The final letdown……..

One of the biggest PR mistakes the Navy ever made was to take part in the filming of the Final Countdown in 1980. I streamed the movie tonight on Netflix-I was really suprised they had it available for streaming.

For those who are not so long in the tooth-The Final Countdown is about The USS Nimitz, being drawn through a time warp from 1980 to a couple days before the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, and the crew must decide whether to launch a preemptive strike against the incoming Japanese carrier fleet with their more advanced air wing, or allow history to take its course. It stars Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, James Farantino, and Katherine Ross. As a movie-I think most will agree it sucks with a capital “S”. But for anyone who was in carrier aviation during the late 70’s and the early 80’s you can’t hate the movie totally. Because, at least for me, the movie was a trip back through time to a period in my own life.

In 1978, I was to make my first class midshipman cruise. Now having been regaled again and again with stories of Subic and pictures of the Senior’s Honey-ko’s, I knew where I wanted to go: Any ship in Westpac. In those days-they did not have “aviation cruises” or any other such nonsense.(Which is as it should be IMHO).  You either went to a ship or a submarine for four weeks-to learn about going to sea and what Division Officers were supposed to do. So I put in my wish list. Westpac, Westpac, Mediterranean.

Unfortunately the NROTC unit at The Citadel had an interesting policy in those days-if they even thought you had the major, and or the grades, to go nuke power-that was the kind of ship they were going to send you to. Since I was a Mathematics major ( only at the behest of mother Navy in order to get a scholarship) and my grades were pretty good, it wasn’t long before a note was found on the bulletin board. I was to see LCDR Porter as soon as possible to discuss my first class cruise. I recall thinking not a lot about it at the time-assuming I was going to be winging my way to Subic and my own honey-ko in no time.

Unfortunately, LCDR Porter had other ideas. “You have the grades to go nuclear power-so you have to go on a nuclear power cruise. What type of submarine do you want? Boomer or Fast Attack?”

“Umm, neither sir. They don’t get enough liberty.”

” Cruise is not about having fun”. ( I would come to hear these words more than a couple times in later years during my DH tour. I didn’t understand them then-and come to think of it, I still don’t understand them now).

“Well sir, I still want to see some ports. So put me down for a cruiser or a carrier”.

LCDR Porter’s face wrinkled up into a disgusted look-and I was dismissed.

As it turned out, I was ordered to the USS Nimitz. But not for 4 weeks- for 10 weeks. Which destroyed the nice little, decent paying summer job I had lined up when I got back. On the plus side-because it was a “nuke” cruise, I got commercial tickets to Spain for further transfer to the ship ( a process that ended up taking five days, and I got to join the ship in Livorno, Italy-just as the ship was begining its liberty swing up to Portsmouth UK and Wilhelmshaven Germany.

What does this have to do with the movie? Well because I was on the ship so long-there were 9 of us in the same boat-the powers that be, allowed us to concentrate of standing bridge watches for the tail end of the cruise. I was actually able to qualify as JOOW ( radio) and stood that watch in a bridge watch section. As a result, I got to know several of the bridge officers that you see in the movie.

The other thing about the movie is that the low visibility paint scheme was not anyone’s idea of a FITREP bullet yet. So the CVW-8 aircraft were brilliantly painted up :

“They’re going to let the Japs do it again!”

In the ready room scenes -I can recognize a lot of the folks-some of whom went on to do some really big things in Mother Navy. The pilot flying the helicopter at the end of the movie ( the one that gets blown up) later became Air Boss on USS America ( where I did my first three cruises). As an air boss he was, shall we say, less than popular, so there was always some mild cheering when the movie was played on the ship’s TV and the helo gets blown up.

There is also an interesting ( or not so interesting) post script to the movie. The flying scenes with Zero’s were shot in Key West. That’s why you can see a Viggie being towed off the line in one of the opening scenes. VF-84 was sent down on detachment and did the flying scenes ( remember this was pre-CGI).  A few years later, it was alleged that the squadron had under reported its flying hours expended on the movie, in return for a lot of “stuff” being left behind by the production company. At the time the CO had moved on to become CO of Test Pilot School. It became an ugly scandal (complete with “60 Minutes coverage”)-and he was forced to retire. Subsequently he went to law school and spent years trying to clear his name. As far as I know-whatever was taken was for the squadron, the CO did not profit one bit from it. But mother Navy still did not look kindly on it-when they were charging the film company 2560 dollars a flight hour. The guy had flown in Vietnam in the F-4 and was one of the first pilots to fly the F-14 in the early 70’s.

You can see some pictures of the detachment at Key West here.

Some trivia:

The E-2 shown flying is an E-2B from VAW-112. Because of AIMD bench configurations and the continuing introduction of E-2C aircraft to the fleet, West Coast squadrons were flying with East Coast Airwings and vice versa.

When an F-14 does a steep dive and pulls out just before crashing into the ocean while “playing” with one of the Zeroes, the “scream” the F-14 made was created by mixing the sound of the jet engines with the actual scream of the pilot’s wife when she saw that clip for the first time. (The guy had actually departed the aircraft and just barely recovered it in time).

During shooting of the opening shot where the CAG’s Tomcat is taking off from Pearl Harbor, the film crew actually underestimated the blast radius of the Tomcat’s exhaust and one of their cameras was blown over when the plane went to full afterburner, which resulted in the shot being filmed from a slightly different angle than originally planned.

The F-14’s used for the dog fight sequences were freshly delivered from Calverton NY.

As a movie-it was not so great. As a memory of a far better time-it does just fine. And seeing an air wing without Hornets? Well, that is just a bonus!