S-3B Viking | with Brian "Sunshine" Sinclair *PART 1*

welcome to Air Corps interview I'm Mike Young your host and this is a first part of our interview with Brian sunshine Sinclair this episode he chats about was time flying s-3b Viking which includes his training what it was like to handle the aircraft's roll and all saw some very interesting stories at the end I also want to thank our sponsor like all watches who were one of the original companies to produce pilot watches for the Luftwaffe during World War two they produce both EMB doll watches and different sizes kazoo artists which adopt the look of times gone by but still satisfied modern demands you can check out all their models and products via WWL accordi thank you so sunshine when did you first become interested in aviation so actually Mike thanks for having me on the show I appreciate that and back when I was eight I got a book called visions of the universe series of illustrations about basically our solar system and some had some text written by Isaac Asimov from my uncle I got the book from my aunt and uncle and it just kind of energized me and I really loved space and I wanted to be an astronaut and I felt that a natural stepping-stone to be an astronaut was to be a pilot Wow so what year did you join the US Navy I was sworn in if you will July 1st of 1993 it was a rude awakening I would say definitely culture shock yeah so in high school that's when I was making my decision because I applied to all three of our services big service academies that would be West Point for Army Air Force obviously a Navy I was blessed enough to be able to get into all three and then I had my options from there listening to my parents my mom actually so I grew up in Pennsylvania and the Naval Academy is in Maryland so the adjacent state if you will so she really enjoyed the proximity she also really enjoyed the uniforms believe it or not the Navy uniforms over the Air Force uniforms yeah yeah so those were some of the deciding factors but then honestly I did my research and I thought well hey I want to be an astronaut which of the three major academies has the most amount of astronaut graduates and at the time it turned out to be the Naval Academy so between my research and wanting to be an astronaut and also my mom's druthers as I would call I chose me Wow okay so let's talk about some of their aircraft you started your basic training on what would they like and what did you actually train on yeah so I went through the Naval Academy didn't fly anything I had one flight in a Cessna just a civilian Cessna 172 was very low threat low stress and then I stepped into flight school and the first plane that we trained on was the t-34 see turbo mentor ah yes are you familiar with that yes I am yeah I got yeah I got the little beast right here right so anyway just this little guy so it's a low-wing as you can see it's a turboprop my life was pretty much going about maximum speed of 289 so it wasn't really but going from car speed tried to accelerate my thinking process he's up to 200 knots is is a big deal so it was a nice gradual progression I finished up primary training as we call it in VT 28 down in Corpus Christi Texas and from there I headed off to Kingsville Texas and I flew the t45 see mm-hmm so the t45 it's a little slip a little more slick jet I got a quick demo I'm sure your folks at home have seen this before but anyway we called the Hulk exactly yeah we caught the goshawk yeah we could I'm sure we could ruminate on that eons for about this but so we took your slick trainer if you will or your slick jets scuse me and then uh as in cool jet what I mean by that slick and then we turn it into our trainer so it's an on afterburning trainer for us and my life went from max speed of about 280 knots to almost 550 560 knots so not quite double but pretty darn close so it was a difference isn't it it's a very big difference man and one of the keys for me throughout flight school was they give us this mantra that we call it so it's a v8 navigate and communicate and to be able to balance and juggle and really prioritize all three of those successfully takes a lot of work so imagine being a college student going from sixty to maybe 70 80 miles an hour for me and then from there jumping into 280 and then from there jumping into 550 so it was it was a steep I would call it learning curve but very enjoyable so after your basic flight training where did you get ported to and what aircraft did you actually want to go onto on the frontline squadrons so I am a product of the Top Gun era here in the United States so as I went through the Naval Academy in flight school I really wanted to fly the f-14 that opportunity unfortunately did not present itself so I selected I was selected for s3's so s3s I'll be honest when I got the word I didn't know what it was and back there in 98 we didn't have Google at all that stuff information wasn't as easy to get so the internet wasn't as big so I actually had to ask around like oh what is an s3 where will I be in office yeah and I had never been to San Diego so when I I'm going from Kingsville Texas which is kind of kind of sparse I would say at best it's a lot of desert ish areas and then someone said oh you're going to San Diego and growing up in Pennsylvania I had barely been to California went to school in Maryland didn't make it that far west really so when I thought I was going to