipped because without forward airflow into the intakes, the jet engines' compressors would stall. Little did they know that I have developed a technique whereby I point the nose almost straight at the ground when I slip, this allowed enough air to enter the intakes to keep the engines from stalling. (I have been trying to teach this same technique for months to a pilot at the Fox Valley Flying Club but he refuses to listen and insists on slipping tail first.)
BACK HOME AGAIN
Anyway, when the Navy brass heard about my sideslip technique, they insisted that I travel to Pensacola, Florida to teach the instructors there my maneuver. I agreed, but on the condition that they let me stop off in Lakeland, Florida to see the Sun N' Fun EAA convention.
After three days at the convention, where I met a bunch of my fellow FVFC members, I continued on to Pensacola. Now, this same technique is being taught to all Naval Aviation cadets , as a way to evade an adversary on ones tail.
Its been an exciting two months but its good to be back home to Illinois and the Fox Valley Flying Club where the real fun is!