What Is an "Aircraft"?

If you are familiar with firearms, you know that there is a part that has a serial number. That part is normally the "frame" or the "receiver". You can replace every other part and it is still, by law, the same weapon. You may go to a match and see a tricked-out .45 race gun that started life as an off-the-shelf Government Model, but by law, it's still the same gun.

With airplanes, the "this is the airplane" part is the data plate. It is normally a piece of sheet metal, stamped with the maker's information. This is one from a Lockheed Vega.

You may, on occasion, have gone to an air show and seen airplanes from the early days of aviation. There, you might have sen a 1923 This or a 1934 That. It might be touted as a "restored original". What you probably don't know is the original parts may be a very small percentage of the airplane you saw and it is possible that the only original part was the data plate.

This is no shit:

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, flying naval aviation jets was a far more hazardous line of work than it is today. It was not unheard of for an fighter jet squadron to deploy for six months on a carrier and suffer a 20-25% attrition rate. In plain English, that meant that a quarter of the squadron's pilots were either seriously injured or killed. And this, mind you, was in peacetime.

Which meant that the Navy needed to buy lots of replacement airplanes. But money for replacement airplanes was difficult to come by; especially during the time that the spending on the Strategic Air Command consumed two-thirds of the military budget. Congress closely scrutinized the amount of money spent on new airplanes.

But Congress paid less attention to the repair budgets. So what some bright soul thought of was to take the data plates from the wrecked airplanes and send them to the manufacturers for "depot-level repairs".

Which meant that the manufacturers would build a new airplane on their production line, affix the old data plate to the new airplane and Voilà! The old airplane was "repaired" and returned to service.

Thirty Days Hath September

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that after the 1970s oil shocks, that Navy ships were limited to a transit speed of sixteen knots, absent operational urgencies.[1] Let me follow up on that a little.

You might have heard of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. That ship was torpedoed and sunk, very late in the war, by a Japanese submarine.[2] Because of a comedy of errors on behalf of a lot of officers, nobody realized that the ship was lost for four days. In that time, over half of the men who survived the sinking died from exposure or shark bite.

Out of that tragedy, the Navy developed the Movement Reporting System, or MOVREP. A MOVREP was a sailing plan, similar to an aircraft flight plan in concept. A MOVREP set out the time a ship was leaving port, the time it was going to arrive in port (or on station), the times the ship was to pass by certain positions (latitude and longitude) and the course and speed between positions. In essence, the position points were dictated by the need to change course and since a great-circle sailing plan had a lot of course changes, MOVREPs could be rather detailed. Ships were allowed to deviate a certain distance off the course line and there was a time window for the position points (plus or minus four hours, if I remember correctly).

The idea was that if a ship went out of contact, at least the Navy would know where to go looking for her.

This is no shit:

There was a ship that was supposed to go from a port visit in one nation to a port visit in another nation. Pursuant to the fleet commander's scheduling order, the ship was to get underway at 1200 local time on September 28th and arrive at 1000 local time on October 2nd. A few days before, the Navigator[3] and his Chief Quartermaster plotted out the courses and distances necessary to go from Port A to Port B. When they did that, the Navigator saw that they would have to transit at a speed of about 24 knots.

That was a puzzle, for the Navigator knew of no reason why they had to go so fast. The Navigator then added in twenty-four hours to the transit time and bingo: That resulted in a sixteen knot transit speed. It was clear to him, at least, that somebody in the Fleet staff had forgotten that September has only thirty days.

He drafted his MOVREP and took it to the Captain. In the "remarks" line, he had something snarky like "transit speed would be 16 knots if September had 31 days." The Captain read it over; he told the Navigator that there were no points awarded for being right if it embarrassed the staff of a three-star admiral. The Captain struck the remarks line, replaced it with "none" and had it sent out.[4]

_______________________________________
[1] This applied to nuclear-powered ships as well as oil-burning ships. The thinking was limiting the transit speeds of nucs would prolong the time between nuclear refuelings.
[2] W. Graham Claytor received the Medal of Honor for his rescue efforts.
[3] This was in the days before the XO was required to be the Navigator. After that time, the junior officer who actually did the work was designated the "Navigator's Assistant" or the "Navigation Officer" or something like that there.
[4] The ship sailed four hours before the MOVREP departure time and arrived four hours after the arrival time in order to save some fuel.

