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Still, the missions themselves are often quiet. "I think we hit a lull," said one Hornet pilot, downing onion rings after a three-hour flight south of Baghdad on Wednesday night brought him back to "Mom"–pilots' nickname for the ship that's their savior in these tossing seas–with a full load of bombs, undelivered during a close air support mission with the Army V Corps. "We were looking for targets of opportunity, but couldn't find any," he said.

It's an oft-repeated refrain these days on a ship traveling with tons of ammunition, some of it labeled like Christmas presents. "To Saddam from the Jones Family. Enjoy!" was scrawled on one brown, 1,000-pound JDAM in the ship's hangar bay. The intricacies of close air support missions, combined with weather fierce enough to implode the nose of an EA-6B Prowler plane Wednesday night, stalled the pace of flights–and bombings–off this gulf-stationed carrier this week. Wednesday's visibility-eviscerating sand and rainstorms steered six planes to airfield landings on the ground, for instance, while nasty weather throughout the week prompted the postponement of some scheduled hops. Decisions to delay flights because of dicey weather measure a mission's importance in terms of life and death: "We consider whether it's a fixed target that'll still be there tomorrow," says Rear Adm. Barry Costello, commander of the Constellation battle group, "or is it troops who will die without the plane coming in to give support? If that's the case, we'll go a long way to get that plane up in the air."

Though some pilots cite the sheer number of coalition planes in the skies over Iraq as one reason flights return fully loaded, officials say the strike slowdown doesn't mean they're running out of targets. "And the Iraqis certainly don't seem to have a shortage of bullets," says Carrier Air Wing Two's commander, Capt. Mark Fox. Rather, he says, concerns of fratricide and collateral damage keep pilots restrained: "There's no shame in bringing your ordnance back if you don't have the right confidence level that where you're dropping is going to be the right place." In that situation, says Fox, "the prudent man doesn't drop."

Which isn't to say the Constellation hasn't been busy, taking out a broad spectrum of targets. Close air support strikes this week covered the Iraqi map, including surface-to-surface missile and antiartillery sites in Al Amarah; military vehicles and barracks in Najaf; Republican Guard AAA sites and fielded forces in Al Kut; and armored personnel carriers near Karbala.

Closer to the capital, Constellation planes struck targets in the new netherworld between fixed and emerging: "There are targets, as war progresses forward," said Costello of Tuesday night strikes on Baghdad command-and-control centers, stopping just short of claiming responsibility for temporarily toppling Iraqi TV, "that might be of higher interest to those higher up on the chain of command. The air wing, last night, hit some of those targets."

And evidence for a still-steady supply of fixed targets comes from Hornet pilot Capt. Mark Hubbard, 42, of Lemoore, Calif., who "walked" with his orders to take out a MiG airfield in Baghdad. A team of five planes, dropping three 2,000-pound JDAM bombs apiece, "cut runways and taxiways to deny them use of the field," says Hubbard. "Part of the war is to achieve and maintain air superiority by blowing up their planes or runways."

Still, the Constellation's air wing is "gradually migrating away from" long-identified fixed targets, says Costello, "to supporting the troops" in battles now raging across Iraq. Pilots flying this war's brand of close air support learned the lessons of Afghanistan: "Afghanistan was the first time we dropped through the clouds," says Fox. Before the Taliban takeout and precision-guided weaponry, soldiers on the ground typically talked pilots to a target, in back-and-forth negotiations using line-of-sight landmarks like trees, roads, and rivers. "He'd get a warm fuzzy from knowing he'd guided us directly to the target," says Marine Corps Capt. and Hornet pilot Benedict Burke, 28, from Yardley, Pa., of a ground soldier's spoken directions in the old CAS model: "But with GPS [global positioning systems], close air support is amazing."

Now, more often than not, the forward air controller simply syncs GPS coordinates up to pilots flying thousands of feet above: "We have good intelligence, and ground troops have good technology," says Hornet pilot Lt. Mike Hall, a 27-year-old from Milpitas, Calif., of the mission he flew last week near Karbala, in which ground troops' zapped coordinates helped him take out several tanks of the Republican Guard's Medina Division. Commanders hope the new, technology-dependent strategy will continue to keep pilots safer, as the war moves into more densely populated areas. "The majority of air losses in war are from small arms," says Fox. "So now we don't spend a lot of time rooting around down low, because that's where you get shot."