Military News - Military Times

Carrier ‘Ouija boards’ go digital

After decades as the central tool for managing the chaos of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck, the tabletop model known as the “Ouija board” will soon begin passing into aviation history, along with its toy-sized air wing.

In place of the board — and the disciplines of “pin-ology” or “nut-ology,” practiced by its users — the Navy plans a new, all-electronic aircraft control system that commanders hope will streamline and simplify the way aviators move, load, launch and recover aircraft. The carrier Abraham Lincoln will be the first flattop to get the system, with installation planned for next year.

In principle, the new gear, known as the Aircraft Data Management and Control System fulfills the same job as the Ouija board and other existing systems: Help the air wing keep track of where its aircraft are, what fuel and weapons they’re carrying, and other important details.

Since World War II, crews have done that by loading plane-shaped cutouts with pushpins, washers and nuts that represent the different payloads the aircraft could carry. A carrier’s flight deck handler and a team of sailors move the models around to determine where planes could sit.

The Ouija board worked so well that for the entire postwar history of naval aviation, the Navy trusted no system to take over for the human beings who managed it, said Capt. Randy Mahr, program manager for aircraft launch and recovery equipment for Naval Air Systems Command. He described a September 1959 issue of National Geographic in his collection, dedicated to the Navy in that era.

“There aren’t any aircraft in that issue flying anymore, pretty obviously,” Mahr said, “but the flight deck is running the same way. ... We’re just now, 50 years later, at the point where the technology we have is advanced enough ... that we can take it and give it to the next generation of sailors.”

Every carrier in the fleet except the Enterprise has an early version of ADMACS, Mahr said, which consolidates information about the ships’ aircraft into a single digital display visible at key points throughout the ship. Those carriers also still have their Ouija boards.

(Navy regulations forbid installing such complex new systems on ships within five years of scheduled decommissioning, so the crew of the Enterprise does things old school: A sailor writes information about planes in grease pencil on a board, and a closed-circuit video camera carries live video of the hand-written updates throughout the ship.)

Next year, the carrier Abraham Lincoln will get the Block 2 upgrade of ADMACS and be the first to lose its Ouija board, as well as about 35 sailors from the crew, according to contractor Specialty Systems. The Navy planned to spend a little more than $6 million on the system by next year, according to budget documents, and NavAir plans to install Block 2 on each carrier in the fleet by fiscal 2012.

In the new setup, the ship’s handler will sit at a computer terminal and move planes around, instead of leaning on the Ouija board. The change will free up a lot of room in the handler’s space inside the carrier’s island, Mahr said, which can get cramped with people crowded around the board.

According to one ex-carrier skipper, that’s going to take some getting used to.

After he retired from the Navy, Capt. Marc Ostertag, a former commanding officer of the carrier Constellation, worked a few years for the defense giant Raytheon. He helped set up an early computer prototype replacement for the Ouija board at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., in the 1990s; it was mounted on a bulkhead. A few sailors tried it out.

“When the boatswain’s mate and the handler, a lieutenant commander, walked in, they said right away, ‘This will never work! We’ve got to have someplace to put a coffee cup!’” Ostertag remembered. “You’ve got to get over that mentality. I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow, this is going to be harder than we thought.’”

Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Cunningham, plane handler aboard the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, was fatalistic about the future of pin-ology when he told Navy Times about the coming electronic Ouija board.

“Pretty soon, it’s going to be a lost art,” he said, along with the attendant folkways aboard each ship. Cunningham’s Ouija board had a line of dollar bills under its class cover — each one paid, he said, for placing an unauthorized elbow or drink on the board.

Mahr said that as he has worked on ADMACS, he has heard a lot of such reminiscing from current and former naval aviators, but none of it has convinced him the old system needs to stay.

“There’s nostalgia for prop aircraft, there’s nostalgia for the F-14” Tomcat, he said. But the people coming into the Navy in the next couple years, they’re going to go look at these old plane boards and say, ‘You’re kidding me right?’ This is 2008.”

DISCUSS: Out with old?