Twenty Knot Tommy

Back in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War was finished, the Navy regarded shore duty as sort of a paid vacation. The idea was something along the lines of since sailors spent a lot of time away from home when they were on sea duty, when they were on shore duty, they should work regular hours. It was highly frowned upon to require sailors on shore duty to work outside of normal hours.[1] It took damn near an act of Congress (or a C/M-4 CASREP) in order to get the shore establishment to work overtime.[2]

"Twenty Knot Tommy" was the skipper of a tin can that was homeported in Charleston, SC.[3] He got that nickname because his preferred speed during sea and anchor detail was 20 knots. The Charleston Naval Station was several miles up the Cooper River. A lot of recreational boaters[4] could be found in the Cooper River. The Coast Guard asked the Navy to limit the speed of its ships when they were transiting the Cooper River. That cut no ice with Twenty Knot Tommy. The Coast Guard would complain to the Navy, the commander of the naval base would send a letter to Twenty Knot Tommy, who would ignore the letter.[5]

This is no shit: Twenty Knot Tommy's ship was returning to port after a series of exercises. From the time the last exercise ended, a normal transit[6] would bring Twenty Knot Tommy and his ship to the Cooper River sea buoy[7] at 0530 on Saturday.

The ship sent the normal logistics requirement message to NAVSTA Charleston, which said that the ship would require two tugs, linehandlers and the usual services early on Saturday morning. NAVSTA Charleston replied that the ship was to remain at sea until no earlier than 0900 on Monday.

Tommy was not going to keep his ship and his crew at sea for two extra days to accommodate the shore establishment. At 0600 on Saturday, his ship was sitting in the Cooper River off the naval base. Tommy got on the radio, called the naval base and asked for the tugs. The duty officer told him to go back out to sea and come back on Monday.

Twenty Knot Tommy wasn't having any of that. So he anchored his tin can right in the middle of the Cooper River, just offshore of the Bachelor Officers' Quarters (BOQ). What Tommy knew was that a number of senior officers had left their families in the DC area and those officers lived in the senior officers' section of the BOQ. Those rooms faced the river.

Tommy's next move was to hold early reveille on those officers. He did that by having the ship's whistle sound long (and very loud) blasts at short intervals.

One of those senor officers was the commander of one of the two destroyer squadrons in Charleston. He was Tommy's boss. Within 15 minutes, the Commodore was on the radio and the conversation went something like this:

"Good morning, Thomas. You're back early, I see."
"Yessir. Request permission to enter port."
"Permission granted. The tugs will be out to you shortly."

And they were. Someone on the Bridge spotted the smoke from two tugs as the duty crews started the tugs' diesels. The tugs got underway, Tommy ordered the anchor raised, and his ship was brought alongside the pier. Other ships at the pier sent over linehandlers to help moor the ship and a crane was waiting to lift a brow.

Twenty Knot Tommy was the hero of the waterfront for the next week or so.

But I imagine that his career went nowhere. For you didn't buck Big Navy and survive.
______________________
[1] 0730-1600.
[2] The sailors on ships used to say that their main mission was to support the shore establishment.
[3] By "tin can", I mean a warship other than a cruiser or a minesweeper.
[4] Also known as "bubbas with boats".
[5] Supposedly he said that sailing in and out at 20 knots effectively halved the time his crew had to stand at Sea and Anchor Detail and if that made the Coasties unhappy, fuck `em.
[6] Warships were limited to a transit speed of 16 knots, unless authorized to go faster.
[7] The "sea buoy" is the last buoy in a marked channel before the open sea.

Career Choices

"Give Me Operations" by Oscar Brand.



(The annotator has it wrong, he sang "rockets, radar and AB" (afterburner).

Fairchild jet fighters were indeed ground-loving whores. The joke used to be that if they built a runway that went around the world, Fairchild would build a jet fighter that would use every inch of it.

Albert Brown, R.I.P.