San Diego and flying this plane I'd never heard of before actually my folks came in for graduation and we went up to Houston which is not too far from Kingsville where I did my training and I I bought a convertible Corvette to try to it's all my stuff I guess you could say yeah so so one of my first ever experiences of entering into the s3 community was actually driving my convertible Corvette from Texas to California which was fun so I'll be honest with you it's a step down in performance so in the t45 we can pull a whole lot of G's we can go as we said earlier about five hundred fifty-five or sixty knots the s3 that was going to be limited to it wasn't designed for that so you know it's a good design for it's an original intent and I can't complain about that but we're looking at limited 450 and about three and a half GS and we used and the thing has windshield wipers so I don't know if any other carrier based jets will say that have windshield wiper so it's like okay so it's kind of slow it's kind of big and honestly we used to joke that the tinted canopies or so that your friends couldn't see you flying the jet so good or bad that's what we said but um in all in all honesty just like pretty much every naval aviator you grow to learn or excuse me you grow to love your aircraft so I really grew into it and I realized what it was designed for and I enjoyed most importantly the people that were part of the community so the jet is one thing and it was kind of a step down from the t45 we're hoping to fly the f-14 but what I realize is a I now had orders to live in San Diego I had no idea how fantastic San Diego was until I drove no kiddin across the Coronado Bridge top down in my convertible Corvette and I thought wow yeah that's where I'm gonna train and that's where I'm gonna live sounds pretty cool isn't it dude it was as well as things that I wasn't wise enough for mature enough to know all the different aspects of what I'll call quality of life right for me you know I was trained I was focus on single-seat fighter single-seat fighters go you know knife in your teeth get out there drop bombs and then I realized oh wait you can have a fantastic quality life have less stress and be around some fantastic people so I that's the way I learned is by joining the s3 training squadron let's talk about the s3's rule what was actually designed for yes we're back in the 50s the Navy was looking for a follow-on to the s2 tracker it's an anti-submarine and right about that time the Russians had gone you know at the time they were the the big capital threat we'll call him but they had gone from their diesel submarine technology to their nuclear submarine technology or it was emerging we'll say so what we needed is some kind of a server anti-submarine warfare aircraft that had long-range and also long lawyer x or max Endurance's we would call it so Lockheed was looking for looking at designs if you will but Lockheed at the time they weren't terribly good with or very mature with carrier based designs ya know they right so like folding when I say carrier base designs I'm talking beefed up landing gear beefed up structures to endure the traps if you will a reinforced hook folding wings folding tails and all that stuff so that the basic general requirement stop right on the carrier anyway they were not good at that stuff yet so they brought in the LTV which is a ling Tim Cove lot they LTV they they built the a7 s they're known for the a7 Corsair so Lockheed said hey guys can you help us out kind of with how to design this stuff and they got a lot of good info obviously from them and then right about I think it was 68 check my notes here sorry 69 the s the ys3 Lockheed design was chosen and then at that point they went into further refinement and manufacturing and what we call the IOC so the initial operational capability happened in 1974 which coincidentally was the same year that the IOC so I was born in 74 they and they only build him from 74 to 78 I think there's like a hundred eighty six of them or so but um so it was anti-submarine warfare this is a very long sorry test pilot answer to your shorter question but uh so pardon me for that but um yeah so the anti-submarine warfare replaced the s2 right looking for sub so we're talking so no boys we're talking about long-range endurance that's got a magnetic anomaly detector it's kind of a stinger comes out the back and looks for any kind of magnetic anomalies it also has a real nice radar suite the apps 137 which is inverse synthetic aperture radar if you guys I don't know if you're listening to talked about that but something to Google you can see that for another day but uh what it boils down to is you could actually find things that are about the size of a periscope at quite a distance Wow so yeah so it's pretty impressive the radar it's actually very impressive and at the time you know nowadays with our fifth-generation fighters they talk about sensor fusion well some of the first instances of sensor fusion was actually with the s3 with its radar and its ESM suite the GW suite if you want to call so they'll be the LR I think it's 67 or maybe 76 but basically the radar receivers the radar itself the magnetic anomaly detector in the back and all that data could be fused together to provide a very clear picture of what's going on why was so like quite an impressive a car for his time it really was you know I'm saying it