Jeff Crowell wrote:
Coupled landings are still possible but not common--the pilots
hate them for a number of reasons, and in truth there is little
motivation or incentive to do them except in extreme need
snip
when you most need it, the system will go down

Paul J. Adam wrote:
It was interesting to go through a 1980s NATO publication on aircraft
capabilities (outdated, long superseded) and note how badly carrier
aviation suffered from the assumption of "must have enough fuel left to
divert to a base ashore, nominally X(lots) miles away, after a few
bolters or a foul deck" in payload and radius terms.

That was very much a peacetime assumption based on a fixed rule

The Boys (i.e. q.v. e.g. those USN/USMC individuals
participizing in carrier aviation) have always set aside
(peace)times when they play under "blue water" rules,
whether they are that far from land or not.

For those not up on their terminology, blue water ops is when
there just plain is not a divert field in range, no matter your
fuel state or aircraft configuration. You just can't carry
enough gas to get to that big ol' Air Force runway which is
2 miles long (and wider than the ***length*** of the carrier's
landing area). There are times when the Admiral decrees blue
water ops, even when MCAS Cherry Point (or NAS North Island,
or *.*) is just over the horizon.

Which can get pretty bloody serious if you're the nugget
who is having his turn in the barrel tonight. As an LSO
once said to a friend of mine "You have to land here, son.
It's where the food is."

And the guy having his turn in the barrel is not necessarily
the nugget (nugget = first-cruise player), either. As the
saying goes, 'there are them what have had their turn, and
them what will.' Couple that with blue water ops, and you
have, oh-fishully, a Bad Situation.

At which point you just plain have to sack up, settle down,
and get 'er done. Or go for a swim. And, if it need be said,
sometimes that is a very bad option. At the very best of
times (day clear air), ejecting is a hazardous event. Given
the sort of conditions under which you usually have Your Turn
(moonless/overcast night, bad weather/heaving deck), you can
have a perfectly optimal ejection, a good chute, a good water
landing in which you avoid entanglement, and a raft which
inflated properly when it hit the end of the lanyard,and
still not get picked up, or even found.

It has happened, in number of times not few, that pilots have
had to be helped from the cockpit after having Their Turn but
actually got it together and successfully trapped.

If you haven't seen it (or even if you have), a scene from
PBS: Carrier involving a heaving deck (and it really isn't
even bad weather):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gGMI8d3vLs


getting back onto the birdfarm
is a challenge and can't be assumed to be simple and easy, even if in
wartime the answer might be "dry your eyes, Princess, and keep trying
until you get it right, crash on deck or flame out... and if you crash
on deck and don't die, I'll kill you myself!"

Words not infrequently spoken also in peacetime, I assure you.
Though usually it's "...crash on ***MY*** flight deck..."


I heard an anecdote that, for USN pilots at the time, the most stressful
part of strike missions over North Vietnam was landing back onto the
carrier at or after dusk... don't know whether it's true but I'm
prepared to consider it.

True story, as measured by devices recording pulse/respiration
rate, etc. According to The Boys, still true.



Jeff
--
42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.