He was the oldest survivor of the Bataan Death March. Born in Nebraska, he was Buffalo Bill Cody's godson and Henry Fonda's cousin. He was 36 when the Death March occurred.

USS Monitor

This is the inside of the turret (inverted):

A lot of details about the Monitor's design are in this article in the NY Times.

This is what I found fascinating: The War Department in 1861 opened a public competition to design a new class of warships. The designs had to be submitted in a month. They built the ship in four months. From one end to the other, it was a ship with new technologies and it was in combat a month after that.

The closest thing that I've heard to that was the first class of LSTs, which went from the beginning of design at BuShips to sea trials in less than a year. Over a thousand were built during the war. One of them is still working for a living.

Scenes From Wardrooms

All places and names have been changed to protect the guilty.

In port, San Diego, Sunday morning: A number of officers are having breakfast. Between the oncoming and offgoing duty sections, plus the handful of junior officers who live aboard the ship, maybe a third of the officers are there.

A young female officer walks through the wardroom. She is wearing a rather short skirt and a low-cut shiny top. She has on flats and is carrying a pair of spike-heeled sandals.

The Ops Boss looks at her and says: “That’s a pretty risque outfit to wear to church, Cindy.”

The Weapons Officer doesn’t even glance up from his plate of eggs. “She’s just returned aboard, Ops,” he says, and adds, sotto voce, “you fucking moron.”

Port visit, Haifa, Israel: It is Saturday night and officers are gathering in the wardroom to go out for a steak and some nightclubbing.

The Weapons Officer is waxing ecstatically: “Man, this is one friendly town. The women are fantastic. Anybody can get laid in this place.”

The Chief Engineer is skeptical. “Even the EWO?* I got a hundred bucks, says that you can’t get him laid, not without hiring a hooker.”

Weaps: “Hell, I’ll take that bet.” Other officers offer up bets, as well, and soon there is about $500 riding on whether the Weapons Officer can get the EWO laid.

Then the EWO, who knows nothing about this, walks into the wardroom. He is wearing plaid trousers and a striped shirt. He is the poster child for bad taste. The Weapons Officer takes one look at him and yells: “The bet is off!”

In port, Norfolk, VA: The admiral commanding Surflant** pays a visit to a destroyer tender to talk to a few commanders of repair activities. After the conference, the admiral meets with the officers of the tender for a little morale-boosting. During the meeting, the admiral says something along the lines of: “Earlier this year, I went to Charleston and Mayport. The piers on those waterfronts are so clean that you could eat off them, but the piers in Norfolk are shithouses. We need to do better here in Norfolk.”

That pronouncement is met with an audible snort from the tender’s Repair Officer. The Captain doesn’t let it pass: “Commander, you have something to add?”

The Repair Officer*** says: “Yes, sir. Is the Admiral referring to his visit to Mayport in April?”

The admiral said that he was.

“I was stationed there,” the Repair Officer said. “They shut down the fucking waterfront for three days prior to the Admiral’s visit just to clean up all of the crap. They washed the piers, removed all of the stuff from the piers and even painted the guard shacks.

“But if the Admiral were to hop on a plane and go down there right now, unannounced, I guarantee he won’t see anything different in either Mayport or Charleston than what he sees right here, right now, in Norfolk.”
______________________
* Electronic Warfare Officer.
** "Surflant", or Commander, Surface Forces Atlantic, was the "type commander". His job was to ensure that the ships were ready.
*** He was actually a lieutenant commander limited duty officer who, if my recollection is accurate, was about fifteen days away from retiring.

What Happens When the Air Force Mistakes a Third Class Petty Officer for a Bird Colonel?

All sorts of hilarity ensues.

(H/T)

The Fourth

235 years ago text at the link.

Aquaflage

Last weekend, I was in the same restaurant where this scene took place. Also there were three men in aquaflage.

They looked stupid in that uniform. They looked like mall ninjas.

I know that I may sound like a broken record on this topic.[1] But I remain unshaken in my opinion that the aquaflage uniform is one of the dumbest looking uniforms around.[2] I predict that neither aquaflage or the new enlisted service uniform will be around by the end of this decade. And those clowns that recommended adopting them will luckily escape the flogging that they so richly deserve.

