We
Are Not Alone
by
Jeff Hoopes
__________________________________________________________
The year was 1986. I was 26 years old. Assigned to
Patrol Squadron 8 (VP-8), our home port was Brunswick, Maine. At the
time of this story, our squadron was deployed to Keflavik, Iceland.
There were 75 officers and 200+ enlisted men in the
squadron. We had nine $60 million, almost brand new, P3C aircraft, and 12
Combat Aircrews of 12 personnel per crew (5 officers, 7 enlisted). Three
of the 5 officers were pilots. The other two were NFO’s (Naval Flight
Officers), one was the navigator/ Communications Officer, the other was the
Tactical Coordinator. That was me. As the Tactical Coordinator my job was
to coordinate the efforts of the aircrew in order to detect, locate, and fix
the position of Russian submarines in the area we were patrolling.
The enlisted aircrew were comprised of two Flight engineers, two Acoustic
Warfare Operators, and three technicians with specialties in maintenance of
radar, ordinance and electronics.
As the TACCO for Combat Aircrew Three, I was the youngest
officer in my squadron to hold that title, something for which I was quite proud.
All 5 officers on our crew were junior Officers (O-3 or below) which we liked
to think of as being without adult supervision - part of our bragging
rights. Being an all junior officer crew, we got a lot of the short
straws, like flying in the dead, dark of night when everybody else was back in
their warm racks sleeping.
My story
concerns one of our night missions. We were flying north of Iceland searching
for a Soviet submarine off of the extreme northwest coast of Norway. We
were operating under the “Big Sky - Little Airplane” theory of maritime patrol
aviation, as we did nearly 100% of the time, under strict radio silence so that
the Russians couldn’t find us via radio transmissions.
Several hours into the mission, my radar
operator asked me to re-initialize (turn off/turn on) his ESM pod. I
asked him what the problem was and he told me that he had a constant contact
with the bearing of 180 degrees relative….(our six o’clock position).
At first, I
didn’t think anything of it. But after his 3rd request to re-initialize, I
began to think that there was a more serious problem than equipment
failure. I got out of my seat and went into the cockpit to confer with
the pilot, our crew commander. After less than a minute of discussion we both
came to the same conclusion….WE HAD BEEN INTERCEPTED AND HAD A FIGHTER ESCORT
TRACKING US FROM BEHIND!
The pilot immediately turned on
our aircraft’s exterior anti-collision and strobe lights and started
broadcasting on the open guard frequency, announcing that we were a U.S. Navy
aircraft operating in international waters, and for our tracker to break off
and leave the area.
Almost immediately the intruder
broke off - - and we went back to searching for Russian submarines.
Later we learned that our
visitor was a Norwegian F-16 that came out to investigate what their
shore-based radar had located cruising off of their coastline.
While the episode was exciting,
it was frightening as well.
A couple of years into our City of Savannah adventure, Jeff Hoopes and Guy McDonald got to talking about their time in the military. They learned that each had served in the late 1980's as aircrew members in their respective branches, Jeff in the Navy and Guy in the Air Force. As their conversation developed, they realized that they both served deployments at the same base, in the same alert facility, at the same time!! The location was at Lajes Field, Azores, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. Jeff's P3 crew was hunting Russian submarines and using Lajes as a forward operating base to put them closer to their targets. Guy's EC-135 crew were flying CINCEUR Airborne Command Post missions, doing their best to stay far enough away from the Russians to provide a survivable communication platform. Yes, it is a small world.
