Our awareness of the seriousness of the business at hand was reinforced by the fact that we quickly lost 3 of our new aircraft and 2 squadron-mates during carquals.

Somehow, in spite of my own inexperience I had the good fortune of being the first pilot in VF154 to carqual in the new jet. 

An observer of our carrier qualifications (carquals) was a young Marine major. He had been the BuAer officer responsible for the development of the CRUSADER. He had also just completed "Project Bullet", a supersonic coast-to-coast speed record run in an F 8 at an average speed faster than the muzzle velocity of a 45-caliber slug. He went on to garner a bit more than the allotted 15 minutes of fame. His name was John Glenn.

A month or so later I captured another somewhat less enviable record, during the work up for our Operational Readiness Inspection. We were at sea somewhere south of Oahu when I suddenly found myself facing the challenge of becoming the first CRUSADER pilot ever to attempt a shipboard landing using a carrier's fearsome barricade recovery system. The objective of the barricade recovery is to snare some poor soul who has no tailhook, no fuel left and no "Bingo" (no alternate land-based field). The barricade is a net-like lash up rigged across the landing area of the carrier's deck between two enormous upright steel stanchions. It consists of 2 stout horizontal nylon cables or "load straps" one rigged at the top and the other at the bottom of the stanchions with a series of vertical nylon straps strung in between these load straps. It's like an enormous heavy-duty 20-foot high tennis net. To complete the analogy, the aircraft is the multi-ton tennis ball on a 150 MPH bad serve. Once a pilot is committed to a barricade recovery there is no turning back-the results are, one might say, strictly up for grabs.

At this juncture, like all first tour pilots, my only prior tailhook experience consisted of 6 "traps" (carrier arrested landings). These traps were made 2 years earlier during flight training in the trusty and extremely forgiving SNJ, a bright yellow propeller-driven WWII trainer. Amazingly, none of us "nuggets" (first tour pilots) in VF 154 had any jet carrier experience whatsoever prior to joining our operational fleet squadrons.