It could be worse, I suppose. At least the Navy didn't adopt the "Working Uniform; Blockbuster Best Buy" that the Air Force has adopted:

It definitely could be worse.

________________________
1. It's my blog.
2. The new enlisted service uniform with the black pisscutter cover is almost as bad.

The Return of DASH?

I wrote briefly about DASH (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) in this post.

DASH was a failure for several reasons. It was too cheaply-made, with multiple sources of single-point failure which would result in the loss of the drone. Because of DASH's small size and the fact that no transponders were installed, they had a propensity to disappear from radar and once that happened, they were effectively lost. There was also no feedback from the drones to the ships; so the controllers had no idea what a drone might be doing at any given moment.

35 years after DASH was canceled, the Navy began trying again to operate drone helicopters rom ships, though not for ASW. But that'll probably come to pass in the not-so distant future.

CASREP

A "CASREP" was a "casualty report." CASREPs were not sent out for people being hurt, but for equipment damage/failure.[1] There were two categories: Combat systems readiness (C) and engineering (mobility) (M) readiness.

C1 and M1 meant that the ship could sail and fight. A 2 level meant that there were minor, but serious degradations. A 3 level meant that there were damn serious degradations. A 4 level meant, in common parlance, that the ship was broke-dick and wasn't going anywhere.

Actually, it wasn't that clear-cut. While a M4 CASREP meant "we ain't getting underway, or if at sea, "send the tugs", a ship might possibly sail with a C4 CASREP. The combat systems CASREPS were by warfare area, so for ASW, the ship might be completely dead, but it could still shoot its guns or fire missiles.[2] If part of the mission was armed diplomacy ("showing the Flag"), then it didn't matter if the Tartar launcher was broken.[3]

CASREPs were sent by teletype radio message. The effect could be like kicking over an anthill, often as the shore establishment scurried around to fix the things that they should have fixed anyway. A simple lack of repair parts could trigger a CASREP, which was really embarrassing to the supply pukes if that part was supposed to be in ship's stock.

CASREPs could also request technical support. This was common in serious leaks in the main steam piping, as repairs required highly certified welders and X-ray quality control examination of the welds. Usually the staff pukes confined their assistance to expediting parts and technicians and refrained from offering their idea of helpful (and unsolicited) advice, but not always.

If a part was needed and not available, the supply system would sometimes send the "next higher assembly". I once saw an entire antenna assembly delivered for a SPS-49 because the radar repair guys needed one part from it.[4]

The more twisted mess was when the supply system's records indicated that there was no part available. Sometimes the divisional supply petty officer would go over to the supply center and do a physical stock check. That could be embarrassing for the supply pukes if they really did have the parts.

This is no shit: There once was a minesweeper in drydock that needed a new dunce cap. The supply system said that there was not one available and that one would have to be manufactured. So one day, one of the more worthless division officers went to check out with the XO and go home (this was around 1300). The XO felt like screwing with that junior officer, so he told him that he could leave after he drove over to the supply center and got a new dunce cap.

This kid was dumb enough that he had no clue what the proper procedure was to go get parts from the supply center.[5] What he did do was to drive his car to the base supply center and drive around until he saw where those parts were kept. He asked the grizzled chief there if they had any dunce caps for that class of MSO. The chief said: "Yeah, I got them, how many you want, sir?" The kid signed where the chief told him to sign, the chief had a couple of guys put the dunce cap in the kid's car (they weren't that big) and the kid was soon back at the ship, showing the dunce cap to the stunned XO.

The supply system was also good at losing parts. I knew of one double-ended cruiser which had one of the motors in its aft launcher burn out. They CASREP'd the launcher and a new motor was sent. It disappeared en route. The supply system said that it had been delivered, the ship denied receiving it. Now this was no tiny motor, it was a big-ass 440 volt motor with a fair amount of horsepower. A second motor was sent and installed. Six months later, the first motor mysteriously appeared on the pier alongside the ship. There was no tracking paperwork, nobody knew who delivered it or where it came from. It was just there.