was uh and it turned out to stay impressive and what I mean by that is as the the mission kind of I wouldn't say lingered but it transferred more to the helicopters they said well what can we do with this thing because it's a very reliable airframe so they ended up using it for utility purposes so they could transport gear on it they could put people in it and then eventually it became pretty much in just an aerial refuelers so what I mean by I say just is it not as sexy as the Hornets and the the Tomcats dropping bombs shooting missiles but very essential especially around the carrier for what we call Bluewater offs I don't know are you are you are you listeners pretty aware of Bluewater oh yeah we have a lot of Navy funds in our channels so you have you'll know okay you get yeah so it's I mean the carrier can't be blue water without some kind of recovery tanker right and and the s3 was sorry the s3 at the time was the only show in town yeah so let's talk about something about your ground training on the s3 what was it like coming from like you said like a you know a fast jet like the goshawk how did you feel about this actually once I got over my little ego thing it was it was actually really nice I I had never worked with a guy before in the cockpit the training for us they focus on single-seat where you're supposed to do all three of those aviate navigate and communicate and when you get another guy in the cockpit it at first was kind of awkward so not awkward like a high school dance or anything like that but just you know you don't want to step on his toes he doesn't want to step on yours and are the responsibilities and the roles clearly defined and then once you establish those roles and they're kind of codify it to the community so it's not like hey this this naval flight officer the NFL he works this way and this other nfo works this way it was very standardized which was nice so once the pilots as a whole understood how the NFL's worked you can integrate and no kidding two heads are almost always better than one so and let's talk about your first flight and the s3 what was that like uh well because I come from t45 land where things were faster I was actually very enjoyable not only for the speed so my brain was kind of already trained for those speeds on how to anticipate the aircraft but also the scenery to be honestly I mean I don't know if you've had a chance to be in San Diego but it's it's pretty nice on it from the ground I view and then when you're up at 3,000 to 5,000 feet it's even so anybody yeah it is so I just really enjoyed it the other thing that was new to me is as you can picture the s3 it's got the two engines that hang off the wings yes and we started learning about single engine operations so so if you can think about one engine gets we didn't shut it off but we put it at idle and we flew around there's a yawl that's created right so basically a twisting motion sorry to use my hands there and so I had never dealt with anything other than centerline thrust before so there was some good learning and it wasn't difficult it definitely had a high wing loading and and plenty of power available for what it needed so it was easy to adjust but it was it was there was some learning there it looks very much like an airliner yeah do you mind if I go grab the yeah obviously go grab it since I'm sorry to put my back to the audience oh yeah so you're absolutely right you got the low slung engine so here's the this is a wooden model of the s3 B and what happen is this yeah move on so that one is vs 41 which is the yeah fleet replacement or fleet replenishment squadron scuse me FRS or is the old-timers call it the rag replacement air group yeah and so just like you said it's got the low slung engines right what'd I say louis long i mean it comes off the wing but it also is actually below the center of gravity so that becomes an issue when you add power the jet has a natural not very dramatic but has a natural tendency to pitch up so that that we can talk about later but actually a binding controls one time where my my elevator authority or pitch authority didn't work so i had to use the throttles to pitch the nose up and then the throttles to bring the nose back down so i'm okay so it was build as we mentioned earlier for loiter and right so you had plenty of gas gas was never a factor it was very low stress when it came to fuel management i'll say that so that's a definite plus it flew around slowly which is good for surveillance but also it that's huge for when you're coming back aboard the carrier and yeah so as we mentioned earlier it's got the the big wings and the light weight so we're gonna call it low wing loading so low wing loading is gonna lend itself to a slow approach speed which I absolutely enjoyed there think one thing we did mention was with a slow approach speed one design features is called direct lift control DLC so it has these there's a button on the stick and it pops up spoilers on the top of the wing and spoils the lift and you can come down real quickly so you got these engines that can kind of pop you up real quickly and then you got a button to drop you back down so it turns out to be very I thought very forgiving to land on the carrier so the s3 doesn't have the heads-up display yeah as you're you and your folks are probably familiar so what where is the Hornet guys and I became a Hornet guy so I can kind of I can kind