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In article , "Kyle Boatright"
wrote:

It is always interesting to watch film of WWII carrier operations. The
aircrew all had to have big brass ones. Even if you survived combat, you
still had to survive deck landings and those godawful barriers they put up
to punish people who missed the wires. Beyond that, your dead reckoning

I once interviewed a guy who had been a Navy test pilot during WWII. He did
not fly combat because of a medical condition (stomach ulcer, with the
prescription being access to a steady supply of milk, which they could not
guarantee on deployment). He flew every plane in the Navy at the time and
did quite a few landings on (I think) the USS Wright on Lake Michigan. May
have also done landings on an East Coast carrier.

Anyway, he said that landings were not as difficult as you would think,
because the stall speed of the planes was low and the carrier at speed meant
that you approached the deck at less than 70 miles per hour in many cases.
He said that landing was in many ways like driving a car onto the deck. He
never flew jets, but he figured that bringing a jet in was much harder
because the approach speed was so fast.

His favorite plane to fly was the F4U Corsair. I cannot remember why. He
described one other plane--I cannot remember which one--as really
interesting to fly because the center of rotation was essentially at the
pilot's seat, meaning that you pretty much turned the plane around you. He
said that one was very easy to fly.





D