CASREPs could be (and often were) amended. A CASREP level might be reduced if the ship's force was able to jury-rig a partial repair. When the casualty was fixed, a CASCAN (casualty cancellation) was sent out.
____________________________
[1] I believe that the CO of an AO or AOR did once send out a CASREP for undermanning.
[2] And maybe the Soviets didn't know that the best ASW ship in WestPac had all of the ASW capability of the Staten Island Ferry.
[3] My recollection is that the USS Compte de Grasse was sent on a "show the Flag" cruise to France soon after she was commissioned, interrupting the ship's training at Gitmo.
[4] The techs just cannibalized the part from the antenna on the pier, took the broken part off the installed antenna, installed the new part and it worked. They then put the bad part into the antenna on the pier, marked the thing as "unserviceable" and sent it back. The supply pukes ashore were not amused and complained. The ship had, by then, cleared the CASREP and nobody gave a damn.
[5] Fill out a Form 1250, have the XO sign it, take it to the ship's supply department, where they would then type out a Form 1348 and take that to the Supply Center. Doing this when the ship was in-port could alleviate the need for a CASREP. If they would give you the part. Sometimes they wouldn't.

Brown Shoes, Brown Pants?

The SH's in the ship's laundry had better have some pre-treatment stuff to use on that pilot's skivvies (and flight suit):



In the part of the video with cross-hairs, being in the center of the screen is to be on line-up and on the glide slope. That jet got pretty low close in, much lower and that guy would have smeared his jet all over the stern. It looks as though he attempted to abort at the last second or so (or got a wave-off) and then snatched the number 1 wire in flight, but what the hell, I was a black shoe, so what do I know about such things.

And Then There Was One

Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.

There is one known veteran left alive: Florence Green. She was in the Women's RAF.

Flight Deck Fire

First, watch the video on Defense Tech.



I'm not going to address the reliability issue of the F/A-18s. That's outside my wheelhouse.

Note that the fire crews don't approach the burning jet from the rear. That's probably because there must have been at least 30 knots of relative wind over the flight deck, which might have increased if the Captain or OOD ordered up more speed to keep the flames blowing away from the flight crew. Spraying foam onto a fire is rather difficult if the wind is blowing in one's face.

You can also see that burning JP-5 dripped down into the catapult shuttle track.

The fire never reached the forward end of the jet, so the crew stayed with it. A flight-deck ejection might throw the crew over the side, which has its own risks.

Good work by the flight deck fire crews. That's what they practice for and it paid off.

(H/T)

The Convincer

Ships were supposed to have safety-themed events from time to time. The Damage Control Assistant on one ship, who had the collateral job of Assistant Safety Officer*, arranged for a program of traffic safety. One of his ideas was a hot-dog cookout on the pier, offering free hot dogs and soda.

The catch was that anyone who wanted the free food had to first take a ride in the Convincer. If you didn't click the link. the Convincer is a gizmo that you ride in; the seat slides down some guides and then slams into some bumpers to give you an idea what a low-speed crash feels like (and why you should wear your seat belt).

The Chief Engineer thought it was a good idea if he rode it first. After being slammed to a stop, the CHENG had a revelation and an idea. The revelation is that the shoulder strap for a seat belt naturally goes over the collar points of a uniform shirt. If you were wearing a shirt that had what the Navy calls "collar devices" (rank insignia), the impact drove the collar device into your collar bone and it hurt.

The idea was to combine the Convincer with a demonstration of why it was a good idea to get a car seat for kids. He told the DCA to have someone get two 5-lb bags of flour or sugar from the cooks, to put them into a plastic bag and to wrap them up with duct tape to make a simulated baby. You'd ride the Convincer, hold onto the "baby" and see the "baby" go flying out of your arms when you jolted to a stop.

That turned out to be a great idea, for it developed into an informal competition to see who could hold onto the "baby". Hardly anyone could.

So the XO came down to make an appearance and ride the Convincer. He got in and strapped in. The CHENG and the DCA were watching. The DCA asked the CHENG if maybe he should tell the XO to put his collar over the shoulder belt. The CHENG smiled and said: "Nah."

The XO rode the Convincer, it slammed to a stop. He said: "Kee-rist, that hurt." afterwards and rubbed his collarbone. But he didn't drop the "baby"; it spun out of his arms and he was able to catch it.

