THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606300060
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABOARD THE CARRIER ENTERPRISE LENGTH: 103 lines
The top commander of the Atlantic Fleet landed on board the Navy's rehabbed showpiece Saturday and met with all the customary admiral-greeting flourishes.
His welcoming party: A gaggle of spit-shined, slat-backed sailors and half the ship's top-tier execs.
His ride: A dump truck, one that will be in mothballs or a junk heap before half the ship's seamen could grow some decent beards.
Adm. William ``Bud'' Flanagan Jr.'s transportation was no slight of protocol, mind you. He rode not an honest-to-goodness dump truck, but rather a venerable A-6E Intruder, the naval warfare equivalent to a sack of bricks upside the enemy's head.
Aboard the Enterprise, the top guy's A-6 ride was more than ceremonial. It was a tribute to a plane with a fierce reputation for showing enemy targets the shortcut to Kingdom Come.
The Intruder, with a duty record dating to 1963, began its last deployment aboard the Enterprise this weekend. It will be decommissioned when the battle group returns to port in December.
``It's a plane that has served us very well for a long, long time,'' said Enterprise Capt. Michael D. Malone. ``Retiring it was the right choice to make for the proper husbanding of the taxpayers' money, but on the emotional side it's a shame to see.''
The flight-deck grunts might call it a dump truck, but make no mistake: The A-6 is one of the most battle-hardened pieces of machinery in the Navy's repertoire. Its victims include Ghadafi's headquarters in Libya, scores of Iraqi bunkers and countless Vietnamese fortifications.
And, yes, it also happens to be the oddest-looking contraption they know how to throw into the air.
The pilot and the bomb-dropper sit side-by-side, more as if hauling trash than flying a Navy attack jet.
A crooked metal stick - actually a refueling probe - protrudes from the nose like an old Model T crank that somebody forgot to remove.
``They call it ugly,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Roy Wise, who flies the A-6 for the Enterprise's VA-75 attack squadron. Then he held a hand to his forehead and pointed a finger out like a hook, the greeting A-6 fliers often receive from pilots of the Navy's newer, faster, pointier aircraft.
``But they all say it with respect,'' Wise added. ``It's a real pretty ugly.''
Wise confesses to a little lump in the throat these days, as do most members of his squadron.
It was in September 1963 that the ``Sunday Punchers'' became the fleet's first team to fly the A-6 Intruder. And Friday, starting when Air Wing Commander James Zortman's plane grabbed the No. 3 cable and screamed to a stop on the Enterprise flight deck, it became the last.
When the battle group's six-month deployment ends in December, some of the A-6 pilots will simply fly their planes to the Navy's desert graveyard, hand over the keys and walk away. A few dozen of the planes are already sheltering fish in an artificial reef off the coast of Daytona Beach, Fla.
The decision to scrap the Intruders was both tactical and financial. The A-6 can't fly as fast as the other Navy jets, it can't fight air-to-air combat, and it is expensive to maintain.
Its F/A-18 Hornet replacement lacks the Intruder's all-weather capability and can't fly the same low, long missions, and the A-6 can drop more bombs than anything else the Navy takes to sea. But that's not deemed as important in the era of smart bombs, cruise missiles and Cold War memories.
In short, the sleek Hornets and F-14 Tomcats are all the Navy needs.
Saying that to the A-6 fliers, bomb-hangers and mechanics (the plane's ``community'' in Navy talk) goes over like the Bronx cheer at a funeral brigade.
``When I heard this was the last cruise of the A-6, I said, `I'm in,' '' said Chief Petty Officer Jim Patterson, working Saturday beneath the steam-filled pipes and creaky beams of the A-6 maintenance center. ``I mean, after this, we're turning it over to lawn darts . . . er, Hornets. The F-18s.''
Across the room, leaning over the plane's maintenance charts, Senior Chief Petty Officer Johnny Boensch, a 23-year Navy veteran and part of the Intruder squadron's team of mechanics, summed up the mood.
``If I were an enemy soldier on the ground,'' he said, ``and I looked up and saw some cute little airplane coming at me, I wouldn't be nearly as scared as if I saw a huge dump truck with 20,000 pounds of bombs bearing down.''
Those inter-squadron rivalries were smoldering long before the military ever bought any planes with pointy noses. But these days, with all the jokes about their plane's shape, its age or its side-by-side pilots holding hands, the A-6ers endure more than the rest.
``We hear it all the time: `It's old, it's slow, it's ugly,' '' said Lt. Patrick Day, an A-6 pilot and spokesman for the Sunday Punchers.
``But when it comes time to plan an air strike, I guarantee you'll see the Tomcat guys down in our ready room looking for help blowing everything up.''
And the Tomcat guys don't disagree.
``On strikes with the A-6s, basically we have to slow down,'' said Lt. Shawn Scharf, a pilot in the ship's Jolly Rogers squadron of F-14s.
``But no one will tell you we won't miss its combination of range and payload.''
And the looks?
``Oh, they're ugly as hell,'' Scharf said, not having to think. ``We sure won't miss that.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
ROBERT LITTLE/The Virginian-Pilot
Lt. Jeff Czerewko, an A-6E pilot, walks to the Enterprise flight
deck to begin a round of required daily takeoffs and landings. This
is the last trip for the A-6 Intruders, which will be decommissioned
when the Enterprise comes home.
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY U.S.S. ENTERPRISE AIRCRAFT
CARRIERS by CNB