The president will reach the Lincoln in a small Navy plane that will make a cable-assisted landing on the deck. The carrier will be too far offshore for the usual mode of presidential arrival, a helicopter flight, officials said.
The aircraft, an S-3B, called a "Viking," is used routinely for reconnaissance and mine-detection, according to a Pentagon fact sheet. It only carries a pilot and several crew members. Bush, a former pilot himself, will sit beside the pilot, White House aides said.
Although the plane will have an arrested landing -- its forward speed will be checked by cables stretched across the deck -- administration officials said such landings were routine aboard carriers and not viewed as particularly risky.
Having been through a carrier landing and takeoff, I can vouch for the fact that there's nothing like it in aviation. I did it in a C-2 (visualize a passenger cabin without windows and seats facing backwards), a larger aircraft than the Viking. Here's a snapshot of our landing:
If you're making your first flight out to a carrier, "I won't get sick" is probably not a good baseline expectation to have. The last five minutes can be grueling for the uninitiated. The aircraft takes several sharp banks, except they feel nothing like that. It feels more like you're being shot 1,000 feet vertically through the air. The closest thing on the ground I could compare it to a roller coaster corkscrew. The best advice I can give is just to stare at a fixed point directly in front of you, and you should be OK.
Because you can't see outside, the arresting cable is pretty much the first sign you're landing. After that, any ill feeling passes pretty quickly. And before you know it, you're spirited out onto the deck ("the most dangerous four and a half acres of real estate in the world") and inside, where you notice, for the first time in hours, that there's not so much damn noise around.
I made my trip in October of 1998 to the USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67), the last conventionally powered carrier before the Nimitz class went into service. The ship is in great condition for a ship its age, but in an inspired bit of Washington maneuvering, the Navy routinely puts it first on a list of ships to be retired, making Ted Kennedy the carrier program's best friend when talk of budget cuts rolls around. "Big John" missed serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom owing to an extensive overhaul, but in the spring of 2002 became the only carrier supporting Operation Enduring Freedom off of Afghanistan. It's not for nothing that carriers are called 90,000 tons of diplomacy — I'll take that over the career foreign service any time.
Looking back, I honestly wish I remembered more of it (returning from a particularly tiring overseas trip just 36 hours before, I was in somewhat of a daze). Some moments big and small do stick out, though — flight ops at night for instance, or learning about logistical challenges as seemingly mundane as making soup for 3,000 crew. At 20, it was the first time it dawned on me that most of those serving aboard were younger than I was, doing jobs requiring extraordinary skill, precision and attention to detail. During flight ops, the 18 year old coordinating movements on the deck has a more important job than any corporate or government executive. You know this country has got things pretty well figured out when our teenagers can depose their brutal dictators.
Oh, and there were a few others on board as well — the French had sent a few of their fighter pilots for training purposes. Judging by some choice remarks made by one of the air traffic controllers during flight ops, they were as ornery then as they are now.
The visuals tomorrow night should be stunning. It's a pity he won't do the catapulted takeoff, the one that takes you from zero to 165 mph in two seconds. That's the cool part.