Oh, and when the Captain rode the Convincer, the XO didn't tell him about the shoulder belt.
__________________________________
*That was true for all ships. The DCA had the collateral duty of serving as the Assistant Safety Officer, the Chief Engineer was the Safety Officer. They did those jobs in their copious spare time.

1911

A century ago today, the U.S. Army officially adopted the M1911.

As I've written elsewhere, both the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 set the gold standard for self-defense handguns.

Attention to Colors

I've mentioned before that I was on shore duty at a facility in the DC metro area for a spell. A large number of people worked there, the vast majority were civilians. The commander of the facility was a captain in some engineering career path. The facility also had about a dozen or so naval officers of varying designators; the idea was explained to me that we all brought real-world fleet experience to the job the facility did.

We were sort of dispersed around the various departments and, brother, most of the civilians that we worked for were scared of us. For instance, my boss had at least three people in his hierarchy between himself and the facility commander, maybe four. He knew, as did all of the other bosses who had naval officers detailed to work for them, that in the "blue suit" chain of command, we all reported directly to the facility commander. It griped the living shit out of my boss that he couldn't make an appointment directly with the facility commander, but I could.

He really hated that once a month, there was a "military lunch" in the executive dining room at the cafeteria, where all of the blue-suiters had lunch with the base CO. When I realized that seriously gnawed on his liver, I made a point of telling him when the lunches were scheduled and reminding him on that day that I'd be gone for an hour or so.

We all stood a 24 hour watch as the Command Duty Officer. We didn't have to sleep at the facility, but we had to be available by phone or pager the entire time. (I think in a 30 month period of time, I had to go in maybe four times.) Turnover was at 0745 and at 0800, the ongoing and offgoing CDO stood in front of the administration building and saluted the raising of the Colors.

Now at most naval bases, all traffic stops for morning and evening Colors. Even if you don't know it's going on, you can see the pedestrians stop, face towards the Colors and salute while the Colors are raised. Even if they can't see them, they can hear the bugle call.*

But not at this facility. We would be standing on the steps of the Administration building, saluting the Colors and watching the traffic drive by. It bothered every one of us.

So one day, when I was ongoing or offgoing CDO, I don't remember which, when the four-note "Attention" call was played, we smartly marched right into the middle of the street, blocked traffic, and when the bugle call for Colors played, we saluted the Colors. When the "Carry On" played, we executed an about-faced and marched out of the street.

From then on, that was part of the drill for every duty day. I don't think we ever were honked at, for they probably believed that we'd just drag them out of their cars and beat the shit out of them. And we might have done just that.
_____________________________
* Bugle calls were pretty much only used for morning and evening Colors in the Navy. The Army and the Zoomies were, of course, big on bugle calls.

Dustoff!

A videographer embedded with a Medevac unit in Afghanistan for ten days. This is the documentary that resulted. It is well worth the 25 minutes that you will spend watching it.



The Army has to be proud of these guys. This video could be used as a recruiting tool. Hell, it should be.

The kicker is that it aired on al-Jazeera.

Uniform Disasters

While I was quite proud of referring to the new naval working uniform as "Battle Dress Oceanic," I have to admit that a commenter on "the Stupid Shall Be Punished" came up with a better term: Aquaflage.

Aquaflage. So it is written, so it shall be.

Sea Legs

The old Grumman documentary about carrier aircraft from the 1970s.

Happy Birthday, Brown Shoes

100 years since Eugene Ely made the first arrested landing on a warship (USS Pennsylvania, ACR-4)

Ely wasn't in the Navy, but his shipboard landing is now commonly regarded as the birth date for naval air. The first American aircraft carrier was authorized just after the end of the Great War and was commissioned in 1922.

Last Pilot From the Doolittle Raid.

The last surviving pilot from the Doolittle Raid has died.

Col. William Marsh "Bill" Bower was 93.

Garbage Out, Garbage In

Ships generate a fair amount of garbage and trash (which our cousins in the Royal Navy refer to as "gash"). In port, it was handled as any other business would; it was thrown into a dumpster on the pier.