of poke the bear a little bit but but the more guys traditionally would declare an emergency for a no HUD approach well the s3 we never had a HUD so so it was very dark and it was no kidding the LSO the landing signal officer basics that we were taught in flight school that is meatball lineup angle of attack it's a very forgiving airframe except for two instances one is going to be when you add the nose does pitch up so you're gonna have to counter it by pushing ever so slightly for them stick so your your two hands I'm sorry your hands excuse me have to work even harder I thought or more together and then if you look at this beast so this thing is about well it's short right you can see it's kind of short that was due to some carrier specifications I'm gonna throw out a number I think it was 59 feet or something I'm sorry I forget but basically because of that there was a lot of lateral instability so they had to build this big old tail so that's kind of one of the characteristics this big old tail well because of that big old tail and the way the wings are placed we had something called Dutch roll so you know this roll yeah yeah okay so so the way I think and we had a flight control we computers on board that would counteract or accommodate we'll say the Dutch roll but if the computers didn't work which happened on occasion then the yaw damper rose it was called I felt no kiddin like Stevie Wonder coming down it was totally I just called to say I love you but I hate this dad yeah yeah but anyway so what I'm getting at is laying it night on the Kerr it's just as dark as you think and honestly I didn't get paid to land enough at land enough I didn't get paid enough excuse me to land at night but I definitely would have land on during the day for free and that was a lot of fun so it's it's community specific so if you're not a pilot but you recur in the Navy then you're a naval flight officer but then once you get into your specific platform for a prowler that you're an electronic countermeasures officer ECMO my fate in your yeah for an f-18 your weapons system operator so wizzo wso but my guys were just known as uh we had different positions called takos but let me leave that aside and I'll tell you what it got to the point cuz you're flying with another guy that's your age and you're out there and then maybe really puts a lot of trust in us once we get our wings so you're out there with this fancy machine whether it be a warning or an s3 and we would go sometimes up in the s3 go up to about 400 400 plus miles away from the carrier and we did something called long-range patrols or lurks or L RPS and we were by ourselves so it's just me and this other guy in kind of the the station wagon if you will and were we can't even talk to the carrier we're so far away and they just hope that at a certain time we would be back overhead to land so me I really enjoyed the interaction with my right seater and the right cedar had his own throttle and stick so we could actually take turns I want her to stick in the x-ray okay I didn't know that yeah right now doctrine prevented the right cedar from landing so the raw islet was sat in the left seat is in charge of the landing both carrier and land-based yeah so out on the carrier it's predominantly sleep eat fly and then rinse and repeat so we would as you can imagine a pilot on an aircraft carrier doesn't have a lot to do except play video games eat sleep and fly so we absolutely loved it so they would traditionally start probably about eight o'clock in the morning so it's kind of later because we'd usually stay up late for night operations yes so you start up at 8:00 probably at the gym get some breakfast get showered get in your flight suit then get breakfast scuse me then head down to the ready room so the right everyone the carrier is kind of the social mecca for the squadron so what's everybody hangs out so you hang out there now that the day prior the flight schedule would have come out so you would have already known what your flight was and when your flight was so you'd get your administrative things done whether it be building new board cards or talking to your crew make sure they know what's going on sometimes you'd have to talk to the intelligence officer on the carrier and and figure out what's the lay of the land if you will so to speak so you get all that done you go for your flight and the the brief and the flight and the debrief or a majority of the day and because we had a lot of gas if you will we could stay up for what we call cycles so many intervals we'll call it she said for a long time you come back down it's probably dinner at that point go get something to eat and then unwind in the ready room and then probably think about some people at the gym then and then probably to sleep and start the day over wow it's so like quite a busy day then it was on fly days it was very busy and believe it or not no fly bays could sometimes be they were definitely more boring but they could even be more busy because we're busier excuse me because that's when the the leadership the CEO and the XO would try to have all the meetings you got to get all the meetings done so you can get ready for the next flight Aang did egg crew get treated better on the ship than you know the kind of I don't know the guys who didn't fly that is a great question glad you asked I have two words for you crew rest so what I mean by that