In article ,
Dave Eadsforth wrote:
In article , Bob McKellar
and aircraft speeds were very low, putting a straight runway on a ship
seemed simple and obvious. Only when aircraft speeds became much higher
did the problems of overrunning on landing manifest themselves. Even

Exactly. Take-off run and landing distance weren't the problems -
Pups or Camels could take off from the foredeck of Furious (or
of Campania, for that matter) without trouble, and their landing
speeds were so low that there wasn't hardly any landing run (modus
operandi in the Furious trials seems to have been for several large chaps
to grab hold of the aircraft as it landed, more or less - the difficulty
was more of keeping it on the deck than stopping it). The problem
was eddiesthrown off from superstructure, which did really bad things
for the small, light, low-powered aircraft of the time (especially
as they didn't really have any throttle control - you had to blip
the engine on & off for landing). The island was a brilliant
solution to this problem (proposed by Murray Seuter, IIRC) which
allowed for uptakes well away from the approach path and an
easy way of casting any eddies away from the flight deck.
It wasn't until quite a lot later that take off and landing
distances became the issue - maybe with the Hawker Osprey/
Nimrod generation in the 1930s for fighters, earlier for attack
a/c. Certainly Furious, Glorious and Courageous still had their
low-level foredeck launching decks for flying off fighters
straight from the hanger in the early 30s.

--
Andy Breen ~ Interplanetary Scintillation Research Group
http://users.aber.ac.uk/azb/
"Time has stopped, says the Black Lion clock
and eternity has begun" (Dylan Thomas)