I don't know how the Navy handles garbage and trash at sea now. Submarines supposedly compacted it and then ejected it overboard, so it would sink. Back in the day, surface ships would just throw it from the fantail; naval ships pretty much left a stream of garbage bags floating in their wakes. [1]

When a ship was at an anchorage, typically a civilian firm would be contracted to come by the ship once or twice a day to pick up the garbage. In some countries, a garbage lighter from a local navy base would do the honors and there would be impromptu trading of goods between the sailors on the warship and the crew of the lighters.[2] The lighters were supposed to take the garbage ashore and then it would be trucked to the local dump.

In Italy, of course, it didn't work that way. The garbage lighters would wait until it was completely dark. Then they would go several miles out to sea and throw all of the shit over the side. This often had one bad diplomatic ramification: Garbage with papers bearing the name of the USS UMPTECLUTCH would then drift ashore onto beaches favored by tourists. The mayor of that town would either complain to his foreign ministry or sometimes just call the local consulate directly and scream at the consular officials about American ships fouling his pristine beaches.

That usually resulted in a cable going to Foggy Bottom, which then was passed along to Fort Fumble. Some desk-bound captain or admiral would then send a message of inquiry to the offending ship, with the message copied to the commanders of the Second Fleet, the Sixth Fleet, the home cruiser-destroyer group, CTF 60, CTG 60.1 (or 60.2) and the home destroyer squadron. That was usually answered with a message that explained that garbage services were contracted through the local consular agent, or "we did what we were supposed to, whaddaya want from us?"

So one time (probably more than one time), there was an American naval ship anchored a mile or so off the coast of an Italian town. Garbage services were arranged as I described above. The garbage was handled by the lightermen as I also described. There were currents that took the garbage from where it was dumped into the Mediterranean Sea (more precisely, the Tyrrhenian Sea) back towards that town.

And back towards that ship.

When the garbage had floated back towards that ship, the garbage bags had taken on water. Some of them had submerged and were floating along about twenty or so feet under the surface. That put them right at the level of the sea chests[3] for the generators, the evaporators and the fire mains. The suction from the sea chests sucked the garbage into the sea chests, where the garbage clogged the inlet screens.

All that stuff kept tripping offline as cooling was lost. The cure was to connect a fire hose to the sea chest and backwash the shit back out. The chief engineer and the captain soon realized that the time might come when all of the firemain pump inlets were clogged at the same time. So the captain ordered that the Sea and Anchor Detail be set, the anchor was hauled up and the ship headed out to sea.

This happened around midnight or so, stranding several dozen sailors ashore. After it was fully light out, the ship came back in, though well away from the garbage current and sent in its boats to retrieve the rest of the crew. The boat crews were told to keep a watch out for garbage so that the sea chests for their engines weren't fouled.

In due course, the sailors who were ashore were recovered and the ship went off to its next mission.

_______________________________________
[1] Classified material was put into burn bags. Stuff classified as "secret" or above was supposed to first be shredded and then burned.
[2] In Muslim nations, a very desired trade good by the lightermen was American porn.
[3] A "sea chest" is the point of salt water inlet for a given system. For generators, sea water was used for cooling the condensers and sea water also cooled the air-conditioning plants. For evaporators, sea water was the raw material for making fresh water. Water for fire-fighting was also sea water.

Now Hear This: Happy New Year!

That is all.

Food, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

see more Very Demotivational

An explanation.

69 Years Ago- The Second Happy Time

69 years ago today, the first of five German U-Boats sailed to begin commerce-raiding operations off the east coast of the United States.

The U-boats were able to sink so many ships with so few German losses that the period from the arrival of the U-boats to about August of 1942 became known as the "Second Happy Time".

The reaction of the US Navy to the U-boat campaign, as well as the local governments in coastal cities, bordered on criminal neglect and dereliction of duty.

The Navy fought the institution of a coastal convoy system, despite the lessons learned during both the First World War and the high losses the British suffered at the onset of the Second World War. The Navy was extremely slow to react and resisted the formation of civilian aerial antisubmarine patrols (a measure that proved to be an extremely effective countermeasure). Until the Navy pulled its collective thumb out of its ass, many merchant vessels were sunk, most with the loss of their crews.