is the we call them the surface warfare officers thus woes so ships company they had watches in that you know as that whenever the ships steamin are underway they have to have some set of eyes at least you know a couple guys looking around so they didn't have the the sanctuary for rest that we did so we had a mandatory rest period and that included actually sleeping and so we had hours they didn't have theirs and we may have heard about it once or twice yeah so I think we got all I'm gonna say nothing against the slows is that I love my job as a pilot on the aircraft care and we were pretty much you know everyone was kind of supporting us to do our missions but did you ever do any dact in the s3 funny you asked of dak yes we did absolutely so dissimilar air combat right training yeah so did it against the Prowler and I did it against an f-18 so a little background is this would have been during the operation during Freedom and I was on the John F Kennedy we're in the North Arabian Sea just south of Pakistan and the Hornets would launch three aircraft to make two for a combat section to go in the third once the first two primary if you will were designated as mission ready and they'd launch and go in the country the third just got the hang out so a lot of times and keep in mind these guys are going in will call double ugly so they'd have a fuel tank on the centerline fuel tank on one side excuse me on that side they have a FLIR and all sorts of stuff hanging off the wings reason I mention is they're very draggy so it's not the fantastic performance you're used to it's you know got a lot of drag out there so once or twice I may have type you know mixed it up with an f-18 and our now that's just a more maneuverable more capable aircraft obviously the f-18 the necessary but we had this little trick up our sleeve called maneuver flaps so we would yeah we'd come into the merge and I dropped my maneuver flaps and I get down really slow keep in mind yes three stall speed it was something around ninety seven knots there's less really double nuts yeah it's double digit so he was way low dude and then I could actually just kind of turn inside of this the Hornet who's turning around bigger circles and I had you know I didn't have any way to pretend to shoot him or anything like that but I just try to stay behind them and until he went vertical or something like that but so so we did it there so in summary because the FI teams are so heavily laden with all the air-to-ground stores there was an opportunity for me I wouldn't say to beat him but to tie or break even now the Prowler was different because you can talk about aircraft capabilities but one of the capabilities is honestly visibility right so they teach us in training that you lose sight you lose the fight well the Prowler has extremely poor visibility once you pass the wing liner the 3:9 if you think they like yeah so the uh now the s3 similar except if we have guys in the back because it's a four it's actually a four-seat aircraft they can look out the window a little bit so what you have is - we used to call them the fat kids so we have two fat kids out there that would mix it up by turning and coming toward each other but as soon as we passed each other's wing wins if you will kinda like this right about here we started to lose sight you just had to turn and hope you knew where he ended up so it turned out to be too fat almost partially blind we'll call them kids fighting on the playground and it was it was never elegant or pretty but it was fun Japanese memorable stories you can share with us on the s3 I do the first one yeah so a couple of funny ones and a couple scary ones the first scary one I remember was my job was to launch at night and I had a buddy of mine from the Academy foo the f4 team the plane I want to fly right he he needed some flares dropped in the water so he could go do his bombing practice so we joined up it was a he I joined on him and he gave me the lead and I we headed out to the the bombing area if you will this is from the carriers over water it's about six o'clock in the evening so up at 18,000 feet above it's still still daylight right but now as we start to descend down we kind of dive into the darkness or dive into the night so here I have imagine the plane that I've always wanted to fly is right next to me out the left side of the plane so it's up descending down I'm looking like man that thing is so sweet man that thing it's so sweet so sweet I'm coming down we get down about 400 feet I have certain altitude alarms that go off I'm like okay I need to pay more attention to my instruments than the plane next to me or coming out well what I had unfortunately done poorly that day was adjust the Coles Minh setting so that the calls Minh window excuse me the altimeter setting on the the barometric altimeter so also and I heard a an altitude warning from the aircraft actually based on the radar altimeter but I my human factors the first thing I looked at was the altitude gauge the barometric out too and the needle I will never forget honestly was lining down through 60 feet which is the height of the flight then yeah and I was nose down at 250 knots or something like that coming downhill so I actually my whole body tensed and when I tensed I pulled back on the stick but I thought is this gonna hurt when I done like I kid you not man that's that's honestly what I thought is this gonna