The 'Short Pickle'

I showed up in March 2013 as the FNG to VFA-131, the WILDCATS while deployed in the North Arabian Sea. I had showed up a day before the Air Wing was to support Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Three months and three port calls later, my short deployment was coming to an end. With three months of flying and having not embarrassed myself around the ship, I was ready to get home.

“Dewclaw” Yelled the OPSO from across the ready room. “The Skipper wants you to be a part of the Air Power Demo. You will be part of the wall of water.” So I thought, “Great, how can I mess this up? I will drop four bombs, with an experienced Division Head as my lead, what could go wrong?”

The planning began. We looked at the gouge from the last air power demo. Checking and double checking how they used WASP to make the bombs drop and impact a mile abeam the ship, on time. After doing some math, appreciative now that I remembered SOHCAHTOA from High school calculus, we had determined what we needed to do to get the bombs off and make this presentation look good for everyone. The plan was for me to fly wing and pickle my bombs as I see the third drop from lead’s jet. Easy day.

First practice goes great, no issues, our timing was a few seconds off but still within the briefed timing window. In my head as we were SIM dropping I was imagining how the bombs would look coming off the jet in a high drag configuration and pickling when I imagined the third to come off. I had this suit cased, what could go wrong now?

The air power demo finally came. I was not particularly worried about how it would work out. The brief was the same as the first with one change, our load out now included a bucket of flares. My lead directed that he would dispense them on our ingress and...

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...else there to help balance the workload when things do go wrong. Nobody intentionally practices these non standard deliveries. Even when you brief something multiple times, when things change, the “holes in the swiss cheese" can start to align. This is when a good brief, flying the brief and time critical risk management during every sortie come into play in an effort to stop a bad situation from getting worse or even better, never happening at all. Looking back I don’t know if there is anything I could have done differently. The brief was there, we began to fly the brief, I made a mistake. Through time critical risk management we were able to keep it from getting worse. Though embarrassing, it was a great learning experience for me. I will never forget the time I short pickled on my last flight of cruise, on our way home, as one of the newest guys in the Air wing.