Merchant ships sailing independently tried hopping from anchorage to anchorage, sailing only in darkness. The U-boats were able to see ships operating inshore silhouetted by the lights of towns and cities. Civilian governments resisted the institution of a coastal blackout, because the local governments feared the impact of a blackout on their merchants, preferring to see ships on the horizon burning from U-boat attacks.

Keep in mind that although the film stock from the war shows the U-boats executing torpedo attacks, U-boats sank a lot of ships by surfacing and firing on those ships with their deck guns, because submarines of the day carried maybe 12-20 torpedoes. Surfaced U-boats were vulnerable to air attack; the later formation of the Civil Air Patrol, light aircraft armed with small bombs, forced the U-boats to discontinue surface attacks.

Between the CAP flights, convoying and Navy blimp patrols, merchant sinkings went down and U-boat losses climbed, making operations off the U.S. coast a lot more hazardous for the U-boat crews.

The Troll Under the Bridge, cont.

Navy Times is reporting that CAPT Graf's continuation board recommended that she be forcibly retired with a general discharge.

I read through some of the comments that CAPT Graf was favored because her sister is an admiral. I don't know anything about that.

But a long time ago, I knew one admiral who was so dumb that he should have been watered twice a week and the only reason anyone could figure out that he had gotten so far was that his father and his uncle were both admirals. Maybe a cousin and a brother as well, I've forgotten. There were weekly stories going around the waterfront about what stupid thing that admiral had said or asked in the weekly staff meeting.

So yes, nepotism did exist in the Navy and it probably still does. Idiot offspring who are legacy admissions isn't confined to douchebag sons at Ivy-league universities.

(Original post.)

Thanksgiving at Sea, or "We Sail to Defend, What We Hold So Dear. "The DDGs, Welded to the Pier."

I hope that you are having (or that you had) a nice Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader. Please spare a moment from your day of food (and football) to think of those men and women in the Armed Forces who are away from home on this day, with a special thought to those on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are sailing into uncertain waters off the Korean Peninsula.

I've spent a Thanksgiving or two at sea, it's not terribly uncommon in the Navy. If the cooks are halfway good, the meal is a feast like none other[1] (though cigars and cigarettes were no longer provided). It was a good idea to reflect on one's underway watch rotation before sitting down to eat, as showing up for watch ready to fall asleep from overeating was not a good idea.

On larger ships, a VIP might show up to thank the crew. A DoD or USO entertainment group might perform, which resulted in a sort of "mandatory fun" if not enough sailors showed up to watch the show.[2] Smaller ships were luckier, usually they got to be on their own. Unless it was truly wartime, Thanksgiving was a day of holiday routine; no work was done other than sweepers, watchstanding and cooking. Everyone could sleep in if they didn't have to be up.

I was surfing around, saw the usual press releases, and found this Plan of the Day from a warship's Thanksgiving thirty years ago.

I don't know the story behind it, but it sounds as though the USS Joseph Hewes had to leave for Thanksgiving to cover something that the USS Sellers was supposed to do. Probably one of the crewmen, or more than one, wrote that poem. If I remember correctly, only line officers could qualify for surface warfare pins back then, so it is possible that one of the wardroom rats had a hand in that.

Covering another ship's commitments was a bittersweet thing. The bitter was that it meant more time away from home.[3] If it was over a holiday, your plans, the plans of your shipmates and everyone's families were ruined. The sweet was that there was considerable unit pride in being on a ship that could be told, on very short notice, to get underway and do someone else's job. [4] That was a hard thing to sell to one's family, but it was still true. The reverse was that the waterfront reputation of a ship that was indeed "welded to the pier" was not good. The higher-ups in the squadron and the group could be counted on to lavish the sort of extra attention on that short of ship which nobody on that ship relished receiving.
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[1] If the cooks produced a terrible Thanksgiving meal, that may result in the Supply Officer and the chief cook getting fired.
[2] "You will attend and you will have fun."
[3] Between deployments, exercises and in-port duty days, it was common to sleep in your own bed maybe 60-70 days a year.
[4] I have no doubt that copies of that POD were mailed to the USS Sellers.

Lockout and Tagout

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.