How do carrier-based planes find the ship after a mission ?

nafod40,

"I guess we're there!"

In the case of the Green Lizard (VA-95) crew, "there" was practice
penetrations of Taiwanese airspace to exercise Nationalist air defense
capabilities. Due to the aforementioned ship's posit error, the Lizard crew
found themselves headed toward a Mainland China coast-in point. Fortunately
they 180ed and bustered for Mother before being "welcomed" by the PLAAF.

--
Mike Kanze

"Do witches run spell-checkers?"

- Old word processing joke


"nafod40" wrote in message
...
Mike Kanze wrote:
Of course it helps mightily if you have a reasonably accurate fix from
the ship before you launch - unlike the pre-launch (and pre-GPS) 40
nm-in-error "fix" that the CORAL MARU gave a VA-95 crew during its 1975
cruise. (Sea story previously shared in this NG.) If you don't know
from where you started, DR by itself isn't going to get you home. Worse
if you THINK you know from where you started - like the VA-95 crew, but
are wrong and don't know it.

We were doing blue water ops, and launched on an alert. I was a nugget
null-P in the E-2. The CAPC makes a big deal about grabbing an accurate
chart that's up to date before we going flying. We get airborne and he
opens the chart up...and it's all blue. Top to bottom, left to right. He
looks at it for a second, closes it back up and sticks it in the navbag
and says, "I guess we're there!"