hurt and fortunately you know grace of God I pulled hard enough that I was able to recover and it turned out that the because I had incorrectly set the barometric altimeter I was off by about a hundred feet so my guess is when I saw a 60 feet I was really to 160 GIS endings yeah so I definitely was reminded of the lesson of set the correct altimeter setting on deck so that was one kind of near-death scary thing another one was another scary thing and that have have you and the listeners had a chance to talk about how we land on the carrier during the day we do kind of a circular pattern to land yeah yeah you do that the circuits yeah person okay so the carrier is off to my left it's heading in the opposite direction than I am so I'm at what we call the 180 per the abeam position and I look over in the Kennedy as pitching so much that I can actually see the screws coming out of the water Wow and at that point I have not that many you know about a minute or so and I'll guess a little bit more time before I have to go turn and land on this thing so I just remember thinking this is why did I sign up for this job so I ended up turning final pitching deck the LSO's are out there with mobilis the manually operated meatball basically and they talked me down there is a screaming power call followed by a wave off wave off and I still land and yeah I got real close to the back of the boat that day so as in as in unforgivingly hitting the back of the boat so once I got over the shock if you will and and I realized that I was okay and we shut down you know taxied out of the LA shut down first thing I did which I shouldn't have well after I debriefed is I called my parents on the satellite phone so I'm now about two months into a six-month cruise about a third of the way through and and I'm excited because I just escaped death you know so to speak what I didn't take in the perspective was my parents perspective I guess or view of how they're gonna take this I said hey guys hey it's great you know I just want to chat with you real quickly hey I almost ran into the back of the boat today your mother thousands of miles away and you still got four more months of cruise so not so good but um those are kind of the scary ones and then can I give you one quick funny one opposite if you go for sunshine okay so we blast off from the carrier and this is sorry for those that have heard the fighter pilot podcast recount but there's basically a urine bag that's gonna float so if you can picture the s3 cockpit it's kind of got a roundish canopy bubble as you could imagine I'm in the left the copilot's in the right-hand seat he we've long missions and there's no bathroom in the back so our solution is a giant ziploc bag right with a desiccant in the bottom so I kind of look away while he's doing his thing and then he stuffs it into a map case so he seals the bag he think he thinks he seals the bag sticks it in the map case and off we go well we just happen to have some practice bombs aboard that day so we did our normal tanking mission and we had some extra time and we had these bombs on her wing they're just smaller marks 76 is little blue 25 pound things so we started doing dive deliveries and we had a couple left and I said hey why don't we pickle as in release the bomb and being very safe why don't we actually follow the bomb down to impact and then we'll recover before but we'll follow it down so we pickle the bomb and it falls off the right-hand side of the wing of the aircraft scuse me I roll a visually acquire the bomb as it's fallen and then I stuff the nose when I stuff the nose to get a dive going it's a pretty violent stuff a lot of things come up out of the colloid one of them yep one of which is the unsealed urine bag over on the right-hand side of the aircraft now keep in mind member that canopy that I talked about so yes this bag is gonna open sparsely and it's gonna follow the curvature of the canopy now it also that comes into my field of regard all my field of view excuse me I see the bomb I see the water I see my buddy and then I see his urine bag kind of floating through the air oh yeah you know this is the first time I've ever seen what I would call weightless it's more free fall I guess free fall water bubbles so basically the urine some of it comes out and if those little globs kind of floating through the cockpit so now my attention is focused on these globs of urine where they're gonna go now I refocus on the bomb and I see the water and I'm like oh I need to recover I need to pull up on the stick because we're getting close to the ground the water excuse me so as I recover I'm looking at the the urine blobs if you will and they come and they basically splash down on my leg so and we still had another two hours of mission time so basically I had to fly around in my buddy's urine well that's the one time I'm not envious of us oh joy yeah good idea yeah [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 28,689

Keywords: s-3b viking, fighter pilot podcast, pilot interview, s-3 takeoff, s-3 sub hunter, s-3 viking, f-18 hornet, aircrew interview, s-3 usn, us navy documentary, f-14 tomcat, dcs, dcs 14, heatblur f-14, f-18 super hornet, usn carrier documentary, cockpit, fighter pilot, fighter pilot interview, submarine hunter, submarine, the fighter pilot podcast

Id: Z23xsM_rTGs

Length: 32min 4sec (1924 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2019